Simple Solutions

Back in 2013, climate scientist Ning Zeng and his team were in the middle of a wood-burying experiment in Quebec, aiming to study the effects of entombing biomass under clay soil.

But during the dig, they made an unexpected discovery: A twisted, 3,775-year-old Eastern red cedar log, buried 6.5 feet under the surface in a dense layer of blue clay.

“I remember standing there just staring at it,” Zeng told Science News. “Wow, do we really need to continue our experiment? The evidence is already here, and better than we could do.”

Afterward, researchers studied the well-preserved log using carbon dating and microscopic analysis, and found that the millennia-old wood had retained 95 percent of its carbon.

This discovery is very significant, the team explained, because it could provide a novel climate solution for storing carbon: Wood vaulting.

The idea behind wood vaulting is simple: Waste wood and other woody materials could be buried under impermeable clay soil to stop decomposition and prevent the release of carbon dioxide, Live Science noted.

The researchers found that in this oxygen-deprived environment, the log’s carbon remained virtually untouched for nearly 4,000 years.

“This kind of soil is relatively widespread,” Zeng explained. “You just have to dig a hole a few meters down, bury wood, and it can be preserved.”

Wood vaulting could be a low-cost and scalable solution, with costs estimated between $30 and $100 per ton of carbon dioxide compared with $100 to $300 per ton for direct air capture technology.

The potential is enormous. If implemented widely, wood vaulting could sequester up to 10 gigatons of carbon annually – enough to cover a significant portion of the world’s emissions goals.

And these vaults could later serve other purposes, such as agriculture or solar farming, making them versatile as well as effective.

“There is a lot of geological and archeological evidence of preserved wood from hundreds to millions of years ago, but the focus of those studies was not ‘How we can engineer a wood vault to preserve that wood?’” Zeng said in a statement. “And the problem with designing a new experiment is that we can’t wait 100 years for the results.”