Well, most of the carbon in the ground that we're burning are long-buried trees, right? I wonder what it would take to just bury a lot of trees and let them regrow naturally.
My approach would be to find the best CO2/$ types of trees, buy them straight from the lumber industry, and sequester them in no-longer-used quarries. Just need to figure out a scalable way to ensure anaerobic conditions to help prevent CO2 release on breakdown.
At the time coal deposits formed the bacteria that broke down lingin and cellulose hadn't yet evolved, so just burying trees wouldn't work today as they would decay. You could probably burn the wood to produce charcoal (burning it in a low oxygen environment), and the bury that, but just cutting down a forest and burying it won't work.
I'm no chemist, but, wild guess, you might actually make things worse by favoring decomposition into methane instead of CO2.
I would think that a proper solution would require figuring out how to get all that carbon into a chemical form that is chemically stable and won't biodegrade. The ideal looks a whole lot like coal, I'd guess?
My understanding is that when wood first appeared on Earth nothing was able to decompose all of that cellulose for millions of years until microbes evolved a way to break the molecules apart and feed on them. I don't know if simply burying the trees is enough to sequester it away now that wood decomposes so readily.
This paper has some interesting ideas: https://cbmjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1750-0...
My approach would be to find the best CO2/$ types of trees, buy them straight from the lumber industry, and sequester them in no-longer-used quarries. Just need to figure out a scalable way to ensure anaerobic conditions to help prevent CO2 release on breakdown.