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Freegrass

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Re: Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR)
« Reply #50 on: August 27, 2020, 06:31:54 PM »
I was thinking about what I would write to the Belgian public media so this technology would get some more attention and give hope to the young ones who must be shitting themselves to be born into a disintegrating world with nasty viruses.

And then I wondered if such hope would end investments in home improvements because why worry if there's a solution?

But can you imagine how kids would feel if they knew the world wasn't going to end?
90% of the world is religious, but somehow "love thy neighbour" became "fuck thy neighbours", if they don't agree with your point of view.

WTF happened?

Tor Bejnar

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Re: Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR)
« Reply #51 on: August 27, 2020, 07:37:08 PM »
For an enjoyable (and scientific) look at "Glorious Mud" see this Earth Logs post.  This is what becomes of olivine.
Arctic ice is healthy for children and other living things because "we cannot negotiate with the melting point of ice"

Freegrass

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Re: Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR)
« Reply #52 on: August 27, 2020, 09:53:52 PM »
WTF? Project Vesta changed their website and what you get now is a link to a crowdfunding page to donate money. All the info is gone.

WTF?

Is this a scam?
https://projectvesta.org/


90% of the world is religious, but somehow "love thy neighbour" became "fuck thy neighbours", if they don't agree with your point of view.

WTF happened?

Freegrass

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Re: Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR)
« Reply #53 on: August 27, 2020, 10:11:41 PM »
Why did I get two questions in last night? Me, a stupid fat guy with a computer?
Something smells here... He talks about governments being interested, and yet I get two questions answered?

Why was he sitting on his bed?

Oh fuck... Yet another disappointment from the destructive human virus...  >:(
90% of the world is religious, but somehow "love thy neighbour" became "fuck thy neighbours", if they don't agree with your point of view.

WTF happened?

Sciguy

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Re: Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR)
« Reply #54 on: August 28, 2020, 12:36:09 AM »
I just Googled Project Vesta and their website came up immediately.

https://projectvesta.org/

Given the news stories, I think it's a legitimate organization.  It claims to be a registered 501c3 (the legal name for) non-profit organization in the US.



I hope it works.  In addition to cutting our emissions of greenhouse gases down to as close to zero as we can, we're going to need to take a lot of CO2 out of the atmosphere.  Reforestation, afforestation, rapid weathering (including olivine on beaches), improved agricultural methods to restore soil carbon (including bio-char) could all help.  They're much better options than trying to capture carbon dioxide from the air, liquifying it, and injecting it into the ground in hopes that it stays there (CCS).

Freegrass

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Re: Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR)
« Reply #55 on: August 28, 2020, 01:37:55 AM »
When you claim that governments are interested in your technology that could possibly solve the biggest crisis in human history, why do you have to beg for money and only get $378,893 USD on a crowdfunding page?

I just saw the website is back. Maybe they heard me on their facebook page?

I find it weird... This planet saving tech is so easy to understand and should have attracted all kinds of philanthropists by now...

When something sounds too good to be true, maybe it is?
90% of the world is religious, but somehow "love thy neighbour" became "fuck thy neighbours", if they don't agree with your point of view.

WTF happened?

Sciguy

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Re: Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR)
« Reply #56 on: August 28, 2020, 08:46:59 PM »
^^^

It's based in the US, and the US is currently lead by a climate change denier.  Hopefully that will change next year and there will be more grant money available for these types of projects.

Bruce Steele

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Re: Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR)
« Reply #57 on: August 28, 2020, 11:42:38 PM »
Freegrass, I would warn against too much frontloading of efficacy without solid science to quantify how well olivine changes ocean alkalinity. I know there are top notch biogeochemistry PhDs who know about
Greensand (olivine) and I have seen experimental methodology that can give us some numbers to work with for the chemistry side of the story. But answers for how biological systems might react take time and before you start you need to have good QA/QC on methodology.   Biology is always messy.
 Take acidification for example. I understand this particular subject fairly well.
 I helped track down funding and played an important part in starting a group called C-CAN, Calif. Current Acidification Network. Our group had its first meetings in 2010 but the impetus for a collaboration between science and the aquaculture/ fishing industries were stock crashes at Pacific Northwest US oyster hatcheries in 2007-2008 .
 So when we gathered one question centered around biological thresholds . The oyster farmers could help supply that number because they had tested water enough times while batches of oysters died in their tanks. So one species of oyster would start to crash if the saturation state of seawater dropped below 1.7 omega.
 The next question was what instrumentation could ascertain pH or alkalinity at an accuracy that in real time would result in a number accurate enough to monitor seawater at the intake source for aquaculture operations. The accuracy of each of two parameters measured separately needed to be very good because uncertainty increases when two sets of uncertainty are added together.  So from the expertise in the room we could determine the accuracy of existing technology wasn’t good enough to provide a real time numbers so oyster growers would know when the seawater of their intake pipes would kill their baby oysters.  Those instruments exist now but they didn’t in 2010.
 This is an example of biological thresholds and QA/QC  in methodology to test seawater to get reliable  results. Each different species has a different threshold of sensitivity and testing in a lab setting, or an aquaculture setting isn’t the same as instrumentation for  open ocean autonomous sensors.
 I am trying to stress the importance of proper design for biological testing of various species that exist in open water settings. When you add in potential effects of metal dissolution  in whatever olivine you source you have some very difficult and expensive testing protocols to design . We don’t have any instrumentation that is both cheap, accurate and durable. Sensors need calibration, and biological fouling can distort your results. So instruments need babysitting and experimental design can only
answer specific questions. Think time and money.
 So as much as we might want solutions we need to acknowledge the difficulty in how we get answers to very difficult questions.

 
 
 
 

 

Freegrass

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Re: Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR)
« Reply #58 on: August 30, 2020, 01:26:47 PM »
I wish to welcome the people from Project Vesta on ASIF.

A few days ago I panicked again. Alcohol and Borderline disorder are a bad mix... I really want this Vesta project to succeed. I hope they will be able to answer all your question and connect with some of the scientists here like you Bruce. I'm sure they will need all the help they can find.

Let's fix the CO2 problem!
90% of the world is religious, but somehow "love thy neighbour" became "fuck thy neighbours", if they don't agree with your point of view.

WTF happened?

Bruce Steele

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Re: Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR)
« Reply #59 on: August 30, 2020, 06:27:01 PM »
Freegrass, Although I consider it a complement to be called a scientist I am just well read on acidification and the carbon cycle.
 After reading some more it seems like olivine does make a good candidate for carbon sequestration but it involves silica and diatoms rather than calcifying phytoplankton. And when you improve  the environmental conditions for diatoms they can sometimes outcompete calcifying organisms by consuming available nitrogen and phosphorus. But there are vast stretches of ocean that are depleted of dissolved silica and additions to those areas might be beneficial in diatoms growth.
 Biological processes take surface carbon to depth so I can see where diatom growth and associated ballasting of organic carbon can improve the efficiency of the carbon sink but if dissolved nickel gets to toxic levels it can deter algae so it is a delicate balancing act. I suspect it will work best in specific regions that are both depleted in dissolved silica and somewhere that large coastal stands of kelp wouldn’t be threatened.

 https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fclim.2019.00007/full

Sciguy

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Re: Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR)
« Reply #60 on: November 25, 2020, 06:43:15 PM »
Stripe, an online payment processing company, is investing $1 million in carbon removal projects to remove all of the carbon it has emitted from the atmosphere.  Project Vesta will receive a quarter of the funds.

https://amp.theatlantic.com/amp/article/617201/

Quote
The Weekly Planet: A Start-Up’s Unusual Plan to Suck Carbon Out of the Sky

An online-payments company may fund more carbon removal than anyone else.
Robinson Meyer
November 24, 2020

Stripe is one of those technology companies that controls the internet’s plumbing. It makes payments-processing software that hustles money from your debit or credit card to someone else’s bank account. If you’ve ever purchased groceries on Instacart or supported a project on Kickstarter, you’ve used Stripe, even if you didn’t know it.

Quote
Lately Stripe has been helping to build a different kind of plumbing—physical pipes running from the open air to deep underground. In the past year, Stripe has become one of the world’s largest purchasers of carbon-removal credits, devoting $1 million to extracting carbon from the sky. Last month, it began allowing its customers—the businesses that use its payment software—to buy carbon removal as well.

Quote
Until last year, Stripe followed the standard playbook for a climate-concerned Bay Area start-up. It powered its operations with renewable energy, and it sometimes paid to plant trees, but it did not study carbon removal, much less purchase it. But then the company’s executives became intrigued by the idea of zeroing out Stripe’s historic carbon pollution—of removing all the carbon that it had emitted since its establishment, in 2010. They were willing to spend up to $1 million on the project.

Quote
Today, Stripe buys removal from four companies: Climeworks, which captures carbon directly from the air and injects it into underground basalt; CarbonCure, which injects carbon into concrete; Project Vesta, which uses a common mineral to convert carbon in the ocean into limestone on the seafloor; and Charm Industrial, which produces an oil from biomass and then injects it deep into the earth.

The company picked these four relatively small companies based in part on their potential to become much larger operations. “As we scale up, we hope to find significantly more,” Orbuch said. The company’s ultimate goal here is to bring the cost of carbon removal down the “learning curve”—which means, in essence, making it cheaper. By buying from these companies now, at a relatively high price point, Stripe is aiming to let everyone pay less later.

Freegrass

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Re: Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR)
« Reply #61 on: April 20, 2021, 08:52:17 PM »
Project Vesta Earth Day Celebration

Join us this Earth Day to celebrate our planet, galvanize hope for our future and learn more about Project Vesta!

About this Event

Earth Day is a powerful chance to celebrate our diverse, resilient planet, and it’s also Project Vesta’s second birthday!

In honor of the occasion we are inviting the global community to gather with us online - to hear our progress, spread awareness, and galvanize hope that with action, a world with a healthy climate really is possible. This is a chance to learn more about Project Vesta, get a real time update, meet more of the team, and groove to some ocean inspired tunes with us!

This is more than a project update - we want to get hopeful with you!

Special musical guests, Dirtwire and Ley Line, will be sharing opening and closing songs inspired by our resilient planet. We will also be announcing the winner and runners up of our Earth Day Creative Competition - interested in submitting? More details, along with prize information and deadlines live on our blog.

Tune in at 12pm PST to learn more about the science we do, meet the team and get inspired! We can’t wait to see you there!

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/project-vesta-earth-day-celebration-tickets-149770145537
90% of the world is religious, but somehow "love thy neighbour" became "fuck thy neighbours", if they don't agree with your point of view.

WTF happened?

be cause

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Re: Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR)
« Reply #62 on: August 09, 2021, 05:47:26 PM »
Crushing stones is no problem .. there are millions of folk sitting at computers { in the likes of the City f london  :) ) that could better serve their planet by taking up rock breaking . In the 1940's it was a way to get the dole in rural Ireland . Men sat at the road side breaking up stones for the road in advance of tarring . my mum still remembers them at work in Donegal .
 I'm sure millions of Greta's followers would volunteer tomorrow . Now where's that olivine . I brought some home from Unst 45 years ago . Often associates with asbestos , so masks may be needed .
  also a lot of donkeys will be needed !
Conflict is the root of all evil , for being blind it does not see whom it attacks . Yet it always attacks the Son Of God , and the Son of God is you .

Tor Bejnar

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Re: Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR)
« Reply #63 on: August 09, 2021, 07:27:42 PM »
Crushing stones is no problem when the right type of stones are getting crushed for other reasons - the mining of peridotites which are host rocks for platinum-group metals, nickel and chromium.

