The idea of wood vaulting immediately made me think of what depth, or what surface area of land, would be required to make a significant global impact. Your comment about digging a 3m depth of hole suggests a relatively thin layer of wood, so I would imagine that would mean and enormous surface area would need to be cleared in which to bury the wood. This would have it's own negative environmental impact.
I immediately thought of Foss y Fran in south Wales, an open cast coal mine where the developer cannot afford to remediate the site leaving a huge hole in the ground near Merthyr Tydfil
Your article about how "green steel" is being held up by the high cost of hydrogen, is in general correct, however green steel may be able to be produced by "blue hydrogen" produced from fossil methane which depends on the successful development of the efficient capture of CO2 produced by SMR and Fischer-Tropsh process, and pumped down into disused gas wells. Meanwhile Europe that imports a large amount of fossil energy, will have to wait until low cost "green" hydrogen is available from the solar farms in Spain, Portugal, the Middle East and Africa to power their electrolysers, and replace their export of fossil fuels to us. This high purity hydrogen is suitable to power fuel cells to drive heavy transport that need it when batteries become too heavy to power these vehicles on their own.
The idea of wood vaulting immediately made me think of what depth, or what surface area of land, would be required to make a significant global impact. Your comment about digging a 3m depth of hole suggests a relatively thin layer of wood, so I would imagine that would mean and enormous surface area would need to be cleared in which to bury the wood. This would have it's own negative environmental impact.
I immediately thought of Foss y Fran in south Wales, an open cast coal mine where the developer cannot afford to remediate the site leaving a huge hole in the ground near Merthyr Tydfil
Your article about how "green steel" is being held up by the high cost of hydrogen, is in general correct, however green steel may be able to be produced by "blue hydrogen" produced from fossil methane which depends on the successful development of the efficient capture of CO2 produced by SMR and Fischer-Tropsh process, and pumped down into disused gas wells. Meanwhile Europe that imports a large amount of fossil energy, will have to wait until low cost "green" hydrogen is available from the solar farms in Spain, Portugal, the Middle East and Africa to power their electrolysers, and replace their export of fossil fuels to us. This high purity hydrogen is suitable to power fuel cells to drive heavy transport that need it when batteries become too heavy to power these vehicles on their own.