Chris West, the group's vice president, says the way to do this is to harvest carbon-releasing dead trees and plant carbon-hungry new ones.
According to plans released last month by the City of Cupertino, the campus, which will cover a 175-acre area, will also feature a separate corporate fitness center and a 1, 000-seat auditorium, along with an additional 300, 000 square feet of research facilities and a low-carbon central plant that will supply the majority of the power needed for the campus.
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This means that carbon which comes from a plant, or a swamp-dwelling bacterium that is digesting that plant, will have less 13C in it than did the carbon in the atmosphere from which the plant drew its sustenance.
And atmospheric carbon dioxide enhances plant growth, which greenhouse gardeners have known for decades.
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Presumably a carbon-sequestering plant would get a free pass from the environmentalists.
First, economic planners and bankers have to start accounting for the hidden cost of carbon in power plant feasibility studies on their own volition.
But the Energy Department estimates that electricity from a carbon-capturing plant with sequestration will cost 8 cents to generate one KWH in today's money by 2016.
To those concerned about emissions, it emphasized that the 400, 000-barrel-a-day refinery, plus an integrated gasification combined cycle plant, could sequester carbon more cheaply than a coal plant.
Scientists have known for a long time that aerosols cool climate by reflecting sunlight and making clouds brighter, but the new study is the first to use a global model to estimate the net effects on plant carbon intake resulting from this type of atmospheric pollution.
Whether plants are C3 or C4, the way they get carbon dioxide from the air is the same: The plant leaves have little holes, or stomata, through which carbon dioxide molecules can diffuse into the moist interior for use in the plant's photosynthetic cycles.
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During photosynthesis -- the process when the plant absorbs carbon dioxide and gives off oxygen -- organic tissue absorbs airborne toxins.
In theory biofuels produce low net emissions of carbon dioxide, since burning them merely recycles atmospheric carbon absorbed by the plant as it was growing.
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The carbon capture equipment can take well over half a plant's output, depending on how much carbon it tries to grab.
Ayrshire Power wants to build a plant with experimental carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology at the site.
In Iceland, Carbon Recycling International opened a plant at the end of 2011 drawing waste CO2 from a power station, with capacity to produce five million litres of methanol per year.
This one plant, for example, will cut carbon pollution by 16 million tons each year when compared to a similar coal plant.
The Weyburn-Midale CO2 project is burying carbon dioxide from a coal gasification plant in North Dakota in a depleted oil field in Saskatchewan.
Because the kilowatt-hours used by cars ultimately come from some carbon-based source (power plant or otherwise), the calculation converts kilowatt-hours to equivalent gallons of gasoline consumed.
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Shuttering even one U.S. nuclear power plant could unleash massive carbon emissions if fossil-fuel plants were used to make up the lost power, according to a new study released this weekend by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University.
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It's less useful, of course, for people who made their teeth before bomb testing started in 1955, and it will become ever less useful as more of the bomb carbon is absorbed by oceans and plant and animal life.
The plant is expected to cut carbon pollution by 16 million tons each year.
We also know that there are negative feedbacks, say, greater plant growth and possibly greater carbon storage in the soil as a result.
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We then follow that carbon which has been fixed by the plant into the soil and into the microbes and back out of the soil.
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"(Our study) suggests that we will be able to use the composition of fossil plant tissue to reconstruct the carbon composition of past atmospheres as far back as 400 million years ago, " she added.
All the proposals envisage a giant pipe starting with a coal plant, but then collecting carbon dioxide from anyone who will capture it before bringing it out to be buried under the sea bed.
If a government-mandated market for pollution offsets ever materializes, the 26-inch pipe hauling away carbon would be able to handle the plant's waste gas and another 5 million tons from other sources in New Jersey.
Some of the data it gathered about the abundance of phytoplankton - plant-like organisms that convert carbon dioxide into oxygen and provide food for other sea life - could already be monitored by satellite.
Because it uses organic materials, any carbon dioxide released during the generation of energy is offset by that absorbed during the plant's life, so the process as a whole is broadly balanced, or "carbon neutral".
Depending upon its application, gas produces roughly 50-70% of the carbon dioxide emissions from an equivalent coal-fired plant.
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The Keystone plant in Pennsylvania tops the list for mercury emissions, and the Scherer plant in Georgia is the dirtiest for carbon dioxide emissions.
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