Project To Suck Carbon Out of Sea Begins in UK (bbc.com) 70
A ground-breaking project to suck carbon out of the sea has started operating on England's south coast. From a report: The small pilot scheme, known as SeaCURE, is funded by the UK government as part of its search for technologies that fight climate change. [...] These projects, known as carbon capture, usually focus either on capturing emissions at source or pulling them from the air. What makes SeaCure interesting is that it is testing whether it might be more efficient to pull planet-warming carbon from the sea, since it is present in greater concentrations in water than in the air.
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But they'll learn something important:
That this idea doesn't work.
Re:if u suck the carbon out of the sea (Score:5, Insightful)
Nobody is proposing to suck all the carbon out of the sea.
The sea has been significantly acidified by absorbing carbon dioxide we've added to the atmosphere, the object would be to try to return it somewhat closer to where it started.
https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/... [noaa.gov]
Re:if u suck the carbon out of the sea (Score:4, Interesting)
I wish I had mod points for this. My son-in-law works in this stuff and he's been frustrated about resistance to carbon-reduction efforts. The specific one he mentioned a while back I believe involved adding a (possibly calcium-containing) base to let a precipitate fall onto the sea bed sequestering the carbon. People were worried about sticking basic chemicals into the sea without realizing that reducing acidity itself was good in addition to carbon sequestration - that they're actually related.
Re:if u suck the carbon out of the sea (Score:4, Interesting)
When I saw the Beeb article yesterday, I noted - no mention of how it generates the high-pH additive ; no mention of the energy budget (which is, I grant, part of the point of having a development project).
I didn't think it was worth the effort of submitting. But obviously someone did.
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When you only have two brain cells to rub together, you can only hold two bits of data at a time. That means that everything has to be all or nothing, always black or white, with no possible shades of gray in between.
They literally cannot conceive of only sucking part of the carbon out of the oceans.
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why do you think it will kill seaweed?
Re: if u suck the carbon out of the sea (Score:2)
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He could pull a plastic bag over his head and tie it off if he's in a hurry.
Also necessary at net zero for synthetic fuel (Score:2)
For the (nuclear+)hydrocarbon lovers, synthetic hydrocarbons at net zero will also require direct carbon capture (crops are far too inefficient, even for existing aviation, not enough arable land).
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This approach is far too resource intensive though, needing both acid and base and losing both in the process for something which needs to process billions of tons of seawater is not going to work. They need to find some way to acidify/alkalize the water using just electricity, without any significant loss of materials in the process.
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Seaweed.
Lots of ocean area.
Seaweed captures ocean CO2.
(As far as "arable land" goes, there is plenty of land available. All we need to do is stop growing industrial animal feed which uses 75% of arable land... rewild!)
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Seaweed wants to be free.
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Most of the ocean is extremely nutrient poor and unlike land it's much harder to keep fertilizer put.
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Forget the "rewild". We've already destroyed most of the ecosystems. What you mean in a world of over 5 billion humans is making vegetarianism compulsory.
To be honest, I gave up believing humans would accept that back when the world's population was under 6 billion. I just don't think that humans have the capability to act towards the common good.
I don't have any real doubt what the "great filter" - the differ
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I agree. We are past the point of saving the climate.
People do not have the will to change their diets and I doubt that they ever will. There is no hope for humanity.
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The US Navy has been working on synthesized hydrocarbon fuels, using nuclear fission as the means to power the process, for over a decade. https://www.zmescience.com/res... [zmescience.com]
This research apparently hasn't stopped. https://www.businesswire.com/n... [businesswire.com]
If there's a carbon capture process then something needs to pay for it. Selling hydrocarbon fuels that's been derived from CO2 out of the air is one way to pay for the process. That's not sequestering the carbon but it does close the loop on the fuel so it's no
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Fuel cost is a rounding error for the military, higher density trumps all. For civilian aviation the cost of synthetic hydrocarbons might be high enough it makes even liquid hydrogen look good.
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Fuel cost is a rounding error for the military, higher density trumps all.
Civilian operations don't care about energy density? Companies that move cargo get paid based on the tons moved, the miles they moved those tons, and how long it took to move those tons. If a semi truck has a 200 pound diesel tank replaced with a 2200 pound battery then that's one less ton that gets moved by that truck. Then consider downtime of a recharge on that battery versus time it takes to move 200 pounds of diesel fuel.
For civilian aviation the cost of synthetic hydrocarbons might be high enough it makes even liquid hydrogen look good.
Liquid hydrogen is so difficult to deal with that even rockets to space are mov
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Commercial aviation using hydrogen at net zero completely depends on the cost of the alternative.
Assuming there is still an advanced human civilisation at net zero. If we return to monkey we won't have aviation and AI probably won't care much for holiday trips.
