CO2 capture by pumping surface acidity to the deep ocean | Hacker News Reader

CO2 capture by pumping surface acidity to the deep ocean

pubs.rsc.org

29 pointsmmettler27 comments

I like it. Ocean acidity is a problem in itself that needs to be addressed.

The cost is above that of capturing carbon at the source of emissions but below direct air capture schemes by a lot.

Isn't this just going to make the surface more alkaline by pumping the acid (co2 rich) surface layer deeper down?

Then the surface can in turn absorb more co2, but I think at the end of the day the ocean overall will have more dissolved co2 and it will become more acidic.

Am I misunderstanding something?

In my general understanding, most life in the ocean livs at surface level, and you probably don't actually hurt much down below. Corals for example only live at shallow depth and they suffer from the acidity.

The abstract claims that acidity will rise in a few hundred years. So an overall acidity rise would happen 300 years from now.

It sounds like one of those "let's buy time" solutions. I'm ok with those. It also sounds expensive, and someone has to show that moving so much water below won't produce more co2 than it would save.

You also have to stop emitting CO2. Without, it is pointless, because the surface will just absorb more and acidify again.

Become carbon neutral, not stop emitting CO2. I very much want to continue breathing.

Stop emitting excess CO2. Breathing will remain permissible, for the present.

Come climate catastrophe, many will stop breathing as it consumes more calories than they have access to.

It is a 'temporary' solution really, giving time for emissions reductions and other CO2 sequestration to take effect. What gets pumped down will be released eventually (50% gone after 2000 years). And there is an upper limit to how much can be stored (1500 GtC, or 150 GtC from the atmosphere by 2100 without hopefully creating other problems).

This is a "solve your living room burning problem by moving to the kitchen" solution

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_acidification

The living room is burning, regardless. Letting the smoke out so it doesn't asphyxiate the rest of the house is a good thing. There is so overwhelmingly more volume of water for the CO2 to disperse into, down deep, that it would not be noticeable.

Of course, you should stop making the problem worse at the surface, too, but the problem to be solved is that even when you stop emitting industrial CO2, the CO2 already emitted is still there, and remains for decades.

Desalinate and pump rising sea levels into terraforming desert regions of the planet.

Millions of acres of additional forest will do all the co2 capturing for us.

I'm sure there's absolutely NOTHING in the deep ocean that would mind the increase in acidity, after all, I've never seen anything down there, or looked very carefully.

If I have to choose between saving deep ocean tube worms (or whatever) and saving mankind... I'm not picking the tube worms.

If the ocean dies, so does mankind.

More nuclear power. Also, carbon.. I dunno exactly, but I feel confident that if you take a bunch of it and apply enough pressure, you get coal.. If you press harder it might even be useful for something besides burning and making a mess.. At least the density of diamond is higher than co2, I don't know how much room 34.81 billion metric tons of diamond takes up, but, maybe if we used if for buildings, bridges, pavement it'd not be too much of a hassle, I mean, we're using 4.4 billion tons of cement per year, so that'd leave us with only 30.81 billion tons of unused diamond.. but not having to produce the cement in the first place would offset it a bit.

Mankind will be fine. Only civilization will collapse, and thousands of species be driven to extinction. The oceans are big and old and can absorb much more than the surface.

The Lovecraftian Deep Old Ones might be unamused by the incursion, but might even welcome it. A little extra acidity along with an influx of oxygen might actually be popular.

Doing nothing is not doing nothing: the natural world near the surface is taking the brunt of carbonic acid contamination. For every creature at the bottom that experiences a change, a million at the top suffer today.

Cold water reefs would be destroyed, for example, and those are essential for fisheries in surface. They stand in the middle of the path.

They are talking about pumping the CO2 to 3000m. Cold water reefs are in somewhat shallower waters (39-1000+m).

There is a lot we don’t know about the deep ocean that could potentially be useful for our current problems. I’m sure there are billions of species of bacteria down there that survive in a much different environment than the surface that could potentially be used to fix things up here. My girlfriend is studying bacteria that live off of sulfur instead of oxygen. Imagine one that can be replicated super fast to eat plastic and put out O2. Who knows. We’ll never know if we kill them.

Hint: this won't kill them. Everything still eating sulfur and whatever has survived overwhelmingly greater shocks, over the eons.

'up to 150 GtC from the atmosphere by 2100 without excessive increase of local pH', so trying to avoid the increase in acidity. That is 10% of the claimed total capacity.

Because eff the deep ocean and whatever lives there, right?

Which, of course, is some kind of undiscovered kraken kaiju monster. :)

Or a ton of small organism that will die because last time ocean was that acidic down there was a billion years ago or sth.

And they'll decompose producing methane, raise to the surface and put climate change into overdrive.

Which would be worse than kaiju. :)

You don't seem to realize just how much water there is down there. They will not even notice a century's worth of surface carbon, but might welcome the infusion of oxygen that comes with it.

Surface production of H2 feedstocks will produce a huge surplus of oxygen, so we won't miss it.

I think the idea is that the acidity gets neutralized by the calcium carbonate deposits on the sea floor.

CO2, or CO₂ ?

Interesting.

The article does not use the Unicode subscript 2 character. It uses <sub>2</sub>. Since the HN post was certainly done by copying the text of the article title, the <sub> tag was not maintained so the 2 reverts to a normal 2.

Someone could have added an actual Unicode ₂ in the entry, but that actually would not be the same characters as the title.

Which is closer to the original text, CO2 or CO₂ ?

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