Global warming: Can mantle rocks reduce the greenhouse effect?
Earth-logs 6 July 2021

Quote
... peridotite ... consists of more than 60% olivine with lesser amounts of pyroxene and almost no feldspar. Being so rich in Mg and Fe, it is said to have an ultramafic composition and is extremely prone to weathering. ... All ultramafic rocks are denser than 3,000 kg m-3, so might be expected to be rare in lower density continental crust (2,600 kg m-3). But they are present at the base of sections of oceanic lithosphere that plate tectonics has thrust up and onto the continents, known as ophiolite bodies. They often occur in orogenic belts at former destructive plate margins and are more common than one might expect. One of the largest and certainly the best-exposed occurs in the Semail Mountains of Oman, where scientists from the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, New York State, USA, and other collaborators have been investigating its potential for absorbing CO2, since 2008.
Arctic ice is healthy for children and other living things because "we cannot negotiate with the melting point of ice"

AbruptSLR

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Re: Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR)
« Reply #64 on: August 09, 2021, 11:09:52 PM »
Capturing a trillion tonnes of excess CO2 in rock using the power of natural wave energy

https://projectvesta.org/

Project Vesta is a non-profit, founded on Earth Day 2019. Our vision is to help reverse climate change by turning a trillion tonnes of CO2 into rock. We will do this using the power of natural wave energy at green sand beaches. Today, we know that reducing carbon dioxide emissions alone will not be enough to solve the climate crisis: we need to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Fortunately, nature already has a way, billions of years old, to do this – by weathering volcanic minerals. When rain falls on volcanic rocks and washes them into the ocean, this causes a reaction which removes CO2 from the atmosphere and locks it up in limestone at the bottom of the ocean.

Accelerating a Natural Process

Project Vesta’s approach dramatically accelerates this ancient natural process. We make green-sand beaches with an abundant volcanic mineral, olivine. There, wave action speeds up the carbon dioxide capture process while de-acidifying the ocean. Thirty years of scientific research has demonstrated that this works and has provided strong evidence that it is a highly affordable and scalable solution. The process captures 20 times more carbon dioxide than the extraction and transportation of the olivine. If deployed on just 2% of global shelf seas, could capture 100% of annual human emissions.

An Open-Source Scientific Approach

Our mission is to further the science of enhanced weathering and galvanize global deployment. To that end, we are planning experiments to pilot green-sand beaches. All scientists in the field are welcome to contribute to the design of these experiments, and all are welcome to analyze the resulting data. Once we have finished the experiments and published the data, we will be able to deliver to the world a blueprint and integrated model for deploying green sand beaches. The Enhanced Weathering Integrated Assessment Model (EWIAM) will enable any government or private organization to measurably remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere at scale.

History - Where We Came From

Project Vesta was born out of a climate change think-tank called Climitigation. This group investigated as many carbon capture solutions as possible, searching for one that had received too little attention and investment. Climitigation found that coastal enhanced weathering was a process with enormous potential for cheap, permanent carbon capture at massive scale. Further, they found that the technology was stuck in the lab, despite real-life beach pilots being the clear next step. No one was bringing together the combination of multidisciplinary science, government support, funding, and sheer force of will that would help this technology ‘cross the chasm’ between theory and maturity. Project Vesta was founded to do exactly this.

The Project Vesta Ethos

We are an open-source project. The work we do will be available to all in service of maximum speed and efficacy of global deployment. We are doing this for the planet, not for ourselves or for any individuals.

We are fundamentalists about our commitment to scientific rigor. We believe that the path to global scale is paved with robust science, transparency, and the credibility that comes from these.

We consider the entire life-cycle of the impacts of our actions. We aim to capture 20 times the CO2 we emit. We measure the ecological effects of our entire process from quarries to marine ecosystems, and wherever possible seek to have a regenerative effect on local ecosystems and communities.

Scale is paramount. Our goal is to remove tens of gigatons of carbon dioxide per year. We believe that to be seriously impactful, CO2 removal solutions must be able to achieve gigaton+ scale by 2030.

Inspiration

The team would like to thank R.D. Schuiling and Poppe De Boer, whose passion for olivine weathering and insightful research provided significant inspiration for the Project Vesta vision, and whose work in many ways continues to guide this promising field.

How It Works

The initial post proposes the use of ocean wave action to accelerate the break-up of the olivine (not that I am promoting this plan).
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Freegrass

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Re: Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR)
« Reply #65 on: November 18, 2021, 08:30:59 AM »
Poo from the world’s largest animals have a stunning effect on ocean ecosystems—and even carbon capture

A million additional whales defecating close to the surface would be like having massive ocean fertilizer machines—absorbing as much carbon as forests covering a continent

https://www.anthropocenemagazine.org/2021/11/poo-from-the-worlds-largest-animals-have-a-stunning-effect-on-ocean-ecosystems-and-even-carbon-capture/

The Southern Ocean that encircles Antarctica has, for decades, been home to a mystery known as the “krill paradox.” It goes like this: tiny shrimp-like krill have been in decline there for decades, even though the population of one of their chief predators—whales—fell dramatically during the 20th century. With fewer whales, shouldn’t krill numbers boom? Now, scientists think they have an answer: Whale poop.

Thanks to an elaborate decade-long investigation involving whale-mounted trackers, drones and sonar, scientists have found that the planet’s largest animals eat and poop far more than previously thought. This gluttony has the potential to ripple through entire ecosystems—including krill—as the whales vacuum up vast amounts of nutrients, then spread them back into the water as feces.

“Just this idea that if you remove large whales, there’s actually less productivity and potentially less krill and fish is amazing,” said Jeremy Goldbogen, a Stanford University biologist who supervised much of the work.

The insight came from a simple question: How much do baleen whales eat?

The animals, which can grow as large as a commercial airliner in the case of the blue whale, feed on some of the smallest animals in the sea by sucking vast amounts of ocean water through comb-like structures in their mouths called baleen. The baleen catches krill or small fish such as anchovies, which the whales then swallow.

But estimates of the total mass of food these giants consume has been wracked by uncertainty and guesswork. The whales are too big to study in captivity, and much of their feeding happens out of sight, underwater in the open ocean. Scientists instead extrapolated the whales’ metabolic needs based on smaller animals, and estimated prey consumption by measuring the stomach contents of dead whales.

In 2010, scientists launched an effort to get a clearer picture of these whales’ appetites. Using suction cups, they attached 321 motion trackers to 7 different species of baleen whales spanning the Pacific, Atlantic and Southern oceans. These devices allowed scientists to record the movements of the whales, including distinctive swimming behavior when feeding. All told, they recorded more than 70,000 feeding events over 10 years.

Scientists also flew drones over 105 whales, taking photos to calculate each whale’s size and how much water it filtered in a single gulp. Finally, they followed feeding whales aboard small boats and used sonar to measure the density and size of clouds of krill or fish on which the animals were feasting. The effort involved 17 researchers from 13 different universities and government agencies in Europe, Africa, and the U.S.

The results were stunning. These whales, it turns out, eat approximately triple the amount of food previously estimated. For the eastern North Pacific blue whale, that amounted to roughly 16 metric tons per day—the equivalent of eating 3 adult African elephants. To grasp the difference from previous studies, the researchers noted that in 2008 scientists predicted that each year whales off the west coast of North America ate approximately 2 million metric tons in total. The new study found that individual blue, fine and humpback whales in the area ate that amount, according to the study, published today in the journal Nature.

“Think of these large whales as mobile krill processing plants,” said Matthew Savoca, a marine ecologist and postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University who was the study’s lead author.

To understand the implications for ecosystems, Savoca and colleagues looked to the Southern Ocean. There the whaling industry had decimated whale populations during the 20th century, killing more than 1.5 million baleen whales. Based on estimated whale numbers there around 1900, those whales each year ate 430 million metric tons of krill a year, double the total mass of krill found in that ocean at the end of the 20th century. The results suggest krill numbers in that earlier era were far greater than today, to feed so many whales without being wiped out.

The researchers suspect the answer is in whale poop, or, more specifically, the iron contained in the poop. The growth of phytoplankton in the Southern Oceans is limited by a lack of iron, so having more than a million additional whales defecating relatively close to the ocean surface would be like having fertilizer machines crisscrossing the region. At pre-hunting numbers, Antarctic minke, humpback, fin and blue whales combined would have injected as much as 1500 metric tons of iron back into the environment, much of which otherwise would have sunk to the ocean floor as krill died.

The iron boost would have driven much bigger plankton blooms—approximately 215 million metric tons of additional plant growth, equal to 11% of today’s Southern Ocean plankton production, the scientists estimate. That, in turn, would have supported larger numbers of krill, which feed on the plankton.


“Our results say that if we restore whale populations to pre-whaling levels seen at the beginning of the 20th century, we’ll restore a huge amount of lost function to ocean ecosystems,” said Nicholas Pyenson, curator of fossil marine mammals at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, who took part in the research. “It may take a few decades to see the benefit, but it’s the clearest read yet about the massive role of large whales on our planet.”

As world leaders gather today in Glasgow, Scotland for a global climate change summit, the findings also hint that more voracious whales could even put a dent in greenhouse gas pollution. The additional plankton growth from earlier whale numbers in the Southern Ocean, said Pyenson, would have absorbed as much carbon as forest ecosystems covering a continent.
90% of the world is religious, but somehow "love thy neighbour" became "fuck thy neighbours", if they don't agree with your point of view.

WTF happened?

Freegrass

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Re: Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR)
« Reply #66 on: November 18, 2021, 08:32:44 AM »
The Enormous Hole That Whaling Left Behind

The mass slaughter of whales destroyed far more than the creatures themselves.

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/11/whaling-whales-food-krill-iron/620604/

In the 20th century, the largest animals that have ever existed almost stopped existing. Baleen whales—the group that includes blue, fin, and humpback whales—had long been hunted, but as whaling went industrial, hunts became massacres. With explosive-tipped harpoons that were fired from cannons and factory ships that could process carcasses at sea, whalers slaughtered the giants for their oil, which was used to light lamps, lubricate cars, and make margarine. In just six decades, roughly the life span of a blue whale, humans took the blue-whale population down from 360,000 to just 1,000. In one century, whalers killed at least 2 million baleen whales, which together weighed twice as much as all the wild mammals on Earth today.

All those missing whales left behind an enormous amount of uneaten food. In a new study, the Stanford ecologist Matthew Savoca and his colleagues have, for the first time, accurately estimated just how much. They calculated that before industrial whaling, these creatures would have consumed about 430 million metric tons of krill—small, shrimplike animals—every year. That’s twice as much as all the krill that now exist, and twice as much by weight as all the fish that today’s fisheries catch annually. But whales, despite their astronomical appetite, didn’t deplete the oceans in the way that humans now do. Their iron-rich poop acted like manure, fertilizing otherwise impoverished waters and seeding the base of the rich food webs that they then gorged upon. When the whales were killed, those food webs collapsed, turning seas that were once rain forest–like in their richness into marine deserts.

But this tragic tale doesn’t have to be “another depressing retrospective,” Savoca told me. Those pre-whaling ecosystems are “still there—degraded, but still there.” And his team’s study points to a possible way of restoring them—by repurposing a controversial plan to reverse climate change.

Baleen whales are elusive, often foraging well below the ocean’s surface. They are also elastic: When a blue whale lunges at krill, its mouth can swell to engulf a volume of water larger than its own body. For these reasons, scientists have struggled to work out how much these creatures eat. In the past, researchers either examined the stomachs of beached whales or extrapolated upward from much smaller animals, such as mice and dolphins. But new technologies developed over the past decade have provided better data. Drones can photograph feeding whales, allowing researchers to size up their ballooning mouths. Echo sounders can use sonar to gauge the size of krill swarms. And suction-cup-affixed tags that come with accelerometers, GPS, and cameras can track whales deep underwater—“I think of them as whale iPhones,” Savoca said.

Using these devices, he and his colleagues calculated that baleen whales eat three times more than researchers had previously thought. They fast for two-thirds of the year, subsisting on their huge stores of blubber. But on the 100 or so days when they do eat, they are incredibly efficient about it. Every feeding day, these animals can snarf down 5 to 30 percent of their already titanic body weight. A blue whale might gulp down 16 metric tons of krill.

Surely, then, the mass slaughter of whales must have created a paradise for their prey? After industrial-era whalers killed off these giants, about 380 million metric tons of krill would have gone uneaten every year. In the 1970s, many scientists assumed that the former whaling grounds would become a krilltopia, but instead, later studies showed that krill numbers had plummeted by more than 80 percent.

