Amazon funds seaweed farming at offshore wind farm to test CO2 capture | Hacker News Reader

Amazon funds seaweed farming at offshore wind farm to test CO2 capture

maritime-executive.com

125 pointsLogans_Run91 comments

Capturing CO2 and then what...burying it deep underground?

If you're keeping it above ground, it's just going to biodegrade into carbon again real quick. I don't get why people think this is a thing. The only exception is lumber, because if you keep it dry it can last 100+ years (which is a fairly decent sequestration target given our current timelines).

If you're going from capture to release in 5-10 years, I don't see the point.

While this group appears to want to use the seaweed as a commodity, often the point of seaweed CO2 capture is to let it sink to the bottom of the ocean, where for a number of reasons (pressure, temperature, lack of sunlight) degradation takes a very long time.

Don't remember the article(s), but a problem was guaranteeing that it actually reached the bottom, which it didn't always do (thus making it difficult to calculate exact numbers to compare with costs).

Do you recall why the seaweed wouldn't reach the bottom? Is it just ocean currents + high surface area to volume ratio of seaweed?

Can't wait to capture all the CO2 and bury it underground so it becomes oil again in millions of years and our descendants can too enjoy the wonders of petrol combustion all over again!

I guess you're being sarcastic, but postponing the worst effects of climate change from "now" to "millions of years from now" would be an enormous win.

And with any luck, our descendants millions of years from now will be running on fusion power, throughout our solar system and around a bunch of nearby stars.

You're joking, but we may be the second or third iteration of intelligent species that has gone through this already on Earth. Geological timescales are so large that any evidence of these species would have come and gone in what is effectively the blink of an eye.

Maybe trilobytes drove F350 Superduties.

We do have solid evidence of a natural nuclear reactor a billion years ago, so probably the trilobites didn't achieve nuclear power.

What are you talking about? What natural nuclear reactor?

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

Why not use it as fertilizer? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seaweed_fertiliser

Given the area of the trials (North Sea) I would be hesitant to eat it but on plants in place of oil based sources? Would that work / be safe?

Is the salt content low enough? Too much salt can make soil infertile.

Scottish farmers fertilised their fields with seaweed and fishguts for centuries. Burnt seaweed ash was also used I believe, a by product of chemical extraction (seaweed and rhubarb were functionally "industrial" plants, use as food followed on. Plants like madder were for dye, rushes and flax for their obvious uses in construction and fabric)

The project is to test the feasibility of using seaweed to sequester carbon from the atmosphere. If we use the seaweed to, for example, create biodegradable plastic, then over time that plastic may release the captured carbon back into the atmosphere. But if the time is, let’s say, 10 years, that’s 10 years carbon is locked out of the atmosphere. Additionally, the plastics created this way may be replacing plastic that has a net contribution of carbon to the atmosphere in its production. And on the scale humanity uses plastics, adjusting our behaviour this way, could mean a significant amount of carbon being locked out of the atmosphere continuously as more of this seaweed plastic is used.

> And on the scale humanity uses plastics, adjusting our behaviour this way, could mean a significant amount of carbon being locked out of the atmosphere continuously as more of this seaweed plastic is used.

Ok, that makes sense. I guess I was forgetting the scale that this could be operated over. If this truly does replace plastics continuously then I suppose that would be a huge temporary win for sequestration.

This may also operate like old growth forest, in that it will cause an ecosystem to spring up that will capture a big amount of carbon just to build itself, then will essentially be sequestered until someone cuts it down and burns it.

Or we make coal or something from the seaweed and have closed cycle fuels.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/03/210302094053.h...

Seaweed put into cattle feed also significantly reduces methane release!

It doesn't significantly reduce emissions. The numbers often touted for it are rather misleading as they miss how little it can change overall emissions

> What’s more, feeding cattle algae is really only practical where it’s least needed: on feedlots. This is where most cattle are crowded in the final months of their 1.5- to 2-year lives to rapidly put on weight before slaughter. There, algae feed additives can be churned into the cows’ grain and soy feed. But on feedlots, cattle already belch less methane—only 11 percent of their lifetime output

> Unfortunately, adding the algae to diets on the pasture, where it’s most needed, isn’t a feasible option either. Out on grazing lands, it’s difficult to get cows to eat additives because they don’t like the taste of red algae unless it’s diluted into feed. And even if we did find ways to sneak algae in somehow, there’s a good chance their gut microbes would adapt and adjust, bringing their belches’ methane right back to high levels.

