Flower Power: Genetic Modification Could Amply Boost Plants' Carbon-Capture and Bioenergy Capacity

Scientific American
By Mike Orcutt October 18, 2010

A new review sums up options for increasing global carbon sequestration by flora and speculates that genetically engineering crops and trees could enhance the process, trapping gigatons of the greenhouse gas as well as increasing bioenergy production

The International Energy Agency predicts that fossil fuels will continue to meet the bulk of rising energy demand for decades to come, but they are currently responsible for 60% of the world's total greenhouse gas emissions. So, managing CO2 emissions from coal, oil and natural gas is crucial in tackling climate change.

Human activities currently add about nine gigatons of carbon to the atmosphere yearly. Photosynthetic organisms on land and in the ocean absorb about five of those gigatons through the natural uptake of CO2, leaving to humans the task of dealing with the rest. But no matter how much carbon there is, capturing it and preventing it from reentering the atmosphere is an immense engineering challenge; even today's best technology is orders of magnitude less effective than photosynthesis at trapping atmospheric carbon.

A new analysis published in the October issue of Bioscience suggests that by 2050 humans could offset between five and eight gigatons of the carbon emitted annually by growing plants and trees optimized via genetic engineering both for fuel production and carbon sequestration.

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