Yes, lead, nickel, iron, copper and lithium are all metals that in theory can be hyperaccumulated. We have spent some time on nickel, copper and lithium so far but haven't shared any of this research yet.
Good questions! The end use of the wood depends on the location of the pilot project and how close it is to a mill. Given the duration of our pilot projects, the trees will be too large to be used for anything outside of saw timber for furniture of construction. We don't allow for our seedlings to be used for pulp / paper in our landowner agreements. Decay can also refer to the decay of wood products etc.
One of the biggest issues with forest carbon in general is the duration in which the CO2 can be stored before it is released back into the atmosphere. While trees have the benefit of being able to be planted right now at scale, climate change is a problem of relative rates. Currently, trees do lack the ability to store carbon for thousands of years underground. Of course you can coppice and keep replanting them post harvest but there will be some carbon returned to the atmosphere even if all your timber goes to wood products that have a long lifespan. Trees can't solve climate change on their own but they can quickly remove carbon in a low cost way buying ourselves more time to scale up other types of CDR solutions.
I think I mentioned this in my other comment but durability and grow rate increase are two different traits we are working on at Living Carbon. I agree it's near impossible to address both in one trait.
Good question, the research we are doing on increasing the durability of wood is separate from the research on photosynthesis. The durability of wood largely has to do with the ratio of lignin to cellulose. Historically organizations focused on increasing growth rate for bioenergy have worked on changing that ration to create fast growing but less dense wood. That's different from what we are doing at Living Carbon. We don't expect to see increases in wood durability from photosynthesis-enhancement alone.
Biochemically our photosynthesis-enhancement strategy is a metabolic bypass pathway that reduces the energy that goes towards photorespiration allowing for more energy to go toward growth. When talking to investors I sometimes say it's like putting the plant into ketosis :) albeit that is not the perfect analog.
When it comes to improving the durability of wood, one of our approaches focuses on improving the ability of trees to accumulate and store metals in their lignin. Metals act as natural fungicides and slow the decomposition of trees. Other ideas include some of the world the Salk Institute has done on increasing Suberin production. Here's a paper that demonstrates how a doubling in nickel concentration in norwegian spruce led to slower decomposition: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09291...
The crazy thing here is that there is SO MUCH precedent from accumulation of metals by trees in nature. In certain parts of New Caledonia a tree called pycnandra acuminata thrives in ultramorph aka Nickel rich soil. It has up to 24% nickel sap concentration and can be tapped for nickel citrate actually.
Is there a danger of the trees themselves becoming hazardous waste if they accumulate the wrong kinds of metals? Though I suppose that could be a feature if it creates an incentive to harvest the trees and then sequester them in such a way that they won't be a problem for humans in any conceivable timeframe.
You guys are amazing. This has been one of my wet dreams as far as a natural carbon capture mechanisms go. It always seemed like a no-brainer to me. I wonder how far this can go? I know it's a fantasy, but imagine we can get sequoias to grow at a monstrous pace? It'll be a massive boon to CO2 draw-down, which is the real issue since not a single country on earth is on track to meeting 2050 Paris Accord goals. Good luck guys and hopefully maybe one day in the future we may partner on project. Keep on rockin'!
This seems like good work, and engineering trees to sequester hazardous metals, or to (e.g.) tolerate nickel-rich olivine soil additions will be a net good. Planting trees costs little.
But if we are interested in mass carbon capture, there may be more value per dollar invested in pumping surface water down to very deep ocean depths. Such pumps could be driven directly by floating wind turbines, maybe without need for expensive electrical components, and could also raise deep, cold, neutral water to the surface to help mediate acidification and high-temperature coral bleaching.
Probably we should be seeding both, along with lots of others, and see which ones achieve more. We will probably be surprised by the results.
Edit: To be clear, there may be much more value here in the other things they are doing than in increased carbon capture, and we should be evaluating the work more on the other things. If they capture carbon, too, that is good.
Wow - this post is getting a lot of great discussion. We are working on responding to the comments directly. A few key points to add that help frame how we think about the role biotechnology plays in carbon capture and removal.
Similar to how advanced biotechnology was able to help develop covid vaccines in record time, biotechnology can and should be used a tool in our fight against climate change. Living Carbon works on a broad array of biotech projects to help improve the carbon capture and sequestration of carbon underground.
We chose to share our work on photosynthesis-enhancement as an example of one of the biotechnology tools that can be utilized because 1) there is precedent in literature for similar pathways working in other crops and RuBisCO engineering has been worked on for decades 2) many of the solutions to storing carbon underground for longer are metabolically taxing to plants and can benefit from biotechnology.
In response to vague fears around genetic engineering, if Living Carbon’s work resulted in ecosystem destruction we would not have achieved any of the goals we set out to achieve as a company. We have warmed the world so quickly plants do not have the time to evolve to survive in the harsher world we have created.