The explanation for this paradox involves iron, a mineral that all living things need in small amounts. The north Atlantic Ocean gets iron from dust that blows over from the Sahara. But in the Southern Ocean, where ice cloaks the land, iron is scarcer. Much of it is locked inside the bodies of krill and other animals. Whales unlock that iron when they eat, and release it when they poop. The defecated iron then stimulates the growth of tiny phytoplankton, which in turn feed the krill, which in turn feed the whales, and so on.

Just as many large mammals are known to do on land, the whales engineer the same ecosystems upon which they depend. They don’t just eat krill; they also create the conditions that allow krill to thrive. They do this so well that even in the pre-whaling era their huge appetites barely dented the lush wonderlands that they seeded. Back then, krill used to swarm so densely that they reddened the surface of the Southern Ocean. Whales feasted so intensely that sailors would spot their water spouts punching upward in every direction, as far as the eye could see. With the advent of industrial whaling, those ecosystems imploded. Savoca’s team estimates that the deaths of a few million whales deprived the oceans of hundreds of millions of metric tons of poop, about 12,000 metric tons of iron, and a lot of plankton, krill, and fish.

Whaling proponents sometimes argue that whales’ gargantuan appetites threaten the food security of coastal nations, dismissing modeling studies that disprove this idea, according to Leah Gerber, a marine-conservation biologist at Arizona State University who wasn’t involved in the new study. By contrast, the empirical results from Savoca’s study “will be hard to refute,” Gerber told me.

The new study, says Kelly Benoit-Bird, a marine biologist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, in California, is an important reminder of how “exploited species are part of a complex web, with many effects cascading from our actions.” Killing a whale leaves a hole in the ocean that’s far bigger than the creature itself.

There are more whales now than there were even a few years ago—in early 2020, scientists rejoiced when they spotted 58 blue whales in sub-Antarctic waters where mere handfuls of the animals had been seen in years prior. But that number is still depressingly low. “You can’t bring back the whales until you bring back their food,” Savoca said. And he thinks he knows how to do that.

In 1990, the oceanographer John Martin proposed that the Southern Ocean is starved of iron, and that deliberately seeding its waters with the nutrient would allow phytoplankton to grow. The blooming plankton would soak up carbon dioxide, Martin argued, and cool the planet and slow the pace of global warming. Researchers have since tested this idea in 13 experiments, adding iron to small stretches of the Southern and Pacific Oceans and showing that plankton do indeed flourish in response.

Such iron-fertilization experiments have typically been billed as acts of geoengineering—deliberate attempts to alter Earth’s climate. But Savoca and his colleagues think that the same approach could be used for conservation. Adding iron to waters where krill and whales still exist could push the sputtering food cycle into higher gear, making it possible for whales to rebound at numbers closer to their historical highs. “We’d be re-wilding a barren land by plowing in compost, and the whole system would recuperate,” says Victor Smetacek, an oceanographer at the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research, in Germany. (Smetacek was involved in three past iron-fertilization experiments and has been in talks with Savoca’s group.)

The team plans to propose a small and carefully controlled experiment to test the effects of iron fertilization on the whales’ food webs. The mere idea of that “is going to be shocking to some people,” Savoca admitted. Scientists and advocacy groups alike have fiercely opposed past iron-addition experiments, over concerns that for-profit companies would patent and commercialize the technology and that the extra iron would trigger blooms of toxic algae.

But with Savoca’s new estimates, “we now have a much better idea of exactly the quantity of iron that whales were recycling in the system and how much to add back so we don’t get bad effects,” he said. His goal isn’t to do something strange and unnatural but to effectively act as a surrogate defecator, briefly playing the role that whales did before they were hunted to near extinction. These creatures would still face many challenges—ship strikes, noise pollution, entangling fishing gear, pollutants—but at least food supplies would tilt in their favor.

Whaling almost destroyed a thriving food web, “but in the sliver we have left, I see a lot of hope,” Savoca said. He’s not talking about restoring long-lost ecosystems, such as those that disappeared when mammoths and other land-based megafauna went extinct tens of thousands of years ago. “This is a system that was alive and well when our grandparents were alive,” he said. “And we want to bring it back.”
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Freegrass

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Re: Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR)
« Reply #67 on: November 18, 2021, 08:33:53 AM »
Ocean uptake of CO2 could drop as carbon emissions are cut

https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/665248

Volcanic eruptions and human-caused changes to the atmosphere strongly influence the rate at which the ocean absorbs carbon dioxide, says a new study. The ocean is so sensitive to changes such as declining greenhouse gas emissions that it immediately responds by taking up less carbon dioxide.

The authors say we may soon see this play out due to the COVID-19 pandemic lessening global fuel consumption; they predict the ocean will not continue its recent historic pattern of absorbing more carbon dioxide each year than the year before, and could even take up less in 2020 than in 2019.

"We didn't realize until we did this work that these external forcings, like changes in the growth of atmospheric carbon dioxide, dominate the variability in the global ocean on year-to-year timescales. That's a real surprise," said lead author Galen McKinley, a carbon cycle scientist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. "As we reduce our emissions and the growth rate of atmospheric carbon dioxide slows down, it's important to realize that the ocean carbon sink will respond by slowing down."

The paper, published today in the journal AGU Advances, largely resolves the uncertainty about what caused the ocean to take up varying amounts of carbon over the last 30 years. The findings will enable more accurate measurements and projections of how much the planet might warm, and how much the ocean might offset climate change in the future.

A carbon sink is a natural system that absorbs excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and stores it away. Earth's largest carbon sink is the ocean. As a result, it plays a fundamental role in curbing the effects of human-caused climate change. Nearly 40 percent of the carbon dioxide added to the atmosphere by fossil fuel burning since the dawn of the industrial era has been taken up by the ocean.

There's variability in the rate at which the ocean takes up carbon dioxide, which isn't fully understood. In particular, the scientific community has puzzled over why the ocean briefly absorbed more carbon dioxide in the early 1990s and then slowly took up less until 2001, a phenomenon verified by numerous ocean observations and models.

McKinley and her coauthors addressed this question by using a diagnostic model to visualize and analyze different scenarios that could have driven greater and lesser ocean carbon uptake between 1980 and 2017. They found the reduced ocean carbon sink of the 1990s can be explained by the slowed growth rate of atmospheric carbon dioxide early in the decade. Efficiency improvements and the economic collapse of the Soviet Union and Eastern European countries are thought to be among the causes of this slowdown.

But another event also affected the carbon sink: The massive eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991 caused the sink to temporarily become much larger coincident with the eruption.

"One of the key findings of this work is that the climate effects of volcanic eruptions such as those of Mount Pinatubo can play important roles in driving the variability of the ocean carbon sink," said coauthor Yassir Eddebbar, a postdoctoral scholar at Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

Pinatubo was the second-largest volcanic eruption of the 20th century. The estimated 20 million tons of ash and gases it spewed high into the atmosphere had a significant impact on climate and the ocean carbon sink. The researchers found that Pinatubo's emissions caused the ocean to take up more carbon in 1992 and 1993. The carbon sink slowly declined until 2001, when human activity began pumping more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The ocean responded by absorbing these excess emissions.

"This study is important for a number of reasons, but I'm most interested in what it means for our ability to predict the near-term, one to ten years out, future for the ocean carbon sink," said coauthor said Nicole Lovenduski, an oceanographer at the University of Colorado Boulder. "The future external forcing is unknown. We don't know when the next big volcanic eruption will occur, for example. And the COVID-19-driven carbon dioxide emissions reduction was certainly not anticipated very far in advance."

Investigating how the Pinatubo eruption impacted global climate, and thus the ocean carbon sink, and whether the drop in emissions due to COVID-19 is reflected in the ocean are among the research team's next plans.

By understanding variability in the ocean carbon sink, the scientists can continue to refine projections of how the ocean system will slow down.

McKinley cautions that as global emissions are cut, there will be an interim phase where the ocean carbon sink will slow down and not offset climate change as much as in the past. That extra carbon dioxide will remain in the atmosphere and contribute to additional warming, which may surprise some people, she said.

"We need to discuss this coming feedback. We want people to understand that there will be a time when the ocean will limit the effectiveness of mitigation actions, and this should also be accounted for in policymaking," she said.
90% of the world is religious, but somehow "love thy neighbour" became "fuck thy neighbours", if they don't agree with your point of view.

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kassy

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Re: Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR)
« Reply #68 on: November 18, 2021, 11:08:07 AM »
Thread title changed from Project Vesta - CO2 Removal With Enhanced Weathering of Olivine to the more general Carbon sequestration with ocean fertilization and enhanced weathering.

FWIW i think the olivine solution is still the best we have since it is readily available, can be scaled up and also fights ocean acidification.
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Re: Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR)
« Reply #69 on: November 18, 2021, 11:38:17 AM »
Thanks Kassy! This thread may save the world one day... :)

Olivine really is a good idea. Belgian scientists have been researching it for many years now, and so far so good. I hope they will publish some results soon. But I don't think it will be enough. The beaches only cover the edges of the oceans, and so that leaves about 70% of the planet unused for sequestration. Actually 99%, because enhanced weathering can also be used on land.

We can plant trees on land, but phytoplankton grows much faster, feeds little fish, and takes carbon very quickly to the bottom of the ocean, where it will be stored forever. Trees take a lot longer to sequester carbon IMHO - I'd have to do more research on that, but it makes sense to me, because they are exposed to the air much longer where they rot and release lots of carbon again.

I always said that the oceans were our solution, and that's why I love that article about the lost whales so much. It just gave me that last click to put it all together. It makes so much sense to me now... Just like on land, animals in the sea are the big fertilizers. Kill the animals on land, and you destroy the ecosystem. Take out all the fish and the whales, and you impoverish the oceans. And so just like on land, we need to put some nutrients back into the ocean if we want it to remain productive.

I keep wondering if 90% of all fish is gone from overfishing, or because the little fish just don't have enough food anymore to multiply in large enough numbers... With a little food for phytoplankton, maybe we can fill the oceans with fish again, and sequester a whole lot of carbon...
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Tor Bejnar

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Re: Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR)
« Reply #70 on: November 19, 2021, 01:08:48 AM »
What would happen if stockyard cow poop was shipped to (especially) the Southern Ocean (from Brazil, e.g.), releasing whale poop portions every hour or two.  The biomass of stockyard cows may be about the same as the 18th century whale biomass.  The main problems are fierce seas and CO2 pollution and cost (return on investment), and maybe drugs we feed cows.

Those ships might want to bring home krill for chicken feed to partly pay for the trip...

Now to start: I'm a vegetarian, so I'm not actually advocating either cattle stockyards or chicken farms.  But it's a 'lemons and lemonade' sort of situation.
Arctic ice is healthy for children and other living things because "we cannot negotiate with the melting point of ice"

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Re: Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR)
« Reply #71 on: November 19, 2021, 01:31:57 AM »
What would happen if stockyard cow poop was shipped to (especially) the Southern Ocean (from Brazil, e.g.), releasing whale poop portions every hour or two.  The biomass of stockyard cows may be about the same as the 18th century whale biomass.  The main problems are fierce seas and CO2 pollution and cost (return on investment), and maybe drugs we feed cows.

Those ships might want to bring home krill for chicken feed to partly pay for the trip...

Now to start: I'm a vegetarian, so I'm not actually advocating either cattle stockyards or chicken farms.  But it's a 'lemons and lemonade' sort of situation.
You don't need to make dedicated trips. All that's needed is some kind of container that can be filled with nutrients and put in or on the back of a ship. Add a computer controlled release system that's communicating with a central computer on shore, and then you could turn all these ships into artificial pooping whales.

https://www.marinetraffic.com/en

I have thought about using the excrements from farm animals as well, but you could also use iron and maybe some other nutrients that could be mixed together according to the location in the ocean.

These ships also constantly take in water, and so maybe you could also add an automated testing system that takes samples of the water to test it so the central computer knows where to add more, or less, or different nutrients.

So who's going to develop this with me so we can patent it and get rich? 😂
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Freegrass

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Re: Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR)
« Reply #72 on: November 19, 2021, 05:30:16 AM »
This doesn't need any words... I can't find them anyway...
Just turn on the speakers! ❤️

90% of the world is religious, but somehow "love thy neighbour" became "fuck thy neighbours", if they don't agree with your point of view.