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Civilian operations don't care about energy density?
The poster didn't say it did. But it isn't the overriding concern. At the end of the day, civilian aviation has to be affordable and profitable.
If high density fuels are too expensive, then they'll find cheaper fuel but as a consequence less cargo and make less money.
For a military, the fuel cost isn't really the biggest factor. The ability to secure a supply chain during war time of is high strategic importance. And the ability to meet the performance requirements for a military aircraft is of a high tacti
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Well, a lot of the carriers have nuclear reactors on board, and transporting jet fuel to changing remote locations is difficult.
For them it might make sense...if they could do it reasonably effectively. But you say they're still researching it. This seems to mean that it's a difficult problem. And their economics are not driven by fuel cost, but rather by fuel accessibility. (They could by 10 times the current going rate and it could still be a bargain.)
Basically, this is never going to be an efficient
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The difficulties the Navy has been facing with synthesized fuels has been largely political.
Democrats don't like nuclear power. Democrats don't like hydrocarbon fuels. Since Democrats had the Senate filibuster, White House veto, or both going back to at least before World War Part One, there was nothing happening in the federal government without some portion of the Democrats in government providing some approval. While the US Navy was showing considerable technological progress they didn't get funds to
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This guy has posted this several times before, but seems unable to realize exactly how costly this is, even if you power it with a nuclear reactor.
It is worth it if the only alternative is "lose the war" (or "get marooned on mars" as he often likes to say this will be used to make fuel on mars). Otherwise there are far better and cheaper ways to get hydrocarbons, even some carbon-neutral ones.
The UK certainly is a world leader... of sorts (Score:1, Insightful)
"Project To Suck Carbon Out of Sea Begins in UK (bbc.com)"
Where else would such an imbecilic and wasteful idea even be proposed?
And who else but the BBC would talk it up?
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It's just a small test project, funded by the UK government, a proof of concept. How exactly it will prove the concept, though, is left as an exercise to the reader.
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Love the reference to the BBC too. Probably a gammon that gets his two minutes of hate by watching GBN.
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Or, and just hear me out. You could read the article and possibly learn something?
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Re:The UK certainly is a world leader... of sorts (Score:4, Insightful)
It actually sounds reasonable if it can be made to work. They talk about potentially removing 14 billion tonnes of CO2 per year, which is significant. Global emissions are somewhere around 37 billion tonnes, for reference.
The process requires a lot of energy, but energy that's fine if we can get it cheaply enough, i.e. through renewables. It would be particularly good if the process could make use of energy when it is available, and shut down when it is not. Technologies like that will be key to providing constant, cheap energy for everyone.
At the rate we are going we will need to remove CO2 from the atmosphere or the oceans to keep climate change under control. It's not cheap and it's not easy, but it's worth researching and developing.
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Where else would such an imbecilic and wasteful idea even be proposed?
It has potential to be more efficient than DAC which is the alternative. But where else would it be proposed indeed. R&D in America is in the shitter, so these kinds of idea come up in places where governments are still interested in funding things rather than only interested in making sure there's no non-white people or women at universities.
And who else but the BBC would talk it up?
New Scientist, National Geographic, and the National Renewable Energy Laborator in America to name a few normal news sources. Beyond those these stories have been
A reasonable explanation of climate change (Score:1, Troll)
"Astrophysicist Professor Valentina Zharkova explains that instead of CO2, it is the Sun that drives the climate change and because of its decreasing activity we should be ready for a colder period".
https://www.freedom-research.o... [freedom-research.org]
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Unfortunately, large amounts of data on solar constant and the Earth's temperature shows that this is not true.
Among other things, changes in solar constant (if they occurred) would increase temperature at all altitudes. The greenhouse effect heats the lower atmosphere but cools the upper atmosphere. This is measured.
https://science.nasa.gov/earth... [nasa.gov]
https://enviroliteracy.org/how... [enviroliteracy.org]
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Well, it sort of does seem to be true over long enough periods of time. But we aren't talking about mere millenia here. (Even then there were enough variables that nobody's really sure. "Snowball Earth" happened, but it's not clear that that was due to a change in the solar constant rather than to huge amounts of fresh rock absorbing too much Carbon Dioxide. Or possibly it required both. At one point there were forests growing in Antarctica...so it must have been warmer then. But the land was distribu
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At one point there were forests growing in Antarctica...so it must have been warmer then. /FACEPALM
Yeah and at that time the rock that is now Antarctica: was at the equator.
How should there EVER grow forests at a pole? 3 month darkness, 6 month twilight, 3 month 24h sunshine ... Does it even rain?
Re:A reasonable explanation of climate change (Score:4, Informative)
Her paper was retracted. https://arstechnica.com/scienc... [arstechnica.com]
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But, according to that story, only one of the four authors agreed to the retraction. Despite mountains of evidence.
