
Empress trees absorb about 103 tons of carbon a year per acre - hourislate
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-08-02/we-already-have-the-world-s-most-efficient-carbon-capture-technology
======
tcgv
> Empress trees (...) absorb about 103 tons of carbon a year per acre.

In 2016, U.S. GHG emissions were 20.15 metric tons CO2-equivalent per
person[1].

So basically each american would have to cultivate about 0.196 acre of empress
trees (792 sq meters, or 8522 sq foot) to become carbon neutral.

[1] [http://css.umich.edu/factsheets/us-environmental-
footprint-f...](http://css.umich.edu/factsheets/us-environmental-footprint-
factsheet)

~~~
crispyambulance
Empress trees certainly have some impressive specs, but no one plant is going
to be the silver bullet.

Can we _eventually_ take per capita carbon footprint down to a fraction of
what it was in 2016? I think so, if the people can be convinced to elect sane
leaders in the US and elsewhere.

Can vast regions in the USA and other countries be re-forested? Yes, if the
willpower is there.

Is it worthwhile to develop artificial carbon sequestration facilities that
operate on vast scales? Yep.

~~~
tim333
It might be done quite quickly with a proper carbon pricing regime. The UK
carbon price is about £35/ton. Times 104 tons/acre is about £3500/acre which
is probably enough to make a profit. Then just get VC funding for your carbon
startup and off it goes.

There are political and practical difficulties doing that but there are also
difficulties with wrecking the climate that might outweigh those.

~~~
hef19898
Might be a worthwhile start-up idea... I'm wondering...

~~~
markdown
[https://worldtree.info/paulownia-scam/](https://worldtree.info/paulownia-
scam/)

[https://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-10-17/timber-investment-
sch...](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-10-17/timber-investment-schemes-
leave-hundreds-without-life-savings/6862060)

~~~
tim333
Ah. To summarise those some previous companies, Timbercorp and Great Southern
pushed planting similar trees as a get rich quick thing and then went bust
leaving useless trees and a lot of people with large losses. World Tree,
featured in the Bloomberg article say they are different and do it better. I
guess it's a tricky business to do well.

------
xahrepap
I planted one of these trees a few years ago and I think it's absolutely
gorgeous. I can't get over how absolutely huge the leaves get. A lot of people
hate them though, for the same reason outlined in the article: you can't kill
them. Many consider them weeds.

~~~
ksec
>A lot of people hate them though, for the same reason outlined in the
article: you can't kill them. Many consider them weeds.

I reread the article and I see no mention of it?

~~~
olliej
They mention it’s “easy to regrow from the stump” what that means is cutting
it down doesn’t kill it. Additionally many trees that easily regrow from a cut
stump also regrow/produce new tree from their roots.

Seems like a recipe for an invasive plant (much like those awful pear trees
the were used for landscaping)

~~~
olliej
After one research it seems like only one variant of Paulownia is "invasive"
\- as in super aggressively spreading, but it does make me wonder if have
acres and acres filled with them will result in some mutant offspring
developing the super aggressive spread that the species is clearly capable of.
Very much like what happened with that invasive pear [1]

[1] I dug up the article
[https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/how-we-
tur...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/how-we-turned-the-
bradford-pear-into-a-
monster/2018/09/14/f29c8f68-91b6-11e8-b769-e3fff17f0689_story.html?utm_term=.5c4ec3628ee1)

------
jaclaz
One of the firms referenced in the Bloomberg article actually offers the
plants (and opportunities of investment in them) and has a number of answers
to the questions asked in the thread:

[https://worldtree.info/empress-tree/](https://worldtree.info/empress-tree/)

Though I have personally never heard about anything actually manufactured with
the actual "empress" or "princess" timber.

It seems like in Japan it has a number of tradititonal uses, the family is
that of the Paulownia:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paulownia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paulownia)

~~~
jfengel
And they're going to have to think of something to do with that wood, if it's
going to be part of a carbon reduction methodology. The trees don't live
forever, and if they are left to rot or burn, they release all that CO2 back
into the environment.

Lumber would be one use. So would charcoal, or paper. Or possibly even burying
them. But either way, growing them is only half the battle.

~~~
CyanBird
In Chile big forestry companies (?) which dedicate themselves to grow and then
sell timber are growing eucalyptus trees for their business, but said
eucalyptus trees have great externalities, in that they use colossal amounts
of water , given that said trees come from a dry climate, they simply evolved
to capture as much water as possible.