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Freegrass

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Re: Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR)
« Reply #73 on: November 19, 2021, 06:08:38 AM »
Species of Feces Help Phytoplankton Feed Itself

The unicellular plants more readily take up iron in the presence of salp feces than in krill feces, an experiment in Antarctica reveals.
By Katherine Kornei
2 June 2021


https://eos.org/articles/species-of-feces-help-phytoplankton-feed-itself

Whales and penguins may be magnets for tourists visiting the Southern Hemisphere, but phytoplankton should be the real draw—these waterborne plants anchor marine food chains. However, phytoplankton have an Achilles’ heel: They rely on iron, a nutrient that’s downright scarce in many parts of the world’s oceans.

Now, researchers working in Antarctica have investigated how an unlikely catalyst—feces from tiny marine organisms—helps phytoplankton take up iron. The team demonstrated that the unicellular plants more readily take up dissolved iron in the presence of salp feces than they do in the presence of krill feces. As climate change erodes krill habitats in the Southern Ocean and salp flourish in their stead, phytoplankton populations might be primed for a boom, the team has suggested.

Powerful Plants

Phytoplankton are found in the top 100 or so meters of the water column, where they absorb sunlight and photosynthesize. It’s a good thing these tiny plants are there—researchers believe that the majority of oxygen in Earth’s atmosphere is produced by phytoplankton. Besides pumping out prodigious quantities of this life-sustaining element, phytoplankton are also an important source of food for marine organisms: Animals like krill eat phytoplankton, and krill in turn are devoured by larger species, all the way up to animals like whales and penguins.

Phytoplankton anchor the food chain, said Sebastian Böckmann, an ecologist at the University of Bremen and the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany. “They’re the basis of the ecosystem.”

But in many parts of the world’s oceans, the growth of phytoplankton is limited by the availability of nutrients, specifically iron. (Iron-containing proteins play an important role in photosynthesis.) “This requirement for iron is at the very basis of almost all phototrophic life,” Böckmann told Eos.

Iron Delivery

Iron can be delivered to the upper reaches of the oceans in several ways. It can hitch a ride within dust particles that blow off landmasses. It can be carried upward from reserves of deeper, more nutrient-rich water. And it can trickle out of melting icebergs whose parents—glaciers—initially scooped up iron-containing sediments as they scraped over a landscape. Despite these multiple delivery mechanisms, however, iron remains a limiting nutrient in many marine ecosystems, particularly those far from land.

In 2018, Böckmann and his collaborators traveled to Antarctica aboard the R/V Polarstern to study how phytoplankton take up iron. In particular, they investigated how the presence of feces from tiny marine organisms affects the plants’ ability to absorb dissolved iron. “We wanted to see how the biology of the phytoplankton community reacts to whatever is being released from the fecal pellets,” said Böckmann.

Comparing the Feces

The researchers set up several experiments. To begin, they collected seawater near Elephant Island, filtered it to remove the phytoplankton, and then added either fecal pellets from salp or fecal pellets from krill. After 48 hours, they measured the amount of iron within the water. There was more than 3 times as much iron in the bottles that received the salp fecal pellets, the team found.

That’s a pronounced difference, Böckmann and his collaborators noted, but iron in the water column doesn’t benefit phytoplankton—or any other life form—unless it’s bioavailable. The real question, therefore, is how much of that iron can be taken up by phytoplankton and put to use, the team concluded.

Deborah K. Steinberg, a biological oceanographer at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science in Gloucester Point not involved in the research, concurred. Other studies have examined how the fecal pellets of zooplankton release iron, she said, but this team looked at bioavailability, too. “They took it a step further to look at the uptake,” said Steinberg.

The researchers started by adding a community of phytoplankton to each bottle of seawater from the prior experiment, along with a small quantity of the radioactive iron isotope 55Fe. They then let the plants munch on their surroundings for 24 hours.

Next, Böckmann and his colleagues filtered the seawater to isolate the phytoplankton. They then used a scintillation counter, which measures flashes of light created by radioactive decay, to estimate the amount of 55Fe within the plants’ cells. After accounting for nonradioactive iron isotopes (56Fe and 57Fe) also being taken up at presumably the same rate, the researchers estimated the total amount of iron processed by the phytoplankton. They found that the presence of salp fecal pellets boosted iron uptake in phytoplankton by nearly a factor of 5 compared with krill fecal pellets.

Using these results, the team drew two conclusions. First, compared with krill fecal pellets, salp fecal pellets release more iron. Second, dissolved iron becomes more bioavailable in the presence of salp fecal pellets than in the presence of krill fecal pellets. There are logical explanations for both of these findings, Böckmann and his colleagues proposed.

First, salp fecal pellets release more iron because they’re more fragile than krill fecal pellets and tend to fragment more easily, previous research has shown. To explain the second finding, Böckmann and his collaborators suggested that ligands—ions or molecules that readily bind to other atoms—released by the salp fecal pellets render dissolved iron more bioavailable to phytoplankton. That’s plausible, the team reasoned, because krill and salp differ significantly in their digestive mechanisms.

The Carbon Question

These results, published today in Current Biology, may have real implications for phytoplankton populations, the researchers proposed. That’s because sea surface temperatures are rising worldwide because of climate change, and krill are moving to higher latitudes in search of cooler waters. As krill habitats contract, salp populations are flourishing in their place. That population shift translates into more bioavailable iron, which could mean booming phytoplankton communities.

But what that ultimately means from a carbon sequestration standpoint is an open question, the team conceded. If phytoplankton populations grow unchecked, they’ll eventually die and sink to the seafloor, locking up carbon. However, if animals like salp and krill (and by extension, species farther up the food chain) dine on the bounty, animal populations could boom. Animals pump carbon dioxide into the atmosphere via respiration, but they also send carbon to the seafloor in their excrement, Böckmann told Eos. “It’s a highly complex interplay between different organisms and elements.”

—Katherine Kornei (@KatherineKornei), Science Writer

Citation:

Kornei, K. (2021), Species of feces help phytoplankton feed itself, Eos, 102, https://doi.org/10.1029/2021EO157013. Published on 02 June 2021.

More links in the article
90% of the world is religious, but somehow "love thy neighbour" became "fuck thy neighbours", if they don't agree with your point of view.

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sidd

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Re: Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR)
« Reply #74 on: November 19, 2021, 09:13:02 AM »
Re: "What would happen if stockyard cow poop was shipped to (especially) the Southern Ocean ... "

This is not, perhaps, a good idea. First off, stockyards should not exist, they are horrible places where animals are tortured and sent off to slaughter. Next, any waste from the animals belong to the fields that grew their fodder, and if anywhere they should be returned there. As I and others have said before, if you remove the product of the soil year after year, it will grow naught but stones and pestilence in your monocrops sustained only by external fertilizer additions and defended by poison.   

sidd

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Re: Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR)
« Reply #75 on: November 19, 2021, 04:11:16 PM »
Re: "What would happen if stockyard cow poop was shipped to (especially) the Southern Ocean ... "

This is not, perhaps, a good idea. First off, stockyards should not exist, they are horrible places where animals are tortured and sent off to slaughter. Next, any waste from the animals belong to the fields that grew their fodder, and if anywhere they should be returned there. As I and others have said before, if you remove the product of the soil year after year, it will grow naught but stones and pestilence in your monocrops sustained only by external fertilizer additions and defended by poison.   

sidd

Quite right, sidd.  Another issue is that non-aged manure is a hazardous substance.  Pathogenic strains of E coli and other nasties are there, too.  Just shipping it to the distant ocean by the kiloton would expose a lot of workers.  Once aged, it's more valuable for the land than the sea.

If the point is to deliver iron, then there's no shortage of iron ore.  Possibly lower quality ore could serve this purpose.  You'd probably want to mix it in with something buoyant, that can slowly dissolve and biodegrade. 

You'd maybe need the next limiting nutrient, which I believe is phosphate for many areas of the ocean.  High quality phosphate ores are in short supply for agriculture.  Maybe a lower quality source could suffice.  Since iron phosphate is insoluble and would possibly precipitate to the ocean floor, you'd want to keep the iron away from the phosphate.

Of course, none of this should be done without a lot of careful research.  Otherwise, it's just another high-risk scheme for geoengineering that would have lots of potential unforeseen consequences.

But it would be nice to boost krill growth, to help feed the whales.

kassy

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Re: Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR)
« Reply #76 on: November 19, 2021, 04:44:24 PM »
Next, any waste from the animals belong to the fields that grew their fodder, and if anywhere they should be returned there.

The same case can be made for fish. We take out whole fish but usually put the remains on land somewhere. Maybe we should let the fishery fleet bring those back to the sea. They visit more relevant places then cargo vessels.

Seems a better idea then polluting busy shipping lanes which are usually close to land were there is already an ongoing nitrification problem due to runoff from agriculture and human poop flushing out to the seas.

Straight up seeding with iron is complicated. It boosts one area at the expanse of another down the flow. The cool thing whales do is recycling nutrients were they are directly useful. This ecoservice is a bit beyond our scope to mimic.



 
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Re: Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR)
« Reply #77 on: November 19, 2021, 05:12:05 PM »
I doesn't look like E-Coli would be a big problem for ocean life. For workers it could be of course, but manure is handled constantly by farmers on land, so I don't think that would be a big problem either if handled with care.

Our rivers are dumping shitloads of the stuff anyway...

Quote
Abstract
We investigated separate and simultaneous effect of temperature, salinity and solar radiation, as well as bacterial strain and origin on Escherichia coli (E. coli) survival in seawater in experimental conditions.

https://www.intechopen.com/chapters/54599
Quote
With the prolonged exposure, particularly in the presence of solar radiation, E. coli cells are irreversibly inactivated and they die.

I understand the resistance to large scale farming, but the fact is that it's happening, and manure can be a big problem to get rid of. Using too much on farmland pollutes our rivers, so the ocean may be the best place to dump it. And preferably far off the coast, in the death zones where there's a lack of nutrients blown in from the land, and away from busy shipping lanes of course...

Watched this video last night, and it had some good facts in it. We don't only need iron, nitrogen is also necessary it seems. And phosphorous of course...

Land poop may be a good idea. Fill a container, put it on a ship, and dump it in a controlled manner...

« Last Edit: November 19, 2021, 05:51:55 PM by Freegrass »
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kassy

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Re: Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR)
« Reply #78 on: November 19, 2021, 09:09:55 PM »
The two environments are quite different so there is no proof cow poop might work. The mix of bad stuff vs good stuff in it might be very wrong. 

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Freegrass

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Re: Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR)
« Reply #79 on: November 19, 2021, 09:51:15 PM »
The two environments are quite different so there is no proof cow poop might work. The mix of bad stuff vs good stuff in it might be very wrong.
The two environments meet constantly when rivers flow into the ocean. Estuaries are among the most productive environments on earth. The biggest problem I know of is too many nutrients. This could cause a depletion of oxygen. That's why it's important not to dump too much in one place.

Without a doubt a lot of research would need to be done. I think it's even illegal to dump things in the ocean without permission.

Environmental Implications of Excess Fertilizer and Manure on Water Quality

https://www.ag.ndsu.edu/publications/environment-natural-resources/environmental-implications-of-excess-fertilizer-and-manure-on-water-quality

When manure or commercial fertilizers enter surface water, the nutrients they release stimulate microorganism growth. The growth and reproduction of microorganisms reduce the dissolved oxygen content of the water body.

Without sufficient dissolved oxygen in surface water, fish and other aquatic species suffocate. The resulting dead fish and other aquatic species degrade the water quality and cause unpleasant odors.

Quote
Ammonia Toxicity
Ammonia-contaminated runoff from fresh manure application sites is toxic to aquatic life. At high levels, ammonia in surface water will kill fish. Fish are relatively sensitive to ammonia in water. Concentrations as low as 0.02 parts per million (ppm) may be lethal. Surface water that manure impairs also may experience changes in species diversity because of ammonia toxicity.
« Last Edit: November 19, 2021, 09:58:13 PM by Freegrass »
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Re: Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR)
« Reply #80 on: December 07, 2021, 04:51:19 AM »
Can all scientists on this forum please stop looking at the ice melting now?!