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Because, obviously, there can only be one possible cause for any given effect. It is simply impossible that climate change (which has, indeed, been going on for 4 billion years, and will continue until - literally - the heat death of the universe) could be driven by multiple causes!
And equally impossible for an astrophysicist to be full of crap on a science outside of her specialty, because she's far too narcissistic for that! If she was full of crap, then she couldn't be the center of attention!
(Plus, take
Still missing the point (Score:2)
And so, why didn't they use one of the source instead? From the coal plants it's 300x more.
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Using fossil-fuel power plants in general (gas, wood), they've spent decades developing the tech. It is doable. But nobody wants to pay the costs of running the direct-carbon-capture equipment, and no government wants to take the politic
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The idea is to remove CO2 even if we are no longer adding it.
Captura (Score:1)
There's an American company, Captura, that is doing that, except their process is built around using up abundant solar power and electrodialysis to create the acid/base. https://www.everybodyinthepool.com/items/episode-62-transcript%3A-draining-the-tub%3A-using-the-ocean-to-capture-carbon
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It doesn't matter *what* your source of energy is, the cost of extracting the CO2 from the atmosphere will always be more than the energy released in putting in into the air in the first place. Sometimes there are external reasons that can justify the excess cost, but it will never be suitable to widespread use until there is more energy available than there are other uses for. (Fat chance of that.)
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This is about preparing for the future. Until you get close to zero carbon emissions, it will almost always be better to use renewable energy to displace fossil fuels, not to pull carbon out of the environment. But we'll get there eventually, hopefully sooner rather than later, and our emissions then need to go negative in a big way. Once there are no more fossil fuels to displace, we need to keep adding renewable energy and using it for carbon capture. We need to develop the technology now so it will b
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No. The place to use renewable energy is the places where it's easiest to justify. This is not likely to be with a process to replace something relatively cheap with something much more expensive.
Once you're getting close to balance, then you consider the cases where it's difficult.
Doing it in the other order looks to me like an attempt to show the entire process is unreasonable. And is either quiet (research--good) or a PR move (vile).
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the cost of extracting [in money?] the CO2 from the atmosphere will always be more than the [cost in money? for that energy] energy released in putting in into the air in the first place.
Nope. There is no such rule of physics.
If you look at the money: you are most likely right. But the money is not the issue, the timeframe would be. The minimum which we would need is a process that removes an amount similar to what mankind is producing.
"""
There are approximately 2,422 operational coal power plants globally
Trees (Score:2)
Why don't they get it out of trees instead? That's how California does it every summer. Or even in the winter if you're in Malibu.
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1) Because this is either research or a scam...or both.
2) Because there can't be enough trees to hold all the excess CO2. (They're called fossil fuels for a reason.)
WRT point 2, if the entire land surface of the earth were covered with trees, that wouldn't be enough. You need to convert them back into carbon and bury them were they won't decompose. Do that a few times (for the entire land surface of the earth) and you'll be getting close. (Coal is a LOT denser in carbon than is wood.)
Why not focus on the obvious problems like plastic (Score:2)
About a million tons of plastics are being dumped into the oceans every year, and this material is suspected of damaging the ecosystem. Algae absorb CO and emit O quite efficiently; 60% to 70% of the Earth's oxygen is made this way. Another 10% to 20% or so comes from several huge rain forests, notably the Amazon.
We should focus on eliminating plastic and other potentially damaging substances from the ocean, and secondarily perhaps limit over-fishing that distorts the food chain.
Also, plant more trees. Ther
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the posting software eliminated the subscripts; that should read CO2 and O2 above. :D
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1) There can't be enough trees.
2) Planting a tree isn't sufficient. Most tree planting projects end up with lots of dead saplings. It needs to be the right kind of tree in the right environment. (N.B.: High infant mortality among trees is normal. Only carefully tended saplings can be expected to survive. Sometime examine how many seeds there are in a single pine cone...though that's not really a fair comparison, as most never reach the sapling stage.)
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Reforestation is a thing, at least in North America. Since the 1970s, the U.S. has planted millions of acres of new forest (see United Nations FAO and USDA Forest Service for data). The U.S. currently is planting about 60,000 acres of trees annually, plus another 130,000 acres of regeneration.
The people overseeing this work are forestry experts, so one can assume they are planting the correct trees for a locale, in the right concentrations and groupings.
The real problem is that Brazilians are chopping down
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In general they do not forget it.
They simply bury to much to eat in one winter.
And when spring comes, they do not like to eat half rotten nuts and stuff.
Most squirrels use a kind of formula, based on distances of trees and intersecting lines of view between the trees.
Hurray! (Score:2)
Ok, I thought the UK was having some hard times, but I'm glad to see that it actually has tons of money to fix the world's oceans.