I wonder if there's a business here, replacing eucalyptus trees for empress,
which might very well grow faster and without as many externalities, such as
the water cost, or the bark eucalyptus trees shed which is a fire hazard

------
corneliusphi1
They are suggesting scam like levels of profit:
[https://worldtree.info/investment/](https://worldtree.info/investment/)

25k -> 355k in 10 years is at least 29% year over year return. That seems...
improbable.

~~~
peacetreefrog
The profit is all based on lumber sales too. If profits really were that high
it seems like capital would flow in until there were so many of these trees
that prices would go down (though I'd imagine they're a small part of the
global lumber market), especially if you can only use their wood for a limited
number of things.

On the other hand, if they really do such a great job storing carbon, seems
like there is potential for them to make money on the fact people are willing
to pay to offset their emissions.

------
mal10c
I think this is a neat idea but have one question. I'm not a chemist but am
curious what happens to all that carbon after it's taken in by the tree. Does
that carbon become something else? Or does it just kind of hang out in the
tree until the tree dies? Once the tree dies, does all that carbon just go
back to the atmosphere again? Thanks for any insight!

~~~
hn_throwaway_99
Interesting tidbit about this. The reason we have so much fossil fuel in the
first place is because of what happened during the Carboniferous era. Trees
evolved the capability to produce lignin, the 'woody' material in trees.
However, it took millions of more years for microorganisms to evolve the
ability to decompose lignin.

So instead of what happens today when a tree dies and rots, the tree died and
just piled up in the forest. I always think it's amazing to imagine what a
forest must have looked like during the Carboniferous with all these dead
trees just piled high. Trees were essentially like today's plastic: non-
biodegradable refuse that stuck around for millennia. Eventually all those
trees got buried and turned into fossil fuels (mostly coal).

And, interestingly, this process let to huge climate change back then, too -
basically the reverse of what's happening now (and at a _much_ slower pace).
Trees sucked all this carbon out of the air and reduced global temperatures by
about 8C.

Edit: One other note - there were of course still forest fires during the
Carboniferous. It's believed they would have been incredible raging infernos
with so much undecomposed combustible material.

~~~
galangalalgol
so when the ability to break down plastic becomes widespread amongs organisms
and they devour all the microplastics in the ocean, our co2 levels are going
to skyrocket...

------
ricefield
Not an expert in this... at 103 metric tons of CO2 per acre per year, how many
acres of this do we need to plan to make an impact?

Look like according to this random Medium blog, we should aim to remove 10B
metrics tons every year? So that's 970MM acres?
[https://medium.com/@friedmann2/going-negative-time-to-
suck-i...](https://medium.com/@friedmann2/going-negative-time-to-suck-it-
up-339c5f8a5608)

~~~
safog
That's like 6x the size of Texas. Can probably pull that off if everyone in
the world pitches in.

Not sure what other effects like invasiveness of the species factor in.

~~~
rosser
> _The Empress Splendor tree belongs to the genus Paulownia. There are many
> different species of Paulownia and only one is classified as invasive, the
> Paulownia tomentosa
> ([http://www.invasivespeciesinfo.gov/plants/printree.shtml](http://www.invasivespeciesinfo.gov/plants/printree.shtml)).
> We do not use this variety, choosing instead non-invasive species such as
> the Paulownia fortuneii._

------
iovrthoughtthis
Don’t we need to take into account the local ecology? If we deploy one single
plant to “solve” our carbon capture needs aren’t we both going to reduce
biodiversity (they out compete local species) and set up a single point of
failure? (Like banana trees now)

~~~
mikhailt
Well, we do have to factor in the potential irreversible loss of biodiversity
from the current climate change as well.

Folks should still be preserving the seeds and protect the local ecology as
much as possible but they don't mean anything if the climate change isn't
slowed down or reversed resulting into the same loss anyway.

------
ksec
I thought Bamboo was the fastest growing tree? I remember it grows more than
an inch every hour. Since no one has done mass planting of Bamboo, there must
be some down fall that wasn't well known?

