Global Application Program
TimberFish and Climate Change
TimberFish proposes producing a significant fraction of the world’s food from sustainably managed forested land. This could allow the conversion of some existing open forests, savannahs, grasslands, and croplands back into managed forests over the next 20 years. As these forests grow there should be an annual net removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Part of this removal could be used to produce food and part would be sequestered as carbon in the forest biomass. An additional benefit would arise since appropriate management of these forests would greatly reduce the occurrence of forest fires and this would help reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations.
This document was last updated in 2023 and it assumed that a commitment to the TimberFish Global Climate Change Plan was made in 2020. The projection then was that this would have led to a development and rollout program resulting in a large scale global implementation of this technology in 2025. That clearly is not going to happen. However, if it had, then in 2025 the TimberFish Technology would be applied to 51.9 million acres of existing forest, and fish production could have begun for that land. During each of the next 20 years, from 2026 through 2045, an additional 51.9 million acres per year of cropland, grassland, open forest, and savannah, could be converted into sustainably managed forest, and the TimberFish Technology would be implemented on this newly reforested land. (Note: only 2.5 million acres of cropland would be converted into forest in any given year.) The cost of this conversion to forest and subsequent food production could be substantially or entirely recovered through the sale of fish produced on the converted land.
The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has proposed a goal of limiting global greenhouse gas emissions to between 445 and 535 parts per million (ppm) by 2054. This could be done by replacing fossil fuel energy with renewable energy. If we then add the proposed TimberFish program it could be possible to actually reduce the maximum atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration experienced in the next 35 years to 440 ppm in 2036, and we would then return to 316 ppm in 2058. The last time the measured levels were that low was in 1959, the year records were first started in Hawaii. The accumulating benefits of this program would continue thereafter, and it would be possible to reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations to even lower levels if desired.
Since carbon dioxide accounts for the vast majority of the greenhouse gas emissions most attention was then directed to developing renewable energy technologies that could replace the emissions of carbon dioxide that stems from the burning of fossil fuels in power plants and cement production plants. This led to the development of heavily subsidized technologies such as solar panels, wind turbines, and corn ethanol. However, while these technologies are important they have not yet directly reduced the key driver of climate change which is the steadily increasing concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (421 ppm in March, 2023). The problem is that these technologies do not in and of themselves remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and so far they haven’t even slowed the rate of increase of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations. See Figure 1 from CO2-Earth.
Figure 1.
Here the data from 1995 through 2023 is the actual data collected at the Mauna Loa Observatory as shown above. As you can see, for the last ten years the rate of increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration has remained almost linear at a rate of 2.40 ppm per year. This corresponds to an average emission of carbon from fossil fuel fired power plants and cement plants for the last ten years of 9.71 GtC/yr (giga tons of carbon per year). Lowering this emission rate by 0.150 GtC/yr would result in an atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration of 456.5 ppm by 2054. This would meet the UN IPCC goal proposed in 2007.
Reducing C emissions to atmosphere from fossil fuel power plants and cement production facilities by 0.15 GtC/yr is a very ambitious program. Given that our track record for the last ten years has shown at best a gradual increase in emissions it may be somewhat unrealistic to expect that a sudden reversal will occur. However, we are assuming that the current recognition of the climate change emergency may start to reduce this rate of increase by 2023.
Unfortunately, even with this optimistic scenario we will still have future steady state atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations of 456 ppm, and no one knows what the long term impacts of this would be. A recent proposal to resolve this situation that is attracting a lot of attention is to plant one trillion trees. This could sequester a lot of carbon, but the there are questions as to how to pay for it, who would manage the forests and ensure that they remain as forests, and what would be the impact on agriculture.
Adding the TimberFish Technology to the current programs might be able to meet an annual reduction of 0.15 GtC/yr and this could resolve these issues and may even provide an economical pathway to returning to existing and even lower atmospheric carbon dioxide levels in the future. (pink line in Figure 2.)