It would be silly to think that our trees alone could or should stop climate change. We view each pilot project as an opportunity to study trees in different ecosystem and understand any impacts they have on underlying ecosystems.
We’re intentionally planting trees on land that human previously degraded - such as abandoned mine lands. We’re working to restore ecosystems that have already faced the consequences of human intervention, rather than integrating our trees into already-thriving wild forests.
Many of our test pilot projects include the testing of different microbial treatments to help quantify the impact on photosynthesis and the growth rate of trees.
75% of the earth’s land has already been degraded by humans. 60% of plants are struggling to survive because there are fewer animals and arable land to spread their seeds and maintain a meaningful population. Whether it’s through paving over our rivers or our urban sprawl, we’ve been modifying our world for centuries. Evolution, which is essentially sums of averages over, cannot move at the speed that humans have moved to degrade our plant and warm it.
There is not silver bullet to climate change. Many solutions like mineralization, biochar, and DAC can increase their rate of carbon removal using biotechnology and more efficiently remove carbon from the atmosphere. We need to use human technology to help reintegrate ourselves into our ecosystem and understand how carbon farming using many different carbon removal technologies can help remove carbon from our ecosystem.
The concentrations of metal that would occur from natural hyperacclumulation is actually much less that what occur in the process of pressure treated wood for common commercial uses like decks and building materials. In this case any wood that accumulated metals would be harvested for useful products that benefit from being decomposition resistant. Think wood used in the outside of buildings.
Trees like poplar are often used for phytoremediation projects. There's a lot of prescient for doing this in scientific literature. Check out a few papers here:
Chen, E. L., Chen,Y. A., Chen, L. M., & Liu, Z. H. (2002). Effect of copper on peroxidase activity and lignin content in Raphanus sativus . Plant Physiology and Biochemistry , 40 (5). doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/S0981-9428(02)01392-X
Hietala, A. M., Nagy, N. E., Burchardt, E. C., & Solheim, H. (2016). Interactions between soil pH, wood heavy metal content and fungal decay at Norway spruce stands. Applied Soil Ecology, 107. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apsoil.2016.06.008
Trees have proven incredibly adept at restabilizing the climate over eons. However, to continue to sustainably inhabit the earth as a species, we need to address the imbalance of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions over the scale of a human lifetime.
We’ve developed a photosynthesis enhancement trait to increase plants’ growth rate and carbon sequestration potential. Some plants have naturally developed a similar method of photosynthesis efficiency increase, known as C4 photosynthesis, which relies on anatomical changes that are only possible in a certain group of plants. Our method achieves similar carbon capture results without requiring elaborate anatomical changes. This is incredibly different from developing an organism that is resistant to glyphosate.
Additionally, while trees sequester an enormous amount of carbon, they also release it back into the air through decomposition. We are developing a range of tree species, with characteristics similar to a slow-decomposing spruce, that are able to keep carbon stored in the high-quality wood for longer.
Similar to the work of the American chestnut, we focus on studying our seedlings on land that otherwise would not be productive for carbon drawdown like abandon mine lands.
The 'man behind the throne' in these forest dynamics is fungi. Trees can fuse roots with their offspring and sometimes cousins (related species). If fungi and humans disappeared tomorrow some trees would still be mother trees, boosting the metabolism of their neighbors. But most of the water and nutrient transport between trees and the ground in temperate forests (where most of the soil carbon exists) is brokered by fungi, and the carbon they trade it for makes up a lot of that soil carbon.
And when you cut down a tree, more than half of the carbon in that tree stays behind in the ground (although I implore scientists to challenge and test this result further. A few of you and a number of the rest of us think this number is low and these numbers influence climate policy a great deal).
If you're engineering trees for carbon sequestration - for actual carbon sequestration, instead of for profiting off carbon sequestration - you probably need to look at root fusion and fungal symbiosis, rather than trunk volume and canopy size. One is fixing a problem. The other is gaming a system that is trying to save us from destroying ourselves. It's tantamount to wartime profiteering.
> root fusion and fungal symbiosis, rather than trunk volume and canopy size
one could consider the soil itself as a living organism by the ton, and I would hope conversations around sequestering carbon will transition into conversations around increasing total biomass on earth.
Carbon gets top billing because its easily measurable and has a direct influence on the greenhouse effect, but the costs of climate change really come from the climate becoming more chaotic - every living organism acts as a buffer for storing energy, carbon, and water - the more life on earth, the more stable the atmosphere becomes.
(I'm no climate scientist, this is my impression from reading Charles Eisenstein's Climate: a New Story, totally turned me around on being fatalistic about climate change)
Gabe Brown refers to the sugars plants offer to fungi as 'liquid carbon'. Ingham calls them 'soil exudates', which is technically more accurate but I think both get the point across.
