Is adding charcoal to soil a good method for CO2 sequestration? - Modeling a spatially homogeneous soil

TL;DR

This paper introduces a mathematical model to analyze how adding charcoal to soil affects long-term CO2 sequestration, showing that charcoal may delay CO2 release depending on soil type and conditions.

Contribution

It presents a new coupled nonlinear ODE model to study the dynamical effects of charcoal addition on soil carbon storage, providing a flexible framework for future analysis.

Findings

Model is well-posed with interesting long-term behavior

Numerical simulations suggest charcoal delays CO2 release

Effect depends on soil type and time scale

Abstract

Carbon sequestration is the process of capture and long-term storage of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) with the aim to avoid dangerous climate change. In this paper, we propose a simple mathematical model (a coupled system of nonlinear ODEs) to capture some of the dynamical effects produced by adding charcoal to fertile soils. The main goal is to understand to which extent charcoal is able to lock up carbon in soils. Our results are preliminary in the sense that we do not solve the CO2 sequestration problem. Instead, we do set up a flexible modeling framework in which the interaction between charcoal and soil can be tackled by means of mathematical tools. We show that our model is well-posed and has interesting large-time behaviour. Depending on the reference parameter range (e.g. type of soil) and chosen time scale, numerical simulations suggest that adding charcoal typically postpones the release of CO2.