array9

Woods are not a good carbon sink.

Wood rots.  It does not last long, unless carefully used and stored.  And only a fraction is economic to handle this way.  The brash burns or rots.

Nothing intrinsically makes the tree better at solar capture, ( except perhaps snow effects ).

So the store of carbon is really the volume of living standing wood, plus the volume of human maintained or rot proof wood products ( house elements, books, bio-char, etc )

You might be able to achieve better carbon storage with bio-char made from straw, scattered on the fields.

Tree trunks look impressive compared to ( say) heather, grass, bracken, but maybe it is not so obvious which is better for storing carbon in the long run.

Crude oil and coal are obviously good at storage.  Maybe dumping straw on the bottom of the ocean would be as good, producing oil and coal sometime in the distant future.

So what we really want is a perennial harvest-able crop which is just heavier than water.  Coppiced teak?




martin