Its time to work out some solutions, or we won't make it...

We've got one year to the next COP!
What are we gonna do?
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kassy

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Re: Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR)
« Reply #81 on: December 07, 2021, 10:07:46 AM »
Can all scientists on this forum please stop looking at the ice melting now?!

Its time to work out some solutions, or we won't make it...

We've got one year to the next COP!
What are we gonna do?

We know what needs to be done but no one wants too do it. The big FF producers want to keep on producing and were we have plans they need to be better coordinated and accelerated (like in the EU).

We do not lack scientific solutions we lack political will.
Nothing will change that by next year.
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Freegrass

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Re: Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR)
« Reply #82 on: December 07, 2021, 10:19:31 AM »
Can all scientists on this forum please stop looking at the ice melting now?!

Its time to work out some solutions, or we won't make it...

We've got one year to the next COP!
What are we gonna do?

We know what needs to be done but no one wants too do it. The big FF producers want to keep on producing and were we have plans they need to be better coordinated and accelerated (like in the EU).

We do not lack scientific solutions we lack political will.
Nothing will change that by next year.
I refuse to think that way... There's always something we can do...
We just need to be smart about it...
90% of the world is religious, but somehow "love thy neighbour" became "fuck thy neighbours", if they don't agree with your point of view.

WTF happened?

oren

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Re: Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR)
« Reply #83 on: December 08, 2021, 11:42:20 PM »
Yes, political will is missing. We have existing and quite economical technical solutions to some of the key issues, these should be enough for the first decade. Finding more future solutions and ideas is nice but the rate of deployment of existing solutions is what matters for now, and it is severely lacking.

Florifulgurator

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Re: Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR)
« Reply #84 on: December 09, 2021, 02:46:50 AM »
We should seriously look into carbon sequesteation NOW. Not in 10 years. I said that already more than a decade ago.

The major solution I have in mind is neither much technology nor does it excite them economists: Carbon negative agriculture plus forestry, boostered with biochar.

But for the rocket scientist muscle car fetishist I also had a tinkering suggestion: The carbon negative (biochar producing) turboelectric hyper hybrid car powered by wood pellets. Output to be given to your local farmer.
https://www.azimuthproject.org/azimuth/show/Experiments+in+biochar#woodgas_hybrid_upgrade_pack_for_electric_vehicles

Meanwhile methinks whale poop is also a great idea.
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Freegrass

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Re: Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR)
« Reply #85 on: December 09, 2021, 09:55:24 AM »
Volcanic fertilization of the oceans drove severe mass extinction

Scientists have discovered that two intense spells of volcanic activity triggered a period of global cooling and falling oxygen levels in the oceans, which caused one of the most severe mass extinctions in Earth history - the 'Late Ordovician Mass Extinction', 450 million years ago.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/12/211202113215.htm

Scientists at the University of Southampton have discovered that two intense periods of volcanism triggered a period of global cooling and falling oxygen levels in the oceans, which caused one of the most severe mass extinctions in Earth history.

The researchers, working with colleagues at the University of Oldenburg, the University of Leeds and the University of Plymouth, studied the effects of volcanic ash and lava on ocean chemistry during a period of extreme environmental change around 450 million years ago. Their findings are published in the journal Nature Geoscience.

This period brought about intense planetary cooling, which culminated in a glaciation and the major 'Late Ordovician Mass Extinction'. This extinction led to the loss of about 85% of species dwelling in the oceans, reshaping the course of evolution of life on Earth.

"It's been suggested that global cooling was driven by an increase in phosphorus input to the oceans" says Dr Jack Longman, lead author of the study based at the University of Oldenburg, and previously a postdoctoral researcher at Southampton. "Phosphorus is one of the key elements of life, determining the pace at which tiny aquatic organisms like algae can use photosynthesis to convert carbon dioxide (CO2) into organic matter." These organisms eventually settle to the seabed and are buried, ultimately reducing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which then causes cooling.

"The unresolved puzzle is why glaciation and extinction occurred in two distinct phases at this time, separated by about 10 million years," states Dr Tom Gernon, Associate Professor at the University of Southampton and co-author of the study. "That requires some mechanism to pulse the supply of phosphorus, which is hard to explain."

The team identified that two exceptionally large pulses of volcanic activity across the globe, occurring in parts of present-day North America and South China, coincided very closely with the two peaks in glaciation and extinction. "But intense bursts of volcanism are more typically linked to massive CO2 release, which should drive global warming, so another process must be responsible for sudden cooling events," explains Dr Gernon.

This prompted the team to consider whether a secondary process -- natural breakdown or 'weathering' of the volcanic material -- may have provided the surge in phosphorus need to explain the glaciations.

"When volcanic material is deposited in the oceans it undergoes rapid and profound chemical alteration, including release of phosphorus, effectively fertilizing the oceans," states co-author Professor Martin Palmer from the University of Southampton. "So, it is seemed viable hypothesis and certainly one worth testing."

"This led our team to study volcanic ash layers in much younger marine sediments to compare their phosphorus contents before and after they were modified by interactions with seawater" said Dr Hayley Manners, a lecturer in Organic Chemistry at the University of Plymouth. Equipped with this information, the team were better placed to understand the potential geochemical impact of extensive volcanic layers from enormous eruptions during the Ordovician.

"This prompted us to develop a global biogeochemical model to understand the knock-on effects on the carbon cycle of rapidly adding a surge of phosphorus leached from volcanic deposits into the ocean," says Dr Benjamin Mills, Associate Professor at the University of Leeds and co-author on the study.

The team discovered that widespread blankets of volcanic material laid down on the seafloor during the Ordovician Period would have released sufficient phosphorus into the ocean to drive a chain of events, including climatic cooling, glaciation, widespread reduction in ocean oxygen levels, and mass extinction.

Whilst it might be tempting to think that seeding the oceans with phosphorus may help solve the current climate crisis, the scientists caution that this may have more damaging consequences. "Excess nutrient runoff from sources like agricultural fertilisers is a major cause of marine eutrophication -- where algae grow rapidly and then decay, consuming oxygen and causing substantial damage to ecosystems at the present day," cautions Dr Mills.

The scientists conclude that whilst on short timescales massive volcanic eruptions can warm the climate via CO2 emissions, equally they can drive global cooling on multimillion-year timescales. "Our study may prompt reinvestigations of other mass extinctions during Earth history," concludes Dr Longman.
90% of the world is religious, but somehow "love thy neighbour" became "fuck thy neighbours", if they don't agree with your point of view.

WTF happened?

kassy

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Re: Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR)
« Reply #86 on: December 09, 2021, 05:44:21 PM »
That article is not really related to carbon sequestration?
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Freegrass

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Re: Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR)
« Reply #87 on: December 21, 2021, 07:50:22 PM »
Most CO2 from Australia’s megafires has been offset by algal blooms

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2289885-most-co2-from-australias-megafires-has-been-offset-by-algal-blooms/

Most of the carbon dioxide released by Australia’s extreme wildfires of 2019-2020 has already been sucked out of the atmosphere by giant ocean algal blooms that were seeded by the nutrient-rich ash, a surprising new study suggests – though it is unclear how long this carbon capture will last.

Australia experienced its worst wildfires on record between November 2019 and January 2020. More than 70,000 square kilometres of bushland – an area the size of the Republic of Ireland – burned to the ground.

As the vegetation combusted, about 715 million tonnes of carbon dioxide were released into the atmosphere – roughly equivalent to the entire annual emissions of Germany. This led to fears that the fires would be a major contributor to global warming.

However, new research suggests that approximately 80 per cent of this carbon dioxide has been absorbed by ocean algal blooms that began growing when iron-rich ash from the fires rained down into the water.

Ash contains iron that can promote growth of microscopic marine algae called phytoplankton, says study author Richard Matear at CSIRO, Australia’s national science research body. As phytoplankton grow, they capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere through the process of photosynthesis.

While analysing data from satellites and floating measurement stations, Matear and his colleagues found that two large phytoplankton colonies – known as algal blooms – grew in regions where ash from the wildfires drifted out to sea. One was to the south of Australia and the other was thousands of kilometres east in the Pacific Ocean.

Based on the rate of growth of the algal blooms and the length of time they existed – about three months – the researchers were able to estimate how much carbon dioxide they removed from the atmosphere.


Location of algal blooms caused by wildfires

The two blooms together exceeded the area of Australia. But because they were in the open ocean, they didn’t look like the thick carpets of algae that can grow in coastal regions and harm fish and other creatures, says Matear. “The concentration of phytoplankton is relatively low because the water is deep and cold and well-mixed,” he says.

Since phytoplankton sit at the bottom of the marine food chain, their rapid growth may have boosted other marine life in these areas, but this hasn’t yet been studied, says Matear.

Wildfires used to be considered carbon neutral because the carbon dioxide they released was recaptured through photosynthesis when burnt vegetation grew back.

But as climate change increases the frequency and intensity of wildfires, scientists are worried that vegetation regrowth won’t be enough to offset the carbon emissions of wildfires.

The latest study suggests that marine algal blooms may be another tool that nature can use to capture wildfire emissions, says Pep Canadell at CSIRO, who wasn’t involved in the research. “It shows a very nice connection between the land and the ocean and how the system tries to balance things out,” he says.

However, one important consideration is how long this carbon capture is likely to last, says Canadell. Research shows that when algal blooms die, some carbon is transported to the deep ocean, but the rest can re-enter the atmosphere, and what proportion this happens to is unclear. “We don’t know if this is 50 per cent or 20 per cent or what so we need longer term research to find out,” he says.
90% of the world is religious, but somehow "love thy neighbour" became "fuck thy neighbours", if they don't agree with your point of view.

WTF happened?

gerontocrat

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Re: Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR)
« Reply #88 on: January 18, 2022, 05:42:56 PM »
No a silver bullet but.......

https://www.nationalgeographic.co.uk/environment-and-conservation/2021/12/could-crushed-rocks-absorb-enough-carbon-to-curb-global-warming
Quote
Could crushed rocks absorb enough carbon to curb global warming?

A little-examined form of geoengineering takes what rocks normally do—lock up carbon—and spreads it through the oceans.


Before sunrise in a quiet village in Gran Canaria, an island off the coast of northwest Africa, a team of scientists shuffles along the port’s wooden boardwalk toward a row of nine containers floating in the ocean.

“Hurry up, it’s going to get light soon,” says one bleary-eyed researcher to another, as they submerge a hefty, cube-shaped device for measuring the activity of bioluminescent organisms into one container. “That will affect our readings.”

The thermoplastic polyurethane “mesocosms,” filled with 8,000 litres of Canarian seawater mixed with varying amounts of limestone—a greyish, carbonate rock with high levels of alkaline—were part of the world’s first scientific field experiment with ocean alkalinity enhancement; research was completed in October. Many scientists hope that this little-examined process has the potential to turn the tide against climate change.

The goal of  ocean alkalinity enhancement is to accelerate the carbon-absorbing weathering of rock, which naturally occurs as rainfall washes over land into waterways and eventually the ocean. Similar action happens through the gradual erosion of coastlines through wave action. “It’s continuously happening,” says Ulf Riebesell, a marine biologist at GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research in Kiel, Germany, who is leading the EU-funded team of 35 researchers. “The rock reacts with water, and during that reaction takes up CO2 from the atmosphere. The question is, can we significantly speed up that natural process? That’s what we’re simulating.”

“It’s a voyage into the unknown,” says Riebesell. “There’s so much we don’t yet know. But what’s certain is that alkalinity enhancement has enormous potential. And we need to test it now, because we’re running out of time.”

Eye-opening potential
In theory, the natural process could be accelerated by depositing large amounts of pulverised silicate or carbonate rocks into the sea. Riebesell estimates that, while natural weathering sequesters one gigaton of CO2 per year, if enhanced weathering were scaled up massively, something in the ballpark of 100 gigatons of CO2 could be sequestered every year. Given that manmade CO2 emissions are 36 gigatons per year, the potential is eye opening. By stabilising alkalinity levels, the process could at the same time help protect coral reefs against acidification. However, there are multiple causes for caution and concern.

