Event
CHBE Seminar: Dr. Ning Zeng, UMD
Friday, May 2, 2025
11:00 a.m.
Room 2108 Chemical and Nuclear Engineering Building
Patricia Lorenzana
301-405-1935
dbenites@umd.edu
“Wood Vault: Burying woody biomass for carbon sequestration -- a simple idea that actually works”
Abstract: To permanently sequester a large amount of CO2, planting trees is not enough. In an established forest, some trees absorb CO2, but other trees die, decay and release carbon back into the atmosphere. Wood Harvesting and Storage (WHS) proposes tree harvesting or waste wood collection, followed by secure storage in engineered structures called Wood Vault to prevent decomposition. The net effect is to remove CO2 from the atmosphere at up to 1/4 of our current emission rate. Demo projects show a durability of centuries, and a cost of $10-50 per ton of CO2. The technique is low cost, distributed, easy to monitor, safe, and creates green jobs, thus adding to the 'toolbox' of climate change mitigation. The burgeoning industry of Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) is implementing WHS commercially, opening a new research subject.
References
- Science: 3775-year-old wood burial supports “wood vaulting” as a durable carbon removal method, Sep 2024
- Washington Post: A cheap, low-tech solution for storing carbon may be sitting in the dirt. By Dino Grandoni, September 26, 2024
- C&EN: How burying wood reduces carbon dioxide emissions, Dec 2023
Bio: Ning Zeng is a professor at the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Science and the Earth System Science Interdisciplinary Center, University of Maryland, and affiliate professor with the Department of Geology and the Maryland Energy Innovation Institute. He earned a BS degree in Physics from the University of Science and Technology of China, MS degree in Physics and Ph.D in Atmospheric Sciences from the University of Arizona. He worked at MIT, UCLA, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, and the Max-Planck Institute for Meteorology.
His professional interests include climate change and variability, carbon cycle and ecosystem, carbon sequestration and other technical solutions and policy implications of climate change. He is a Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher and on Reuters List of Top Climate Scientists. He was a founding co-chief editor of the journal Earth System Dynamics. He was Chair of the 9th International CO2 Conference. He is a contributor to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Reports and the Global Carbon Project. He has published 151 papers with 20181 citations and H-index 59 (Web of Scicence/Clarivate), and 29900 citations and H-index 79 (Google Scholars), including 10 papers in Science and Nature (five first author).