Figure 2.
This would reduce the maximum atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration experienced in the next 30 years to 410 ppm in 2055. The accumulating benefits of this program would continue thereafter, and it would be possible to reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations to even lower levels if desired.
Any increase in the amount of new land converted back into managed forest would allow the carbon dioxide removal levels shown above to be met with the extra forests being used for seafood production. Alternatively, this additional production could be used to meet the goal of reducing emissions to atmosphere by 0.15 GtC/yr if conversion to renewable energy did not always meet this goal over the next 30 years.
We know that 52 million acres is a lot of land to convert to forest in a year. For example, the total land area in New York State is about 35 million acres. This raises a question as to whether or not this program is practical or even achievable. 52 million acres per year for 20 years is 1.04 billion acres.
But look at it this way. Our current human population is about seven billion people. Over the last 300 years we have lost over half of the world’s forests. But, there are still almost 12 billion acres of pasture, shrublands, and savannahs that are suitable for reforestation and new forest development. We only need one billion acres of this available land for the TimberFish Program. On a per person basis this would amount to planting trees on one eighth of an acre (less than 6,000 square feet) sometime in the next 25 years. It is manageable.
The problem is that we may need that land to produce food and that is why the TimberFish Technology presents such an opportunity. This technology can produce lots of high protein healthy seafood from forested land without compromising the carbon sequestering capability of the forest, or its aesthetic, biodiversity, and habitat features.
A program to achieve this objective could call for the conversion of:
25 million acres of cropland, out of 3,705 million acres of cropland, or 0.67% of total cropland, and
988 million acres of grassland, savannahs, shrublands and pasture out of 11,881 million acres of grasslands, savannahs, shrublands, and pasture, or 8.3% of total grasslands, savannahs, shrublands, and pasture,
Into new managed forest land.
To be successful this will have to be a global effort. Most of the land that will be required is contained in a few big countries with relatively low population densities. The Table below shows the top ten countries ranked in terms of their land area and including their population densities. This is where most of the land is that we will need to use for reforestation and new forestation.
Country and Land Area in millions of square miles
Russia 6.60
US 3.80
Canada 3.80
China 3.70
Brazil 3.30
Australia 2.90
India 1.24
Argentina 1.10
Kajakhstan 1.00
Algeria 0.92
DRC Congo 0.90
While countries with relatively low population densities have the locations where most of the new forests will be sited, it will also be essential to have the all the countries with high population densities involved in an integral manner with this effort. Growing and maintaining new forests is only part of the program. All of us, and particularly those of us who live in high density population centers, must alter our behavior so that our consumer demand is for products derived as much as possible from this forest based circular economy.
The logical existing organizations to actually implement this technology and programs are the large multinational corporations in the energy, food, and machinery sectors. They have the resources, the organization, the technological expertise, the marketing, and the distribution systems and infrastructure to further develop and implement this new technology. They are also experienced in working with all countries throughout the world.
The big multinational fossil fuel companies are aware, as are most of us, that there will not be a long term market for fossil fuel derived energy and products. They facilitated the technology emergence that has created the world of today because we as individuals liked and demanded their products. We like automobiles and trucks, heat and air conditioning for our houses, electricity for lights, computers, cell phones, and appliances, supermarkets and shopping malls. So if we are to resolve Climate Change we all have a responsibility to alter our behavior.
By gradually deceasing the production and use of fossil fuels large corporations can replace their product lines to include the energy and food products that can be generated from a new forest based economy.
But again, we all need to do this together. We as individuals and consumers need to create the demand for these sustainable products. Only then can their work as corporations be combined with our efforts as individuals to successfully continue our human evolution in a safe and sustainable world environment.
The continued successful development of the TimberFish Technology could greatly assist the implementation of this initiative. Thus in the near future we will be exploring new initiatives, including new operating companies, joint ventures, partnerships, and technology licensing and sales.