While on paper the initial chemical process is straightforward, almost every other factor is unknown. How will biodiversity be impacted? Where should these minerals be deployed? Could there be unintended consequences? How much will it cost? Who decides if it should go ahead? And crucially, as Riebesell and his colleagues are testing, will it even work?

During the 33-day experiment, researchers studied samples from the mesocosms, which contained seawater that ranged from naturally occurring levels of alkalinity up to double that amount. About 45 parameters—from pH levels to plankton health—were analysed at multiple laboratories at the Oceanic Platform of the Canary Islands and the Technology Park of the University of Las Palmas. A key objective of the ongoing research is to see whether adding alkaline minerals to seawater in this quantity will produce calcium carbonate, which would in turn release some CO2 and lessen the gains.

“Calcification might increase in response to alkalinity enhancement, which would lower the amount of CO2 being sequestered,” says Riebesell, whose team is studying the data in Germany. “But if the calcium stays in the water, and the alkalinity doesn’t lower back down, the CO2 stays in the ocean for good. That’s our hope.”

Rosalind Rickaby, a professor of biogeochemistry at Oxford University’s Department of Earth Sciences has for the past two years conducted lab research into whether calcification occurs, when alkalinity is increased, in cultures of single-celled organisms called coccolithophores and foraminifera. She’s seen positive signs.

“It’s small scale, so it’s difficult to come to a conclusion,” she says. “But the cells are being detrimentally affected by the alkalinity, which is a good thing. It’s evidence that by adding alkaline, you reduce CO2 levels, which the cells need for photosynthesis.”

Next year, in search of further clues, Riebesell’s team plans to carry out a follow-up study in the temperate and highly-productive waters of Norway, which stand in contrast to the waters of the Canary islands, which have little aquatic plant growth. The Norway test in May will involve much larger—50,000-litre—mesocosms, and so will provide insight into how more complex organisms such as fish are affected.

A herculean task
Even if the process does work, implementing ocean alkalinity enhancement to all of the oceans could prove a herculean task. Mining, milling, and transporting minerals would require an industry equivalent to coal mining, since sequestering one ton of CO2 would require between one and five tons of mineral, according to Riebsell. Then there’s the question of distribution: minerals could be deposited by ships, mixed with coastal sand, or even sprinkled on agricultural land. Each method would have various challenges, costs, and timescales.

“It’s feasible because there are enough minerals,” he says. “But it would be a huge undertaking. And should we even continue mining like this?”

The Gran Canaria test used limestone, which, although plentiful, doesn’t easily dissolve in water and must be mixed with concentrated CO2 solution, adding another level of logistics. Quicklime, a byproduct of the cement industry, dissolves easily and is abundant but requires burning of limestone to be produced, making it less effective at cutting emissions. The most promising option is olivine, a greenish silicate-based mineral that, pound for pound, sequesters twice as much CO2 as quicklime and four times as limestone. Olivine will be used in the Norway research.

A separate research program undertaken by California-based company Project Vesta also plans to deploy olivine in four field trials across the coastal waters of California, New York, India, and the northern Caribbean in the next few years. “It’s found all over the world, even on Hawaiian beaches,” says CEO Tom Green. “Its mining doesn’t require any chemicals, you just have to extract it, and you could use the world’s coal mining infrastructure.”

According to Project Vesta, just three tons of CO2 would be emitted in the process of ocean alkalinity enhancement using olivine for every 100 tons removed. Green says that makes it much more viable on a large scale than direct air capture—using machines to suck CO2 out of the atmosphere—since the latter requires a lot of energy. “We want to harness the power of oceans,” he says.

Are oceans a solution?
Oceans, which already soak up 90 percent of the planet’s excess heat and a quarter of CO2 emissions, are increasingly seen as the frontier of climate solutions, according to Jean-Pierre Gattuso, a professor at the Villefranche Oceanography Laboratory in Nice, France. In contrast, land-based efforts such as reforestation only remove a relatively small amount of CO2 from the atmosphere, can only replace what’s already been emitted, and are unlikely to produce permanent gains, since forests can be logged or burned.

“Our emissions reductions simply aren’t fast enough,” says Gatusso, who in January published a policy briefing in Frontiers in Climate on ocean-based technologies such as alkalinity enhancement, iron fertilisation (using iron to stimulate phytoplankton growth), and artificial upwelling (circulating nutrient-rich deep waters upward). “So what’s needed are technologies that remove CO2 from the air. In that regard, the ocean quite obviously has the most potential.”

Turning that potential into reality is another matter, and experts say there are tough criteria that must be met: verifiability, although impact can take years to prove; scalability, which would need to be enormous; economic feasibility, due to the required scale; permanence, which is almost impossible to guarantee; accountability, even though a governance structure doesn’t exist; and, of course, environmental soundness.

“Alkalinity enhancement has the greatest potential [of these ocean-based solutions],” says Riebsell. “But more research has to be performed. We need years to reach a point where we understand the risks to some extent. We will never fully understand those risks.”

Time is running out
Some critics fear large-scale manipulation of the Earth’s natural systems will lead to unpredictable, damaging outcomes, like the introduction of European rabbits to Australia in the 19th century, which devastated native species as the population exploded from just 13 to 200 million in about half a century. Others warn that if the idea of a quick fix—allowing the world to return to business as usual—is promoted, it will discourage climate action and regalvanise the fossil fuel industry.

For Riebesell, who has studied the impacts of climate change on oceans—from rapid warming to acidification and de-oxygenation—for over a decade, those concerns are valid, but as time runs out for humanity to avert an irreversible climate disaster, he sees little choice.

Ten years down the line we will have to make a decision about what we employ to reach our climate targets,” he says. “So we need to know which of these options are really scalable, the risks, the costs, and the impacts. Avoiding this research will not make the problem go away. We must find a solution.”
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Freegrass

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Re: Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR)
« Reply #89 on: January 22, 2022, 01:09:12 AM »
And so it begins...  :)
Thanks for that Gerontocrat!

The question we have to ask ourselves is what would be worse? A runaway climate disaster that would destroy all the coral reefs? Or minor problems that can save the coral reefs?
I would go for the latter... Although I have my doubts that these problems would exist. Volcanic eruptions do this all the time...

And the fear that this would prolong the use of fossil fuels, is hogwash. Green energy is already cheaper right now. In 10 years from now fossil fuels won't make any sense anymore.
90% of the world is religious, but somehow "love thy neighbour" became "fuck thy neighbours", if they don't agree with your point of view.

WTF happened?

Freegrass

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Re: Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR)
« Reply #90 on: April 01, 2022, 02:55:23 AM »
Moving the dial on ocean-based CO2 removal

Two reports published in the US look seriously at the practicalities and responsibilities of altering the ocean to tackle the climate crisis

https://chinadialogueocean.net/en/climate/moving-the-dial-on-ocean-based-co2-removal/

It’s now widely acknowledged that to avoid catastrophic climate change we’ll need to physically remove CO2 from the atmosphere. Yet the technologies needed to do this, collectively known as carbon dioxide removal (CDR), remain nascent, underfunded and largely unregulated. Two recent developments aim to clear a path for testing these controversial methods in the ocean.

In the first week of December 2021, the US National Academies of Science, Technology and Medicine (NASEM) released a much-awaited report evaluating the feasibility and cost of alternative ocean-based CDR approaches. The same week, the international non-profit Aspen Institute released a separate report, calling for a code of conduct for such approaches.

While previous reports, including another by NASEM in 2018, have evaluated options for climate intervention, NASEM’s new analysis, funded by US non-profit ClimateWorks, takes a detailed look at ocean-based techniques exclusively, focusing on the six deemed most promising. The options range from restoring kelp forests to electrifying seawater in a bid to enhance the ocean’s natural capacity for carbon storage.

“This is a holistic picture of the current state of knowledge about these different techniques and what we need to do before we can make a decision about whether to deploy them,” says Romany Webb, an author on both reports and an expert in environmental law at Columbia Law School in New York.

Meanwhile, the Aspen report gives specific guidance to practitioners – be they scientists or entrepreneurs – interested in ocean CDR, and calls for a code of conduct that is environmentally and socially responsible.

Calling the reports “nicely complementary”, NASEM author David Koweek says the Aspen report helps to fill in the blanks on what the ethical, responsible CDR research that NASEM calls for actually looks like in practice. While neither report advocates for climate intervention, taken together they are seen as a gear-shift in the conversation around altering the ocean to tackle the climate crisis.

The ocean as a carbon sink

To keep global warming at or below 1.5C – above which will see the disappearance of coral reefs and low-lying island nations, as well as other adverse outcomes – emissions need to be dramatically reduced by 2030. By mid-century onwards, as much as 1 billion tonnes of carbon will need to be removed from the atmosphere each year. These are the conclusions of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in a landmark 2018 analysis. Despite this knowledge, there has been little done since to develop carbon dioxide removal at scale. On land, proposals to plant trees and develop bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) are seen as competing with global food security and possibly worsening deforestation.

There are fewer territorial conflicts in the ocean, which already sequesters billions of tonnes of CO2 each year, an amount equivalent to around 25% of our annual emissions. In theory, encouraging the ocean to absorb just a little more carbon, and store it over long timescales, could avert the worst of climate change. “These recent reports help to rectify the very land-centric focus that has previously prevailed,” says Greg Rau, an ocean chemist and co-founder of CDR start-up Planetary Hydrogen, who was not involved in either report.

But ocean-based interventions have also been contentious. Early attempts by entrepreneurs – most famously Russ George in 2007 and 2012 – to seed the ocean with iron and to sell the sequestered carbon as tradable credits prompted an international outcry and led to calls (most notably by the UN’s Convention on Biological Diversity and the International Maritime Organization) for a moratorium on commercial ocean fertilisation. This stalled ocean CDR research for at least a decade, during which there was little funding for research and few real-world trials. With greenhouse gas emissions continuing to rise, however, interest has resurfaced and experts are keen that, this time, it’s done responsibly.

While there are numerous options for enhancing the ocean’s carbon storage capabilities, the NASEM report focuses on those thought the most promising. These are: seeding the ocean with nutrients such as iron to boost plankton growth; altering the ocean’s physical transport processes in order to boost nutrients at the surface and to bring carbon to depth; cultivating seaweed at large scale; restoring ocean ecosystems such as kelp forests; adding large volumes of carbon-absorbing minerals such as lime to the ocean; and using electricity to boost the ocean’s alkalinity and carbon uptake.

Putting a price on reality

For ocean CDR to take off, practitioners will first need to test these approaches in the lab and in the field. The NASEM report assigns costs to each of these stages. The largest cost is for demonstration-scale field trials, which, if existing studies are any indication, will total about US$25 million per year for 10 years. In addition, some approaches will need to be tested in the lab to optimise methods, costing around $18 million per year. The report also estimates computer modelling costs at around $5 million per year and research into governance and issues such as equity at around $4 million per year. A separate report, published in 2020 by the Energy Futures Initiative, suggested a total US budget of $2.5 billion in research development and demonstration for CDR.

“These two independent assessments give some sense that we are in the billion-dollar range over a decade, probably,” says Koweek. Any government funding for CDR would compete with other strategies to tackle the climate crisis including decarbonisation and adaptation. In comparison, the entire US budget to tackle climate change in 2021 was $22 billion.

Beyond finding funding for R&D, practitioners will have other hurdles to overcome. One of the major issues with any form of ocean intervention is environmental liability: who is responsible for negative impacts – should they occur – in international waters? And what about transboundary effects, where jurisdictional claims overlap or where a technology deployed in national waters has impacts downstream? Iron fertilisation, for instance, may impact the biological productivity at the tests site, but also elsewhere; in changing the amount or type of plankton in the water, it could spread harmful blooms or introduce non-native species to other nations’ waters.

“Any negative effects that go beyond the authorising nation’s ocean boundaries, or that is derived from CDR conducted in international waters, have international implications. But then so do the benefits,” says Rau. “Both national and international governance are required.”

