Seaweed Farming For CO2 Capture Would Take Up Too Much of the Ocean - Slashdot

Posted by BeauHD

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  Looking at it simply from "relying on ONE solution" for the whole kit and kaboodle is likely NEVER going to take care of the whole thing.

  However, used IN CONJUNCTION with other methods, it could realistically get us there.

  So betting or burning the farm on a single point of failure is cataclysmically moronic.

  • There is a reason behind this single-measure-thinking and it is not what you think. This is actually not about doing anything, but about creating the illusion that we still have good options so the usual assholes do not have to change anything. Basically stepping on the accelerator while the cliff is already in sight. Now, for creating an illusion that there are still nice and cozy measures that do not require any drastic lifestyle changes or the like, pushing simplistic, single solutions works much better. The people this is targeted at cannot do any fact-checking anyways and have no understanding how things actually work.

    And with that, the stream of "magic" fake solutions that we got subjected to the past few years suddenly makes a lot of sense.

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    • The really sad part is that most people's lives could get better if we addressed climate change.

      In the UK, most homes are poorly insulated. One of the easiest and fastest ways we could reduce out emissions is to simply insulate every building properly. The up-front cost is what prevents most people from doing so. The cost would be a lot lower if the government had teams doing every house, road by road.

      Renewable energy is incredibly cheap, at a time when energy prices are rising due to fossil fuels and over-budget, delayed nuclear builds. If the UK went all in on renewable energy, by 2030 we could have really cheap and plentiful electricity. Government borrowing is still relatively cheap, even with the moron tax applied, and borrowing to invest in things that will boost the economy is both sensible and responsible.

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        until a volcano erupts, or the jet stream shifts, or whatever else. Than you'll be an international charity case. USA will be expected to foot the bill like always.

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        LOL. If that was remotely true, you greenies wouldn't be screaming for more subsidies, and for more taxes and bans on everyone else, you'd just be calmly investing and reaping the benefits.

    • • Re: Magical solutions

        Thanks for taking your time to lay this all out.

        That's indeed exactly what our outlook is, no matter how much money Big Oil throws at marketing and lobbying campaigns. All their greenwashing politics and words are not going to fix anything. On the countrary: decennia of that is what got us into this mess.

        One doesn't argue nor negotiate with the laws of nature.

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      Extending your analogy.

      We are accelerating with the cliff in sight, but we're trying to build a bridge off the end of the cliff. Problem is, it doesn't go anywhere...

      And the bridge might just be a mirage anyway.

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      But this does not apply to you - you're special.

      The simple reality is everyone attitude is someone else should make the sacrifices. The problem is at the very top. The problem is John Kerry and ilk like him who continue to go climate focused events that everyone who isn't an idiot can see have a massive carbon footprint themselves. The problem is banning short haul flights but excluding private jets.. You don't see Al Gore closing off any part of his unnecessarily large home and not cooling the disused por

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        We need to act to limit the damage of climate change, rather than get side-tracked by other people's hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is not an excuse to do nothing. There were some huge hypocrites among abolitionists and suffragists, but very few people would now advocate for slavery or for taking the vote away from women.

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    Yes. This. Please mod parent up.
    
    Biomass as CO2 sequestration makes sense but it's a temporary measure with an upper limit, as the article has pointed out. However, the planet is biologically/ecologically degraded. This means that there are large areas of land & sea that are missing biomass & it would benefit the planet's biodiversity, ecology, & climate to replenish it. What I'm talking about is "re-wilding", i.e. restoring the complex ecosystems of flora & fauna to large areas of what is

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      BTW, some kelp farming could be used to reduce methane emissions from cattle (from burps & farts). Apparently, kelp supplements in their feed is very effective.

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    If it's 10 more expensive than some other alternative why use it at all? Research wide, develop narrow.

• This is like saying "Corn farming as a staple food would be impractical if we grew it in flowerpots."

  Suppose we seed and supply nutrient to floating, netting weed species in the Pacific gyre and its Atlantic counterpart, the Sargasso Sea? Grow a few million square kilometers of this stuff in two places where the currents keep plants and nutrients together for long enough for it to absorb a few billions of tonnes of carbon. When the seaweed runs out of nutrient it dies and sinks to the bottom at abyssal dept

  • To cover a million square kilometers of ocean we would need to create a seaweed garden 25 kilometers wide that spanned the entire circumference of the earth. (25 km x 40k km). If you planted seaweed from Alaska to the southern tip of South America (10k km) you would need a garden 100 km wide stretching into the ocean the entire distance.

    If you planted the entire Gulf of Mexico in seaweed you would barely reach one million square kilometers and then you would need to set some areas aside for shipping, oil exploration (or not), recreation, and leave enough areas open to sunlight to not kill all the sea life in the gulf.

    It's a nice idea on paper but one million square kilometers is a HUGE area to set aside, plant, and manage. The better idea is to cut down on producing CO2, not try to come up with huge projects so we can continue to generate at our current pace.