TimberFish can provide services comprising design, engineering, permitting, construction and project management, operation, branding, and marketing. We will also establish and support continuing research and development in conjunction with colleges and universities to further vet and expand this technology.
During this process TimberFish will seek to develop relationships with companies and organizations that have both the markets and expertise to facilitate the large scale implementation that will be required if new forests are to be developed and sustainably managed. This could lead to a sequestering of massive additional quantities of carbon thereby reducing atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations. All this can occur in addition to producing a whole new food chain of clean, sustainably and locally produced seafood. The goal is to catalyze a global application of this technology that is economically profitable and is not dependent on subsidies or regulation for its adoption.
Here is a general proposal for Mitigating Climate Change with TimberFish.
Summary
Planting one trillion trees is an attractive approach to mitigating and reversing Climate Change because new tree growth removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and sequesters it in the tree biomass and forest soil. The problem slowing widespread adoption of this approach is, how to pay for it. Since the TimberFish process uses wood chips and nutrients to grow microbes which are fed to invertebrates, which are then fed to fish, it represents a potential solution to this problem. By utilizing the dead wood and a fraction of the new tree growth that occurs each year in a new developing forest this process could produce and sell enough seafood to make planting new forests a profitable business. This would occur because the increased value and market for green and dead wood as chips would provide an economic incentive to plant new forests.
How this would impact existing and new developing forests will be a function of temperature, rainfall, available sunlight, native tree species diversity, and various other local conditions. For applications in temperate to tropical climates the following ranges could be expected. Once a full forest canopy is established (about 4 to 10 years depending on the species and diversity of trees in the forest) 9,700 to 17,600 pounds of green and dead biomass, net respiration in the living trees, would be produced per acre per year.
If 3,000 to 7,000 pounds of this woody biomass was harvested and used to grow fish in a TimberFish system, there would still be 6,700 to 10,600 pounds of new forest biomass added each year to that previously sequestered in the forest. This would still allow for harvesting timber and pulpwood from the forests. Processing the harvested wood would annually generate; 36 to 86 pounds of fish, 88 to 204 pounds of potting soil with one percent nitrogen, and enough high energy residual wood chips to produce 1,200 to 2,000 KWH of electricity. This would replace energy currently produced from fossil fuel. The entire process would discharge a clean water effluent that would meet tertiary treatment water quality standards of 10 mg/l of Total Suspended Solids, 5 mg/l of Biochemical Oxygen Demand, 1.3 mg/l of Ammonia, and 1.0 mg/l of Total Phosphorus.
Proposal
Over the last 300 hundred years we have lost over half of the world’s forests and wetlands, and, since the late 1950s, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased by 30 percent. In addition, the planet’s human population is projected to rise by another several billion people and this means that we will need more food for the future. However, the amount of land that is suitable for agriculture is close to being maximally utilized and the oceans are becoming increasingly contaminated.
The TimberFish Technology (TFT) represents a potential solution to these problems. It is a patented environmental biotechnology that produces contaminant free, locally and sustainably produced fish and shrimp from currently unutilized resources such as clean food and beverage waste streams and nonagricultural plant material such as wood chips from forests. The process combines the wood chips and nutrient sources in a bioreactor that grows a microbial biomass. This is fed to invertebrates such as worms or insects. The invertebrates are then fed to fish or larger invertebrates such as shrimp or mollusks. The process also produces soil amendments, tertiary treatment quality effluents, and high lignin residual wood chips that can be used for renewable energy production. There are no wastes or negative environmental impacts and the process produces more energy than it consumes.
This is a sustainable environmental biotechnology that is economically capable of combating climate change and environmental pollution in todays global economy. It comprises building an expanded and safe food chain through integrating currently unused resources with conventional and emerging food and agricultural practices. The technology can treat and recycle high strength solid and liquid organic wastes, wash waters, and wastewaters that do not contain toxic or harmful materials. These are currently generated by food and beverage producers and processors; restaurants and dining halls; and various agricultural operations that have production residuals. It combines these with a wide variety of nonagricultural plant materials that can be sustainably harvested from diversified ecosystems such as forests, woodlots, and grasslands.