One issue for commercial practitioners who want to sell credits from their CDR scheme, just as Russ George did, is verifying any claims they make about carbon sequestration. One of the codes that the Aspen Institute recommends is that any project must estimate the amount of CO2 that might be removed, as well as how that might be independently verified. “We can create a framework that ensures effective public consultation and public input into the design of projects. How are we actually going to pay for them?” asks Webb. “Are we going to have some sort of carbon crediting framework? What does that mean for monitoring and verification of carbon removal?” she says. “There’s a lot of work to do on the science side and on what supports we need for these related issues.”

Another concern is inclusivity. Climate intervention, as a field of research, is almost exclusively the domain of wealthy nations, with research typically carried out by older, white men. In formulating their guidelines, the Aspen Institute solicited the views of a broad range of stakeholders. “There was a strong effort made… to include diverse voices, bringing in a wider range of country representatives and representatives from different fields – the fisheries industry, for example, could be really heavily impacted by some of these approaches,” says Webb.

Given that 300 million people worldwide depend on fisheries for their living, of which 90% are artisanal fisheries in poor countries, “the governance of doing anything like this at scale should be globally inclusive,” says Andrew Norton, director of the London-based International Institute for Environment and Development. Norton also points out that some of the lower-tech options, such as kelp restoration, could provide employment for poor communities in developing countries. The question, he says, is not only “what’s the hit?”, but also “what’s the potential?”

Kerryn Brent, a climate governance expert at the University of Tasmania, says: “What the code attempts to do here is to strongly encourage researchers, be they scientists or practitioners, to think beyond just the questions of science and technology… to issues of social impacts and the need for evidence.”

For the time being, none of these technologies are ready for deployment, just for further investigation. “Some of the techniques are further advanced than others. But none are ready for prime time yet,” says Webb. “It’s another path for hope,” says Koweek. “We need to be able to find ways to think and to know that the future will be better than the present. And these reports are one small part of that.”
90% of the world is religious, but somehow "love thy neighbour" became "fuck thy neighbours", if they don't agree with your point of view.

WTF happened?

Freegrass

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Re: Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR)
« Reply #91 on: April 01, 2022, 03:08:54 AM »
Can fake whale poo experiment net Australian scientists a share of Elon Musk’s US$100m climate prize?

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/dec/24/can-fake-whale-poo-experiment-net-australian-scientists-a-share-of-elon-musks-us100m-climate-prize

Scientists and engineers have pumped 300 litres of simulated whale poo into the ocean off Sydney as part of efforts to snag a share of Elon Musk’s US$100m prize for capturing and storing carbon.

The team, known as WhaleX, carried out its first open-ocean experiment on Sunday about eight kilometres off Port Botany in New South Wales after gaining clearance from the federal government.

The 12-strong team are racing to carry out a follow-up experiment using up to 2000 litres of the simulated poo – a mix of nitrogen, phosphorus and trace elements – before the end of January.

Tesla and SpaceX founder Musk announced in February he was funding a US$100m competition through the XPrize Foundation to find methods that could safely capture and store carbon dioxide at a scale of a billion tonnes or more a year.

Musk said at the time the competition was not “theoretical” but was looking for teams that could “build real systems that can make a measurable impact and scale to a gigaton level.”

WhaleX registered for the four-year competition and will send a report before February hoping to be selected for one of up to 15 “milestone” prizes of U$1m each.

Whale faeces is known as an ocean fertiliser and a food for phytoplankton. When phytoplankton grow and multiply, they absorb carbon. When they die, they sink to the ocean floor taking much of the carbon with them.

Dr Edwina Tanner, a climate scientist who is leading the WhaleX project, and colleagues said they targeted a 225sq km area off Port Botany where their previous water sampling had shown a deficiency in nutrients.

From a small boat, the team aerated the formulation with a gel made from seaweed and mixed that with a dye so they could see from a drone how it dispersed.

The formulation, manufactured as an aqua food by a fertiliser company in regional New South Wales, was formulated to match the deficiencies in nutrients in the area where the trial was carried out.

The amount released was about the equivalent of a Humpback whale doing two poos, Tanner said. To be successful, she said the aqua food mix needs to stay in the top 20 to 30m for at least a day.

“It was incredible. The food stayed buoyant and well within the trial zone location,” Tanner said.

The team thinks the experiment, which was to test the method used to disperse the formulation and to see how buoyant it was, will have sequestered about two tonnes of carbon dioxide.

Tanner said “a lot of science” would need to be done to make sure the approach is not damaging the marine environment, but she said as it closely mimicked a process that has been happening for millions of years “we’re confident we can do this safely.”

A further trial is being planned before the end of January and will see up to 2000 litres dispersed from a larger boat in the same area of ocean.

If scaled up, WhaleX would fall into a broad category of carbon reduction efforts known as negative emissions technologies – an approach where more CO2 is sequestered than is used during the process.

WhaleX is looking along whale migration routes for suitable sites for further trials, including near Morocco, Oman and Kenya. An area off Western Australia over the north-west shelf has also been selected.

Managing director of Ocean Nourishment Corporation (ONC) and one of the partners in the project, John Ridley, said work would continue even if it was not successful in the XPrize competition.

He said the process was currently costing about $25 to $30 to sequester a tonne of carbon dioxide.

He said investors were being attracted to it because of the potential scale and, he said, it could store carbon securely and for longer than some land-based methods. ONC was actively speaking with more than 10 investor groups from Europe and Australia.

He said the world’s climate crisis was pushing the planet close to “several dangerous tipping points”.

“We need emissions reductions and carbon removal and we have to escalate both of those really fast, almost at military scale.”

This month the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine released a report summarising the potential risks and benefits of a range of supposed ocean-based methods to remove and store CO2.

The report said there was medium to high confidence that adding nutrients to the ocean to promote phytoplankton growth could be “effective and scalable”.

There was less confidence about the potential environmental risks of the method on a very large scale, but the report said “there are deep-ocean impacts and concern for undesirable geochemical and ecological consequences.”

The report added: “No matter what the impact of [ocean fertilisation] on the deep sea, it should be noted that what deliberate and large-scale [ocean fertilisation] would do is essentially speed up the natural processes that are already happening, under any current scenario of enhanced CO2 in the atmosphere.”

A department of agriculture, water and the environment spokesperson said it was aware of the WhaleX project and the department had confirmed the experiment could go ahead without the need for any permit.

A statement said the WhaleX trials were “considered to be genuine scientific research” under the London Protocol that covers dumping at sea as it was considered a “placement” of materials.

The statement said: “For future trials involving larger volumes of material, the department has advised WhaleX that additional information would be required for the department to determine whether the activity could still be defined as ‘genuine scientific research’ under the London protocol.”

“If the department considers that future trials are of a scale that cannot be considered to be genuine scientific research, the activity would be considered as dumping under the sea dumping Act.”

The spokesperson said the government did not have any policies on ocean fertilisation that would regulate future large scale activities.

But the spokesperson also said: “However, work is under way with reference to Australia’s obligations under the London protocol to consider ocean fertilisation as a future regulatory area.”

In November, teams of Australian university students at Monash University, the University of Sydney and the University of Tasmania each won a $250,000 prize in the competition for proposed carbon projects. Judges were looking for student projects that would make them “competitive applicants” in the overall competition.

After four years XPrize judges will pick one U$50m grand prize winner and a U$30m prize to go be shared among up to three runners up.
90% of the world is religious, but somehow "love thy neighbour" became "fuck thy neighbours", if they don't agree with your point of view.

WTF happened?

Freegrass

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Re: Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR)
« Reply #92 on: April 01, 2022, 03:13:20 AM »
To Combat Climate Change, Researchers Want to Pull Carbon Dioxide From the Ocean and Turn It Into Rock

Running seawater through an ocean carbon capture plant could chemically convert carbon dioxide to limestone on a grand scale

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/combat-climate-change-researchers-want-to-pull-carbon-dioxide-from-ocean-and-turn-it-into-rock-180977903/

A new method for combatting climate change feels like a bit of modern-day alchemy: scientists have figured out how to take carbon dioxide out of the ocean and turn it into harmless rock.

For every tonne of carbon dioxide we pump into the air, roughly a quarter of it gets absorbed by the ocean like a giant, watery sponge. All of this excess carbon dioxide is acidifying the water and threatening organisms, such as those with calcium carbonate shells, that are sensitive to the change.

To avert this fate, carbon emissions need to drop—fast. But many scientists also believe that active carbon capture—deliberately pulling carbon dioxide out of the environment—will be a necessary step to help curb, and potentially even reverse, the rise in emissions responsible for countless environmental impacts. However, capturing enough carbon to make a difference is a massive task, one that has so far proved challenging and expensive.

“You’re talking about removing some 10 to 20 gigatonnes of [carbon dioxide] per year, starting from 2050, probably for the next century,” says Gaurav Sant, a civil and environmental engineering professor and director of the Institute for Carbon Management at the University of California, Los Angeles.

To date, most efforts to capture carbon have focused on direct air capture—trying to pull the gas out of the atmosphere. But to make carbon capture more efficient, Sant’s research team is turning to the ocean for help.

Oceans and other large bodies of water can hold more than 150 times more carbon dioxide than the air. Sant and his colleagues’ idea is that if you can remove carbon from the ocean, the water will absorb more from the atmosphere to maintain a state of equilibrium. Now, they’re proposing an innovative way of getting carbon out of the ocean—by turning it into rock.

Seawater contains a lot of calcium and magnesium. When the calcium or magnesium ions combine with carbon dioxide, they form calcite or magnesite. The chemical reaction is similar to how many marine organisms build their shells. But by introducing a third ingredient, electricity, Sant and his team can make that reaction happen quickly, efficiently and, perhaps eventually, on a large scale. Putting this all together, the scientists have proposed a new technology that will run seawater through an electrically charged mesh, using electrolysis to trigger the chemical reactions needed to form carbonate rocks.

So far, the team has built a 1.5-by-1.5-meter prototype that they can flood with simulated seawater. They are collecting data on the amount of carbon dioxide that can be removed over various periods of time, analyzing the process efficiency and the amount of energy required. Aside from simply demonstrating the concept, they are using the model to determine what operational variables might impact the process.

“This is the formative step towards building larger systems and proving the process at a larger scale,” says Sant.

The process is a bit like a water treatment plant, but instead of taking in water and sifting out impurities, the proposed plant would use electricity to force carbon, calcium, and magnesium to react and become solids. The “purified” water would then be returned to the ocean.

“You are actually returning water that is slightly more alkaline than what you put in,” says Alan Hatton, a chemical engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who has worked on several unrelated carbon capture technologies. This more alkaline water could help mitigate the effects of ocean acidification in the immediate vicinity, he adds.

As well as pulling carbon out of seawater, the chemical reaction has a useful byproduct: hydrogen gas. By producing and selling the hydrogen, a plant could help offset its costs. Sant says that even if a proposed ocean carbon capture plant is powered by natural gas instead of renewable energy, the whole process could still be carbon negative because of this hydrogen gas byproduct.

While ocean carbon capture is a newer technology, a few other groups are also experimenting with it. Some of their projects, such as one by Halifax, Nova Scotia–based startup Planetary Hydrogen, are showing promise.

Like Sant’s team, Planetary Hydrogen is extracting carbon from seawater, trapping it in a solid, and indirectly making hydrogen gas. Rather than using electrolysis, however, they’re doing it with hydroxide. Hydroxide is an alkaline material that speeds up what is otherwise a natural process—rocks reacting with carbon dioxide and water to form alkaline forms of carbon—which would typically take place over geological timescales, says Greg Rau, the company’s lead researcher. While neither team is past the early stages of development, the two proposals seem to have a few benefits over trying to capture carbon out of the air.

Carbon dioxide is much less concentrated in the atmosphere than in the ocean, so direct air capture efforts typically need to be quite large to have a significant impact. Neither Hatton nor Sant believes ocean capture plants will require such real estate. And, according to Sant, his process will require half the energy cost of direct air capture and it won’t need a storage reservoir for the carbon dioxide.