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      I'm wondering how you propose to "plant" this seaweed? Do you know how it grows & what conditions it needs?

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    Nutrients disperse a bit too readily, which is why ocean farming has very low yields. Without additional containment, you're stuck with what's in the water by nature.

    In already nutrient dense waters you can of course seed limiting nutrients to trigger blooms more efficiently, but those waters have other inhabitants which would be affected.

• Seaweed is delicious. Why not just grow a bunch, harvest it and eat it? I imagine it'd work fine for feeding various forms of livestock as well.

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    Don't forget that seaweed can be used effectively as a fertilizer too.

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      Right? Don't sequester it in the sea, sequester it in me!
  • Because co2 is a byproduct of human metabolism. So the carbon captured by growing the seaweed will be released immedialy if you eat it. In order to capture carbon, the seaweed needs to be deliberately sunk and kept in deep waters. My understanding is that even under these conditions it will eventually decompose and release the co2, but only after hundreds of years. So essentially we would be just buying time.

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      What a massive failure to understand basic biology and common sense. Increasing human consumption of seaweed won't increase the number of humans and thus will have ZERO impact on biological CO2 production. Eating seaweed produces SHIT, which still contains the majority of the carbon you first put in your mouth. That then goes in the toilet and makes its way back into the environment as sequestered carbon. In fact, if the carbon footprint of seaweed production is lower than that of whatever you would have

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        This bizarre claim is easily disproved. The median dry weight of one days production of fecal matter is 29 g. [nih.gov] If the average daily food consumption is 1800 kCal the dry weight of organic matter you are consuming is about 400 g (carbohydrate and protein, most of the calorie intake, is 4 kCal/g, fat is 8.8 kCal/g). About 93% of the carbon intake was metabolized into CO2.

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    I think you just release the CO2 if you eat it, but apart from dumping it in the deep ocean in the hope we'll have better ideas in a couple of hundred years, there is a way to make it into (co2-stable) fertiliser. There's a small UK company doing exactly that: https://www.einnews.com/pr_new... [einnews.com]

    The jist of it is that you take the seaweed, magically turn it into biochar and then just spread that out on your fields ready to grow crops. I don't think it entirely replaces a typical fertiliser, but it at least red

• Where are the cost efficiency numbers to show how much it costs to remove one ton of CO2? How does it compare with other methods? Who cares if this method alone can remove all the CO2 we need to remove. This argument sounds like "bicycles are a lost cause because they don't meet all of humanity transportation needs".

• "a million square kilometers of ocean would need to be farmed in order to remove a billion tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere over the course of a year"

  We burn about 40 billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere every year. One billion tons less would be nice, but clearly we are not going to be able to extract anywhere near enough to do what's necessary. We have to seriously reduce emissions ASAP.

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    Agreed. Here is the breakdown of the US's CO2 emissions - https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissio... [epa.gov]
    
    Here's those numbers in text:

    • Transportation - 28%
    • Electric Power - 25%
    • Industry - 23%
    • Commercial and Residential - 13%
    • Agriculture - 10%

    To address each in turn. We're stuck with the highways & cities as they stand now, tearing everything down and rebuilding it overnight for better efficiency won't happen. It's a good long term goal. In the meantime we need to help people reduce their travel-based CO2 emission

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      All good suggestions. The primary obstacle in government for implementing all of that is the GOP. The IRA had to be pushed through over their unanimous objections, and we aren't likely to see any other significant legislation along those lines for years. I don't think its going to be enough.

• We urgently need to produce much less CO2, nothing else will cut it. Yes, that means quite a bit less wealth. Get over it. The alternatives are much, much, much worse.

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    I have to ask: have you noticed how seamlessly the fossil fuel shills transitioned from, "Global Warming is a lie" to, "It's too late to stop Global Warming, we'll just have to adapt"?

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      They are fighting a retreating battle and they have had time to prepare for about 50 years (when _they_ knew reliably what was coming and decided to let it happen in order to increase their profits). Of course, they have a long-term, media strategy so that is no surprise at all.

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        It is worse than that. They didn't just prepare for 50 years, they actively funded organizations [environmen...ogress.org] to delay practical solutions that have existed since 50 years. We could be much more prepared for climate change had we not been hampered by people like amimojo or you, who fought and still fight against nuclear industry since 50 years.

        _You_ knew reliably what was coming, and decided to let it happen because of your ideological distrust of nuclear. You (as you are german), decided to keep extracting and burning

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          The nuclear reactors of 30 or even 20 years ago were garbage nobody should ever have built. Meanwhile solar has been viable since the late seventies, when panels could repay their energy investment in 7 years or less and would last 20 years or more.

          You're too dumb to know you're describing yourself. The same companies profit from building fossil fuel plants and from building nuclear plants — the so-called "power companies".

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            The nuclear reactors of 30 or even 20 years ago were garbage nobody should ever have built.

            Any arguments to support such a bold claim?