From these materials TimberFish produces clean, locally produced seafood such as fish and shrimp, animal feeds and feed ingredients, potting soils and soil amendments, renewable energy substrates, clean water for reuse or permitted discharge, and clean air with no odor or greenhouse gases other than carbon dioxide which is recaptured and reused by the plant material inputs.
Implementation of this technology will allow us to significantly expand our current agricultural production of food without disrupting existing agricultural industries. This will become increasingly important in countering the disastrous impact that Climate Change will have on the world’s future food supply. This will be coupled with the additional benefit that the technology will also generate an economic incentive for large scale new forest development that can mitigate and reverse Climate Change.
The TFT will require large quantities of plant material that does not have to be processed or dried, and can include green wood, dead branches, bark, and leaves. Consequently, it will generate a large new market for dead and green wood chips that can be harvested from both existing and new forests and woodlands. This will significantly increase the value of forest plant material thereby creating an economic incentive for new forest development and additional harvesting of existing forests that does not interfere with or diminish the production of current forest products such as timber, pulpwood, and dried wood chips.
This will provide a strong economic driver for preserving our existing forests and for new forest development. It will incentivize maintaining new and existing forests with a variety of native tree species that preserves the natural biodiversity and biodynamic stability that were characteristic of the forests lost over the last 300 years. This program can include reforestation, afforestation, and similar efforts to capture carbon dioxide in rapidly growing new forests. By producing seafood from a fraction of the plant material generated each year in rapidly growing forests TimberFish can greatly reduce the cost of sequestering large quantities of carbon in new forest applications.
Once a new forest has established a photosynthetic canopy cover it can function like an existing forest and can sequester a given amount of carbon per acre per year net respiration. The rate of carbon accrual can vary as a function of the types and diversity of the trees in the forests. This will be dependent on the temperature, rainfall, available sunlight, and various other local conditions, but once established should remain approximately constant for the life of the forest. However, it will have an upper bound which is determined by the amount of light that falls on the forest and which can be usefully absorbed by the trees in that forest. Thus the annual rate of accrual for tropical and subtropical forests with 12 month growing seasons can be up to 2.4 times as large as for a temperate or boreal forest with a growing season of five months or less.
The working canopy cover can be established very early in the life span of the forest if there are a lot of initial trees planted or seeded per acre. As these trees grow and become larger they will compete for the available light and many will die or be harvested. However, the light absorptive capacity of the forest will remain essentially constant due to the increased growth of the surviving trees.
The carbon that is accrued annually will be partitioned in pools comprising aboveground living biomass (trunks, branches, leaves and needles), aboveground dead biomass (dead wood, fallen branches, leaves, and needles), belowground living biomass (roots), belowground dead biomass (decaying roots from dead trees and other forms of deadwood that have been physically incorporated into soil), and the soil carbon comprising microbes and various organic molecules such as lignins, resins, and humus, that are in the forest soil and have been deposited or generated by the microbial degradation of recognizable plant structures.
The creation of new forest products will incentivize management practices that will optimize the allocation of carbon in the aboveground living tree pools. There is differential sequestering of carbon in the trunk diameter, stems and branches, and leaves and needles pools. The carbon distribution in each of these pools can be managed by whole tree harvesting, thinning, and pruning. These strategies can then maximize the retention of carbon removed from the atmosphere by the photosynthetic capture of carbon dioxide, net the respiration, and branch, leaves, and needles death, that occurs in each respective pool.
