Why not dump lots of Alka-Seltzer into the sea? (And other geo-engineering news.)
June 26, 2024 edition.
Plop, plop, fiz, fiz…
WHY NOT DUMP lots of Alka-Seltzer into the sea?
Or perhaps you prefer dumping dead plants into the deep ocean? These are two of the creative methods startups are using to store carbon in the ocean, write Amrith Ramkumar and Eric Niiler at The Wall Street Journal. And the ideas aren’t as crazy as they sound.
Vesta is the company mixing thousands of tons of sand with a mineral called olivine.
When the sand dissolves in water, the resulting chemical reactions absorb carbon.
It is not actually Alka-Seltzer, but it is essentially an antacid. (The above drawing is my illustration, not theirs.)
Vesta is currently in exploratory mode.
Startups hope to get the oceans to store at least 1 million metric tons more carbon than they otherwise would. That would be a huge win for the carbon-removal industry and 4X the industry’s total results so far.
But it’s only the same as one year’s emissions from 200,000 cars. That’s far, far short of a solution to carbon pollution.
HOW MUCH ARE companies paying to have carbon removed from the atmosphere? It turns out the price can vary by a factor of 14, depending on how it’s done.
The direct carbon removal price ranges from $1,402 per metric ton for direct ocean removal to only $111 per ton by biomass removal. See the chart on Statista.com.
MICHAEL GREENSTONE EXPLAINS why the University of Chicago created its Climate Systems Engineering initiative:
“We’re going to wish we had effective carbon dioxide removal technologies operating at scale, or we’re going to wish we knew how to modulate temperatures with various forms of geoengineering to prevent human suffering, and the University of Chicago” is “the perfect place to” study that.
Geoengineering “Inevitable”
FOUR RESEARCHERS AT The Jet Propulsion Laboratory believe large-scale geoengineering interventions appears inevitable, but admit we don’t yet know enough to safely deploy it at scale. They published their study on Research Square.
A TEAM LEAD by UC San Diego oceanographer Jessica Wan found that “marine cloud brightening can be very effective for the US West Coast if done now.”
The bad news is that the window of opportunity may close by mid-century. The hotter world in 2050 will make it ineffective. By that time, cloud brightening in California could even “cause heatwaves in Europe.”
They published their study in Nature.
Funding Secured……
THE PRITZKER INNOVATION Fund, Simons Foundation, Quadrature Climate Foundation, and SilverLining promised to keep spending their cash on cloud brightening and stratospheric aerosol injection. That’s despite the town of Alameda blocking a cloud brightening equipment test and Harvard’s cancelling of its solar geoengineering research.
In this quote, president David Spergel of the Simons Foundation, summed up their resolve admirably:
"We want to have the basic science in place so that society can evaluate the possible benefits and costs of stratospheric aerosol injection or marine cloud brightening."
An Inspirational Send-Off
TO SEND YOU off on the rest of the week, all of us at The Plan B Post want to share with you this inspirational quote. I think you’ll get where I’m going with this…
“Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.”
— Helen Keller