There are some drawbacks to Sant’s proposal, though, that could make it difficult for the technology to progress. The biggest seems to be the amount of solids the process would create once it’s operating at a scale meaningful enough to affect climate change.

Removing 10 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide from the ocean, for instance, would yield 20 gigatonnes of carbonates—at a minimum, says Sant. He does have an idea for what to do with all these solids, though.

For the better half of a decade, Sant’s research has focused on streamlining a process of combining carbon dioxide from factory flue gas streams with calcium hydroxide to form concrete. “Because [my carbon dioxide sequestration method] effectively produces carbon neutral limestone, now you’ve got the ability to produce carbon neutral cement, and use the limestone solids for construction,” says Sant.

A lot of the solids produced by an ocean capture plant could be used that way, but there will still be tonnes left that would likely go back into the ocean, which could upset local marine ecosystems.

Hatton says it’s worth comparing the proposed plant’s potential impacts to the effects of a desalination plant on the surrounding ocean environment. While the main issue with desalination is the build-up of brine, the carbonate deposits from Sant’s plant could create other problems such as smothering plant life and significantly altering seafloor habitats. Just operating the plant, Hatton says, could also have physical effects on the behavior of the water near the facility, such as disturbing flow patterns.

Leaving the surrounding environment as undisturbed as possible is a top priority for Sant, although he recognizes that as this kind of technology becomes more prevalent there exists the potential for some unintended, as of yet unknown, consequences.

Once the team is able to demonstrate the technology can work on a large scale and is economically viable, they hope to eventually see hundreds if not thousands of plants built around the world. Ultimately, Sant hopes their work will open people’s minds to what carbon capture is capable of.
« Last Edit: April 01, 2022, 03:32:32 AM by Freegrass »
90% of the world is religious, but somehow "love thy neighbour" became "fuck thy neighbours", if they don't agree with your point of view.

WTF happened?

kassy

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Re: Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR)
« Reply #93 on: April 01, 2022, 02:48:29 PM »
Thread renamed by request.
Þetta minnismerki er til vitnis um að við vitum hvað er að gerast og hvað þarf að gera. Aðeins þú veist hvort við gerðum eitthvað.

Freegrass

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Re: Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR)
« Reply #94 on: April 01, 2022, 05:44:57 PM »
Thanks Kassy, this title is a little shorter and encompasses all the ocean sequestration techniques.

After reading that latest new technique, with electricity, my mind went into overdrive again. They have a problem with dumping all those carbonates into the ocean, because you can't dump them all in the same location. So the ideal solution would be a free floating platform with a windturbine on it - to produce the electricity they need - and then use the hydrogen that's produced to power the engines that can steer that platform into the right currents and winds so it won't end up beaching somewhere? 🤔

Then ships would come and dock with the platform to load up on CO2 neutral cement and excess hydrogen, which would then help to pay for the entire operation? 🤔

Maybe this is something for the Ocean Cleanup crew? Clean up the carbon too? 🤔


Anyway... happy to see more and more people looking at the ocean to clean up our carbon pollution. I always said that this is where we need to find the solution, because it covers 70% of our planet...
90% of the world is religious, but somehow "love thy neighbour" became "fuck thy neighbours", if they don't agree with your point of view.

WTF happened?

etienne

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Re: Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR)
« Reply #95 on: April 02, 2022, 02:23:43 PM »
The idea to combine it with the ocean cleanup platform is great. But I would use PV panels to avoid moving parts and to have a size compatible with the ocean clean up platform.
I would put the electrodes directly into the sea to avoid pumping, since hydrogen should go up, it should be possible to capture it.
At night, it could work with the energy of the hydrogen.
Since the ocean cleanup platform is a moving platform, maybe the carbonates would not be an issue.

kassy

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Re: Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR)
« Reply #96 on: April 02, 2022, 06:29:51 PM »
But again it produces hydrogen which depletes ozone (see Green hydrogen thread reply #669).
I prefer simple things that can not go wrong so reduce output and start spreading olivine. We can do more later but all is moot without really big FF reductions.
Þetta minnismerki er til vitnis um að við vitum hvað er að gerast og hvað þarf að gera. Aðeins þú veist hvort við gerðum eitthvað.

Freegrass

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Re: Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR)
« Reply #97 on: April 02, 2022, 07:17:34 PM »
But again it produces hydrogen which depletes ozone (see Green hydrogen thread reply #669).
I prefer simple things that can not go wrong so reduce output and start spreading olivine. We can do more later but all is moot without really big FF reductions.
Hydrogen doesn't deplete the ozon from what I read about about it. It just slows down the restoration of the ozone layer.

Read this paper from 2018. I haven't had the time to read the whole thing yet, that's why I hadn't posted it yet. I will do so now so others can do so if they want.

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/760538/Hydrogen_atmospheric_impact_report.pdf

Quote
There are a limited number of studies in the peer-reviewed literature of the impact of
hydrogen emissions on the stratospheric ozone layer with which to make more than a
cursory assessment. Having said that, the few available studies all point to the impact of
large potential hydrogen leakages on the stratospheric ozone layer as being small. There
appears to be no conflict between the studies reviewed here on this point.

This review and assessment takes the view that the stratospheric ozone layer impacts of
hydrogen cannot currently be quantified and but are likely to be small.


In view of the limited nature of the quantification of the potential impacts of hydrogen on
the stratospheric ozone layer, it is important that new studies are commissioned using a
range of state-of-the-science stratospheric models, using up-to-date information where new
model input data are available.
90% of the world is religious, but somehow "love thy neighbour" became "fuck thy neighbours", if they don't agree with your point of view.

WTF happened?

Freegrass

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Re: Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR)
« Reply #98 on: April 04, 2022, 03:55:48 AM »
Why using the oceans to suck up CO2 might not be as easy as hoped
New studies suggest simply adding minerals or growing seaweed might be limited or costly ways of removing carbon dioxide.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/03/30/1048434/why-using-the-oceans-to-suck-up-co2-might-not-be-as-easy-as-hoped/

The world’s oceans are amazing carbon sponges. They already capture a quarter of human-produced carbon dioxide when surface waters react with the greenhouse gas in the air or marine organisms gobble it up as they grow.

Their effectiveness has prompted growing hopes that we could somehow accelerate those natural processes to boost the amount the oceans draw down, helping to slow climate change.

One idea gaining attention and investments is to add minerals that could lock up carbon dissolved in the oceans.

But a study last week in the journal Frontiers in Climate suggests there may be limitations to one promising version of the strategy, which relies on a volcanic mineral known as olivine. In theory, adding ground up olivine should increase the seawater’s alkalinity, which helps convert carbon in the water into a stable form and allows the oceans to take up more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Researchers at the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research in Germany recently dissolved fine-grained sand made up primarily of olivine in artificial seawater. Over a period of 134 days, they found, the water’s alkalinity actually decreased. This and other factors reduced the amount of carbon removed by a factor of five compared with olivine’s theoretical potential, according to the researchers.

Other research groups have also recently found that dissolving olivine in filtered and artificial seawater produced less of an increase in alkalinity than expected, the study noted. Still another recent preprint paper found similarly confounding results for other minerals that had been expected to boost ocean alkalinity.

Meanwhile, several additional studies recently raised doubts about a different ocean-based approach: growing seaweed and sinking it to suck up and store away carbon.

Finding viable ways to pull down greenhouse gases will be vital in the coming decades. A National Academies report in December on ocean-based carbon removal noted that the world may need to suck up an additional 10 billion tons annually by midcentury to limit warming to 2 ˚C.

Boosting ocean alkalinity could theoretically remove tens of billions of tons each year on its own, according to the research group Ocean Visions. But the National Academies panel noted that it will require extracting, grinding, and shipping rocks on roughly similar scales, all of which would have substantial environmental consequences as well.

The new studies haven’t delivered the final, definitive word on whether any of these methods will be feasible ways of helping to reach those carbon removal targets.

But Michael Fuhr, one of the authors of the olivine study and a doctoral student at GEOMAR, says their findings do suggest that this approach is “not as easy as expected until now.” He adds that it may work well only in certain places where the ocean chemistry is right. That could include areas where the waters are low in salinity but rich with organic sediments, which will increase acidity.

Fuhr and others say that additional lab experiments and fieldwork will be needed to determine how well this method works in the real world, what the ideal conditions are, or whether other materials are more promising.

Maria-Elena Vorrath, a researcher at the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research, said in an email that the study shows the olivine process doesn’t work the way we assumed. But she stressed that the mineral remains “one of the most permanent and promising methods nature gives us.”

“We just need to understand and read the manual,” she wrote, noting that water mixing and other variables in the actual oceans could alter results seen in the lab.

One company, Project Vesta, has been planning to conduct a field trial in the Caribbean for several years, which would entail spreading olivine sand along beaches or in shallow waters. It’s also been carrying out lab experiments, toxicology testing, and planning for field trials on the east coast of the US, says Tom Green, the company’s chief executive officer.

Project Vesta began as a nonprofit but is now what's known as a public benefits corporation, which means it has the twin goals of making a profit and achieving social good. The hope is to eventually sell carbon credits for any greenhouse gas removed with olivine, Green says.

A handful of additional startups are working on other ways of boosting ocean alkalinity, through approaches including electrochemical processes. Those include Ebb Carbon, Planetary Technologies, and Seachange, all of which have pre-sold tons of carbon removal they expect to achieve to companies including Shopify and Stripe.

Meanwhile, the National Academies panel called for setting up a $125 million US research program to study whether we could develop ways to scale up or accelerate these processes, identify environmental side effects, and figure out how to reliably measure and verify whether carbon removal is occurring.

“Ocean geochemistry is fraught with complexity,” says Wil Burns, a visiting professor at Northwestern University who focuses on carbon removal. “We’re going to need to do a lot of iterations of this research, under very different conditions and different scales, to draw conclusions that we could do these at large scales and monetize them.”

By James Temple, March 30, 2022
90% of the world is religious, but somehow "love thy neighbour" became "fuck thy neighbours", if they don't agree with your point of view.

WTF happened?

Freegrass

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Re: Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR)
« Reply #99 on: August 21, 2022, 03:37:14 PM »
Here we go. I finally did it. I've just send an email to these 3 people of the Heidelberg Cement Group. They claim to be one of the largest cement producing groups in the world. Let's hope I get an answer, and if I do, I'll post it here.

Quote
HeidelbergCement is one of the world's largest manufacturers of building materials and has been contributing to progress for 150 years. Our products are used in the construction of houses, traffic routes, commercial and industrial facilities.

At the center of actions lies the responsibility for the environment. We are pioneers on the road to carbon neutrality and have set ourselves the goal of producing climate-neutral concrete by 2050.

Together with our customers and partners, we drive innovation and work on building material for the future. So that the world can always build on us.
https://www.heidelbergcement.com/en/company

The email is in Netherlandic because these people are Belgian. Wish me luck!


Geachte heren,

Volgens het internet zijn jullie de grootste cementproducenten van de Benelux, en dus is mijn vraag aan jullie of jullie al eens bekeken hebben of het financieel haalbaar zou zijn om groene cement te produceren van zeewater en elektriciteit? Volgens mij is dit de beste manier om een gigantische hoeveelheid CO2 te onttrekken uit onze atmosfeer. En de "bijproducten" zijn groene waterstof en kalksteen...

Ik zou alles kunnen uitleggen hier, maar misschien hebt u er al van gehoord, en dan verkwist ik uw tijd. Maar als u er nog nooit van gehoord had, dan kan dit artikel hopelijk een aanzet zijn voor jullie om er verder onderzoek naar te doen.

U zou groene cement en groene waterstof kunnen maken, EN carbon credits kunnen krijgen om al de CO2 te verwijderen. Volgens mij een zeer interessant idee. Hopelijk kan u er wat mee. Laat je me iets weten of dit een realistisch idee is? Ik heb er veel hoop in, maar ik ben geen cementproducent voor wie dit economisch haalbaar moet zijn...

Met vriendelijk groeten,
Danny....
90% of the world is religious, but somehow "love thy neighbour" became "fuck thy neighbours", if they don't agree with your point of view.

WTF happened?