In the early years of a developing forest there will not be much carbon in the belowground dead biomass and the soil so that almost all of the carbon accrued through photosynthesis will be sequestered in the living biomass of the forest. As the forest matures the belowground soil dead biomass and soil carbon pools will increase, and they will start to be oxidized, principally by microbial action, back to carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. When this rate of oxidation of the sequestered carbon approaches the amount accrued by photosynthesis the forest will have reached a steady state carbon balance maturity and will no longer be sequestering significant additional carbon from the atmosphere. However, the ability to produce fish and energy will continue for the life of the forest. This can also be included in mature forests used for timber production. Here the tops of the trees harvested for timber can be used as inputs to the TimberFish system.
How this technology can be implemented for a given developing forest will be a function of local conditions. For applications in temperate to tropical climates the following ranges could be expected. Once a full forest canopy is established (about 4 to 10 years depending on the species and diversity of trees in the forest) 9,700 to 17,600 pounds of green biomass, net respiration in the living trees, would be produced per acre per year. If 3,000 to 7,000 pounds of this green woody biomass was harvested and used to grow fish, there would still be 6,700 to 10,600 pounds of new forest biomass added each year to that previously sequestered in the forest.
When an appropriate nutrient source is added, the carbon contained in the wood processed by the TimberFish system each year can result in the production of 36 to 86 pounds of fish, 88 to 204 pounds of potting soil with one percent nitrogen, and enough high energy residual wood chips to produce 1,200 to 2,000 KWH of electricity. This could replace energy currently being produced from fossil fuel. The process also would discharge a clean water effluent that would meet tertiary treatment water quality standards of 10 mg/l of Total Suspended Solids, 5 mg/l of Biochemical Oxygen Demand, 1.3 mg/l of Ammonia, and 1.0 mg/l of Total Phosphorus.
The new market for green wood chips and dead branches will create an economic driver for proper forest management and new forest creation. This driver will generate new demand for tree related products and will not interfere with or replace the existing demands for timber, pulpwood, biomass for energy production, or carbon credits. The increase demand will generate additional income from forest harvesting that can be allocated to the forest owner and the existing array of independent contractors that collect, cut, skid, and chip the wood.
There are two additional benefits from this technology. The first is the impact it can have on reducing the occurrence and financial and environmental damage that occurs from forest fires. Past forest management practices, and higher temperatures as the planet warms, have recently contributed to a higher number of more costly and destructive forest fires. This has significantly increased the economic cost of forest fire property damage and has also increased the amount of carbon dioxide, soot and smoke that forest fires discharge into the atmosphere. Managing the forests by harvesting excess dead wood through collection, thinning, and pruning can greatly reduce the incidence and intensity of future forest fires. This will also help to mitigate and reduce Climate Change.
The other significant benefit of applying this technology is that it will create a major new source of seafood for our increasing population. The fish will be locally produced, contaminant free, and they can be profitably sold in todays market. Additional income can be generated from the sale of potting soils and excess energy, if not all of it is used to power the system. All of this provides an economic driver that is profitable in its own right, and which sequesters carbon as a no cost benefit of the technology.
Because the TimberFish system can use a variety of nutrient sources along with the plant material it provides additional environmental benefits when it uses waste streams from the food and beverage industries as sources of nitrogen and phosphorus. The same benefit can be obtained by incorporating nutrients from commercial and institutional sources of food wastes such as restaurants and cafeterias. This eliminates the environmental pollution and consequent treatment costs from these waste streams which then become sources of nutrients for TimberFish rather than potential pollutants.
In all of these systems, only half of the energy contained in the raw wood, the cellulosic fraction, can be effectively used for seafood production. The remaining residual wood chip will have an elevated energy content when compared with the raw wood because it will have a higher lignin to cellulose ratio. This can make for more efficient energy production from the wood chip residuals that will still comprise about 50 percent of the original weight of the harvested raw wood. The result is a significant new source of renewable energy.
There are many possible combinations of forest types and potential sources of nutrients (even fertilizer can be used). This makes the technology extremely flexible and adaptable to many different locations, climatic conditions, and local economies. It is truly a global technology.