We can definitely use soil recarbonization as an air brake (pun not intended) for atmospheric carbon increases, but at the end of the day we enjoy an environment that was created by trees running unchecked for millions of years depositing carbon dioxide in the ground, before other fungi learned to eat lignin and slowed the process down.
When you're trying to change habits you need something to do, instead of a list of things not to do, and planting trees and learning how to make them happy are certainly things we can do.
Scientifically speaking this work is mighty interesting and desirable, there will be, I suppose, plenty of new discoveries/updates at the micro-molecular level about the photo-syn. processes. Two thumbs up and more power to you, we will learn a great deal about leaf tree photosynthetis on theoretical level.
Having said that, the naive and (forgive me for saying) faulty science behind the idea of using these for "stabilizing" climate is alarming. Ecology and the processes responsible for climate stability is infinitely more complex, and most importantly CO2 does not play central role in it per se. The amount of information processing by micro-biota to render the service of climate stabilization against equilibrium thermodynamics is unreachable in any foreseeable future by humans (ie. there is not even a hope to begin modeling this from first principles -- ignoring the fact for now that no theories exists on the hierarchical correlations among the ecological levels).
Of cause I understand the "advertising" element this work needs to attract funds and investments. That is why I would not unleash my criticism in full scale here (also not appropriate here), but (humbly) I would like to see that you attract real ecologists under the umbrella, and update the narrative to account for the dominant role forests play in on-land water cycle at least on the rudimentary level. Sure, I do not mean to uproot your efforts focusing on details of photosyntheis, but climate stabilization (mean for real, not just advertisement statements) is worth to acknowledge to come as a system. At the same time, I have anxiety that with all the good intentions we can easily cause more harm (as has been done many times prior , eg. corn-ethanol additives, palm oil, etc).
It's always a privilege to receive such a well thought out answer to an off the cuff post like mine above.
I believe we are both arguing from two orthogonal axes. You are responding from the rational perspective and I am responding from an emotional one.
From my perspective, so many promises like this have been made to fix the world with this 'one simple trick' that it raises way to many alarm bells for me.
I go on vacation at a town where there was a famous protest which prevented a forestry company from cutting a large swath of old growth.
The natives managed to defend their claim and the land is uncut to this day. I spoke to some of them and their leaders said more or less: "The forest has always taken care of us, and we don't know how it works so we should leave it the way it is."
And this is from people who have been observing nature in this one spot for 10 000 years. They might have figured some stuff out along the way but generally the white man won't believe them. Both communities are talking past each other because they don't publish papers, and also because we don't spend much time observing nature do its thing.
I guess all I can say is I wish it worked this way, and that fixing our mistakes would be this easy.
Living Carbon and/or Maddie/Patrik never claimed this would be a "one simple trick" solution to the climate crisis.
Solutions that address 1% of the problem are worth doing-- no single approach will be able to dig us out of the hole we are in and we need to attempt to address it from all angles.
Hi! I'm interested in carbon farming. We have some land that's probably not very well suited to it, honestly, but are looking into doing something with it.
It's hard to say what approach to take, and information is scarce. It would be great if projects such as yours advertised net CO2 captured per acre per year, and also $ per CO2-equivalent greenhouse reduction.
Climate ranges would also be good. Do these trees grow well in dry areas, for example?
Right now we are planting them in controlled environments for further study or on land where other plants cannot grow well - such as abandoned minelands. Our goal is to draw down 1GT of carbon in lands where trees don’t currently thrive; therefore we’re working to restore ecosystems that have already faced the consequences of human intervention, rather than integrating our trees into already-thriving wild forests.
All our current poplar trees are female and do not produce pollen, thus instilling a low fertility rate while maintaining the integrity of the tree to integrate with local ecosystems.
We take an ecosystem approach to everything we do. This includes understanding the interrelationships among species in a given location as well as understanding the economics to help local land stewards thrive. With access to over 17,000 tree variations, we are focused on identifying the most helpful species for a given local area.
We focus on carbon projects that create true additionality. We focus on restoring land that has been degraded or is underperforming. We are specifically interested in abandoned mine land, reclamation land, former range land or farm land. We also work with farmers to plant trees alongside agricultural crops for shade management, riparian buffers and windbreaks.
FWIW, I'm against GMO applications, not research, on first principles. I think we should wait three to five centuries at least, until we understand life systems better or have off-planet labs where, as msandford said, "there's no way for the genes to escape."
However, that said, you folks sounds like you really have your act together.
C4 plants evolved when CO₂ partial pressure was low and there was a higher partial pressure of oxygen in the air, which is the opposite of the trajectory we see today. Therefore, we have reduced the selection pressure on C4 plants.
Rather than try to go against this evolutionary process, we have incorporated natural processes from other plants and algae to achieve the same effect of avoiding photorespiration.