Edit: Turns out Bamboo is classified as plant. But the question remains the
same.

~~~
pier25
> _Bamboo’s carbon sequestration properties have been studied in countries
> where it naturally forms wild forests, such as Mexico (Castañeda, 2006) and
> China (Song, 2011). Contributing to these efforts, Ricardo Rojas Quiroga—an
> environmental engineering student at the Universidad Nuestra Señora de La
> Paz—studied Guadua angustifolia, a species of bamboo that grows in the
> Carrasco National Park of Bolivia. He measured the density and masses of
> bamboo plants in the forest, estimating the amount of carbon stored per
> hectare. Rojas concluded that, in addition to forming part of one of the
> most biodiverse ecosystems in the world, each hectare of the bamboo forest
> of Carrasco National Park stores levels of carbon comparable to some large
> tree species such as Chinese fir and oak. This finding is consistent with
> that of many previous studies, a review of which can be found in this 2010
> report by INBAR._

[https://matteroftrust.org/what-can-bamboo-do-about-
co2/](https://matteroftrust.org/what-can-bamboo-do-about-co2/)

------
cookingrobot
A unique carbon capture solution I don't hear much about is kelp. The key is
that you want the carbon captured to stay out of the air, and the deep sea is
a great place for it to end up. [https://carboninstitute.org/kelp-and-carbon-
sequestration-br...](https://carboninstitute.org/kelp-and-carbon-
sequestration-bringing-terrestrial-carbon-accounting-to-the-deep-sea/)

~~~
th-ai
3) Ocean Afforestation via macro-algae forests covering 9% of the world’s
ocean surface can produce sufficient biomethane to replace all of today’s
needs in fossil fuel energy, while removing 53 billion tons of CO2 per year
from the atmosphere, restoring pre-industrial levels. This amount of biomass
could also increase sustainable fish production to potentially provide 200
kg/yr/person for 10 billion people.
[https://www.researchgate.net/publication/259892834_Negative_...](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/259892834_Negative_Carbon_Via_Ocean_Afforestation)

Offsetting current carbon emissions would require some 50 trillion trees. An
alternative offset would be to cultivate kelp forests. Kelp can grow at 2 feet
per day, 30 times faster than terrestrial plants. Planting kelp across 9% of
the oceans (4.5 x the area of Australia) could provide the same offset.
Additionally, the kelp would support a fish harvest of 2 megatons per year and
reduce ocean acidification. Large scale open ocean forestry would require
engineered substrate and added nutrients.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aquaculture_of_giant_kelp](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aquaculture_of_giant_kelp)

------
rgacote
Not sure planting a "highly invasive tree" is the solution:
[http://www.ecosystemgardening.com/paulownia-princess-tree-
on...](http://www.ecosystemgardening.com/paulownia-princess-tree-on-most-
hated-plants-list.html)

~~~
ghostbrainalpha
The hybrid Empress Splendor tree is not invasive.

[https://worldtree.info/empress-tree/](https://worldtree.info/empress-tree/)

~~~
CyanBird
Quoting the website:

>Is the tree invasive?

>The short answer is: No, the Empress Splendor tree is not invasive.

>The Empress Splendor tree belongs to the genus Paulownia. There are many
different species of Paulownia and only one is classified as invasive, the
Paulownia tomentosa
([http://www.invasivespeciesinfo.gov/plants/printree.shtml](http://www.invasivespeciesinfo.gov/plants/printree.shtml)).
We do not use this variety, choosing instead non-invasive species such as the
Paulownia fortuneii.

>The Rainforest Alliance has chosen Paulownia as an ecologically sound tree
for the purposes of reforestation and carbon sequestration (View the
Rainforest Alliance Report).

>The Rainforest Alliance is internationally recognized as a certification
program for sustainable forestry and best practices for tree planting and
agroforestry.

------
krastanov
Any idea whether this is damaging/depleting for the soil because it is so
fast-growing? If so, to what extent can the soil be artificially rejuvenated
through fertilizers or other tools?

~~~
soperj
No, it's one of the only nitrogen fixing trees in the world. That's part of
the reason it can grow as fast as it can.

------
namirez
This can be helpful, but it's still a shortsighted solution. There are two
types of carbon cycle on the planet: the short-term and the long-term [1].

The only natural mechanisms to transfer carbon between the two cycles are the
planet's tectonic and volcanic activities. This has changed in recent history
and we are constantly extracting carbon buried underground (long cycle) and
release it into the atmosphere (short cycle). Capturing the atmospheric carbon
into trees can be helpful, but it still remains on the surface.

The real solution is to stop burning fossil fuels altogether.

[1]
[https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/CarbonCycle](https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/CarbonCycle)

~~~
StavrosK
I mean, it sounds like the _real_ real solution is to bury trees deep inside
the earth.

~~~
AnthonyMouse
> I mean, it sounds like the _real_ real solution is to bury trees deep inside
> the earth.

Which is effectively what oil and coal are. Hence why we need to stop digging
them up and burning them first.

It doesn't make a lot of sense to dig a deep hole to extract carbon from the
ground at the same time and you're digging a different deep hole to put it
back in, when you could save yourself a lot of trouble and just leave it
there. (And burn the wood to generate electricity if that's cheaper than
alternatives like solar and nuclear, which it isn't.)

------
olliej
Given there was an article about hemp a few days ago, how much carbon/acre
does hemp take?

