I read with interest an article in Scientific American today regarding the sequestering of CO2 underground. The model they presented was a power plant that scrubbed CO2 out of emissions and then pumped it into a shale bed 2km down for permanent storage. It struck me that this idea is suffering from the same problem that computing suffers from, and that proponents of grid computing are trying to solve.

Computer scientists have recognized that building a bigger, more powerful computer is not as practical as linking hundreds or thousands of small computers. Thus the name grid computing. The same insight should hold for power production. Who has the biggest grid of land suitable for power production? Famers? Who needs the byproduct of power production, CO2? Farmers and their plants.

Why not seriously enlist farmers in the production of power? There are an awful lot of farmers around the world. They produce a lot of waste biomass that can be used for power generation. They also have a lot of land, which means access to sun and wind. They also require CO2 for their plants to grow. CO2 is the product of most of our power generation activities right now.

Proponents of CO2 sequestering say photosynthesis is an unlikely candidate for managed CO2 scrubbing. Maybe that’s because they are thinking on the wrong scale. What if the average farmer was also a power plant operator. In addition to a modest range of wind, geothermal and solar generation technologies to balance production strategies, a farmer could also operate a biomass, gas or coal (the technology exists to use all three) generator. The CO2 could be scrubbed and sequestered temporarily, instead of permanently, then released in a controlled manner via underground distribution so it slowly eminates from the soil under the crops they grow.

Crops use photosynthesis to convert CO2 into biomass (i.e. to grow). We know that slightly raised CO2 levels accellerate plant growth. A good industrial crop like hemp, which has a wide variety of uses and is quite hardy, might be a good candidate for utilizing the extra CO2.

As successful, small-scale power producers, endangered family farms could find a new lease on life. Improved crop output and supplemented income from power production could make the difference for a highly subsidized global industry. And pairing CO2 producing activities with CO2 hungry activities just makes sense. The same sense that farmers have always had when they use manure to fertilize.

Call me crazy, but the same principle that makes the Internet so functional could also make our power system more able to handle problems. Instead of concentrating production in a relatively small number of highly polluting, high-output power plants, the future of power production may lie in a distributed grid of inputs and outputs. Scaling back CO2 output to a locally managable level may be they way to avoid the issue of sequestering alltogether, and turn CO2-producing power generation into a sustainable form of energy production.