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            Those reactors provided low-cost energy to France and its neighboring countries (net exporter for 50 years, except for 2022), and allowed France to be one of the first country to emit less than 50g CO2eq/kWh since the 70s. Meanwhile, Germany has been one of the main emitter in Europe, since the 70s. Even today, with all its renewables and 500 billions of investment, they emit ~1/4th of the CO2 of the European union. Thanks to the coal and lignite mining and burning they keep doing.

            You should stop spreading

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      Yeah. In stark contrast, one can't help but admire the staunch consistency of alarmists: for about 30 years they have been steadfastly saying that "Arctic is going to be ice-free in 15 years" and not budged one iota!
      
      Now go ahead, do the obligatory "-1 I hate how you're right" mod.

      • Re: Stop looking for magic solutions

        On the countrary. Over 30y there have been predictions with error margings, ranging from "optimistic" to "worst case scenario."

        In hindsight, time on time again we've managed to overshoot the worst case predictions. It's safe to extrapolate and to say that our current predictions, as always, are severe underestimations of the actual situation.

        How's the weather, by the way?

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    Does it though? Is it less wealthy to build solar panels and buy EVs? Less wealthy to develop electric trucks for transport and shift to passenger train rather than plane? Less wealthy to build plants producing SAF, hydrogen electrolyers, shutting down SMRs, switching to arc smeltering, build newer more efficient power plants?

    We can do a lot to reduce our emissions without reducing wealth. Quite the opposite, several countries realise wealth will be owned by those who demonstrate an ability to not change li

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      Exactly. We need to get it out of our heads that laws of physics may apply. Let's put our heads in the sand a bit more.

      Just as an example: thinking that the solution to transportation is to replace all ICE by EVs is just stupid. There won't be enough materials for that (not in the timeframe that matters), there won't be enough electricity for that (we would need to produce 2-3x more electricity if we were to electrify our fossil fuels usages)...
      What will and is happening is less people traveling and people

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        Don't underestimate human capacity for production, it's what got us into this mess afterall. Shifting production to all EV/fuel-cell in 10 years will cause some suffering and a lot of new strip mines but technologically/econimally it's just a question of resource allocation. We could do it without starving, just requires high levels of mobilization.

        Finding a political way is the hard part.

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    "Global passenger traffic is forecast to reach 92% (or 8.4 billion passengers) of 2019 levels in 2023.

    The baseline projections for global passenger traffic indicate that the industry will recover to 2019 levels by 2024, driven mainly by domestic travel."

    https://aci.aero/2023/02/22/wh... [aci.aero]

    Looks like next to no one is interested in giving up air travel, everyone else is supposed to cut back, not them. And since commercial air travel is barely 100 years old, we know it is an unnecessary luxury. Therefore it shou

• Can we just farm diatom instead? These won't interfere with ships.

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    What? Of course not! That'd actually *work*, and we can't have that!

• Im kind of half expecting our attempts to correct global warming to end up making it worse than if we'd just left it.

• A million square kilometers is 1000 kilometers square. That's not huge compared to an ocean. To do that whole thing, 13 billion tonnes, would take a bit more than 3000 kilometers by 4000 kilometers. That would fit in any of the major oceans quite well.

  And a huge seaweed farm would provide homes and breeding grounds for lots of fish, and shipping lanes are just gaps in whatever structure you make.

  The impossible thing is actually constructing millions of square kilometers of anything. But space has never been

• I'll likely get marked as troll, but here goes... Ah, those simple solutions that aren't even remotely solutions.

  Last Sunday, an actual educated man told me that we should just ban CO2, and pull it all out of the atmosphere so it would stop over heating the planet.

  He refused to believe me when I told him that CO2 is a critical part of our existence on earth. Without it, the average temperature of the whole planet would be below freezing.

  Strange thing is I see that sort of thinking all over the place.

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    They cant possibly be well educated if they think some amount of CO2 isnt a natural part of the atmosphere. Every single person who took junior high science class had a lesson on the fact that CO2 makes up part of our atmosphere and that plants use that as "food". You're talking to an absurdly ignorant person on the subject of anything regarding our atmosphere and then making extrapolations based on that.

    The rest of your post is just defeatist "we dont know how to solve this problem properly now and at 100

• You must be sacrifice to appease HER.

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    The real situation is that if we ignore Her needs long enough, she does the executions.

• There's a 3,000 square miles "dead zone" in the Gulf of Mexico where agricultural runoff has caused so much algae growth that the dead and decaying plant material has hoovered up all the available oxygen.

  Instead of growing *more* seaweed, maybe we could capture that waste biomatter and sequester that instead? I like the idea of helping two different problems simultaneously.

• I'm just curious.

  Would culinary seaweeds that people already eat and that food processors already use suck CO2 out of the air as well?

  Even if it is not enough, perhaps promoting culinary seaweeds can HELP solve more than one problem at a time.

• The gravest danger of global warming comes from those who aim to stop it.