~~~
zparky
Looks to be about 108 tons/year with 2 harvests.

www.aph.gov.au/DocumentStore.ashx?id=ae6e9b56-1d34-4ed3-9851-2b3bf0b6eb4f

------
xfactor973
i can't figure this out:
[https://worldtree.info/investment/](https://worldtree.info/investment/) this
seems far too good to be true. Back of the napkin calculations show they're
saying the returns could be 28% a year compounded. That's better than buffet
level returns. Surely this is a scam right?

~~~
kennywinker
Yeah those numbers seem really good - $25,000 invested over 8-12 years results
in $1,423,125 profits of which you get 25% ($355,781). If those kinds of
returns were really there wouldn't people quickly saturate the market,
devaluing the lumber and breaking the model?

------
dTal
Well yeah, by definition we already have the world's best version of any
technology.

~~~
acheron
"I wanted to build the world's longest suspension bridge, but I found out
someone else had already done it." \- Jack Handey

------
dillondoyle
I wonder if there is any investment in bio-engineering a better plant or tree?
Maybe just simple evolution working from our best carbon sinking trees, rapid
prototype through generations, only breeding from the best stock?

------
Timothycquinn
There are very limited cases where growing trees for carbon sequestration
purposes is a net benefit for the planet. Yes, there are places where land is
un-utilised, and water is sufficient but it's often better for the environment
to allow wild plants grow so wildlife can flourish. Here is a very good
article by the respected Bob McDonald speaks to this topic:
[https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/trees-carbon-emissions-
bo...](https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/trees-carbon-emissions-bob-
mcdonald-1.4132679)

~~~
JusticeJuice
> There are very limited cases where growing trees for carbon sequestration
> purposes is a net benefit for the planet.

Could you elaborate on this? I couldn't see anything in that article to back
up that statement.

------
EGreg
Forgive me, but it doesn't look like much. How can a tree with such a small
mass contain more carbon than a massive tree with trunks and branches? They
don't even seem to be very close together in those photos:

[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-08-02/we-
alread...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-08-02/we-already-have-
the-world-s-most-efficient-carbon-capture-technology)

~~~
KingMachiavelli
It's not about carbon per tree. It's about carbon per acre*year. Dense woods
grow slowly so they take in very little carbon per year even though they grow
very large. Fast growing trees are much better at quickly taking CO2 of the
atmosphere.

~~~
brians
Fast growing matters. The ability to harvest them and have them regrow matters
a lot too. That’s what makes bamboo so effective at carbon capture.

~~~
EGreg
Only if you harvest them without releasing CO2 - no firewood for instance

------
titojankowski
Fascinating!

Anyone got a good source for the 103 tons per acre stat?

All I've found so far is the Bloomberg link, which I think is from the World
Tree Website (the company spotlighted in the article). World Tree [1] says the
source is The Environmental Resources Trust, but doesn't provide a link.

[https://worldtree.info/carbon-offsets/](https://worldtree.info/carbon-
offsets/)

------
danzig13
My parents have one of these bastards growing against their house. We had no
idea what it was until this story.

They’ve cut it down twice, butchered the stump, given it a chemical bath. It
is currently back at gutter height.

------
api
Genetically engineer or selectively breed a salt-tolerant version?

~~~
dredmorbius
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mangrove_swamp](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mangrove_swamp)

------
eanzenberg
The best thing we can do for the earth is take a lot of the money being spent
and plant tons of trees, then use the wood as co2 storage in the form of
furniture.

~~~
frankbreetz
Isn't most furniture already made out of wood? I'd imagine if we made every
single piece of furniture out of wood it wouldn't make a bit of difference. We
need to make things out of wood that are not already made of wood, like
skyscrapers and large buildings. If that's not enough we need to cut down
trees and bury them so they don't decompose and then plant more. I think you
are vastly underestimating the amount of carbon in the atmosphere that needs
to be removed.

~~~
galangalalgol
about 5.5B tons of new wood furniture a year would be needed. That is 70tons
of furniture for each person born in a year.

------
blondie9x
Company information for those interested -
[https://worldtree.info](https://worldtree.info)

------
brg1007
Does anyone knows the scientifical name for the tree pictured in the article ?

~~~
devb
Paulownia tomentosa. Known in my area as the princess tree, but also goes by
royal paulownia, foxglove tree, kiri, and empress tree.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paulownia_tomentosa](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paulownia_tomentosa)

------
midnitewarrior
Do Empress trees make for good firewood?