> All told, if we accept the most promising claims of the algae boosters, we’re talking about an 80 percent reduction of methane among only 11 percent of all burps—roughly an 8.8 percent reduction total

https://www.wired.com/story/carbon-neutral-cows-algae/

Thanks for the info! 8.8% still sounds like a lot, but definitely less than I was expecting.

Edit: Other sources from sibbling threads say it's much, much more than 8.8%.

https://www.dcceew.gov.au/climate-change/publications/from-b...

They are not looking at *overall emissions* which is the exact reason why they are getting larger numbers. They are only looking the emission reduction in feedlots which is a major point of that article I cited

This article from Australia claims a 95% methane reduction using a native seaweed additive.

https://www.dcceew.gov.au/climate-change/publications/from-b...

That's still red seaweed ("FutureFeed’s solution uses a specific type of red seaweed"). It like other seaweed additive, can only really be used in feedlots where as mentioned above, only account for ~11% of emissions

Anyone looking seriously at reducing the emissions from their steaks will over time realise that just eating less beef is easier. There's something kind of amazing about how the cattle industry tries to greenwash itself, since all it really does is remind the rest of us that we can also just live without them.

I have an idea, how about we feed cattle green grass and make sure they poop in the fields. This way, we dont need to transport food to them and we dont need to have poop lagoons. That is a revolutionary idea many can't accept

Colorado is experimenting with burning this stuff to create electricity and "biochar", which they then want to bury in defunct-but-uncapped oil wells, keeping it out of the air for potentially thousands of years. We could grow all this, then burn it, then bury the pollution. Also, it can be used for animal feed. A small amount of seaweed added to a cow's diet massively reduces the amount of methane they sell. Lots of options here, and it would be a waste of money to just... not use the seaweed for anything

> A small amount of seaweed added to a cow's diet massively reduces the amount of methane they sell.

Beggar thy heifer!

The biochar can be very useful to add to farm land, prairie soil that has become more basic (saltier) especially due to lower water tables. Shipping spreading costs a factor.

This is all just a scam run by Big Cow to get some tasty Asian flavors in the trough.

Yep. I remember doing the math when this info first came out years ago and seaweed production would have to scale astronomically to add an appropriate amount to reduce all cattle feed.

Granted, any reduction is good, but talking like seaweed is the pariah that will make cattle farming environmentally sound wont happen.

I did some napkin math, and it doesn’t seem too feasible: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20713552

The TL;DR was: in order to supply 1.5 billion cows with the seaweed we might need up to 291.000 metric tons of algae per day. ~ 106 Million metric tons per year. In 2014 the world wide Aquatic Plants (which include ALL Macro-Algae) production was around 27 Million tons [0].

[0]: http://www.fao.org/3/a-i5555e.pdf, page 24, table 7

I should have added “/s”

I think you may have meant “panacea.” “Pariah” means an outcast, like an embarrassing family member.

> A small amount of seaweed added to a cow's diet massively reduces the amount of methane they sell

According to another thread, not so massive:

> roughly an 8.8 percent reduction total

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34842167

I consider that to be pretty massive, since methane is an extremely aggressive greenhouse gas, but I apologize if I made it seem like it was 60% or 80% or something like that

We could also eat the stuff.

> https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/seaweed-healthy-nutriti...

Generally, 1 cup (15 grams) of seaweed provides you with:

    Calories: 45
    Protein: 5 grams
    Fat: 1 gram
    Carbs: 8 grams
    Fiber: 1 gram
    Folate: 13% of the daily value (DV)
    Riboflavin: 22% of the DV
    Thiamin: 15% of the DV
    Copper: 56% of the DV
    Iron: 21% of the DV
    Magnesium: 17% of the DV

... seaweed is a great plant source of vitamin B12, a vitamin naturally found in meat, poultry, eggs, and dairy. ... seaweed is a rich source of antioxidants

Right, and that's fantastic, but that's not sequestering carbon. That's growing food.

Displacement is useful, albeit mischaracterized.

yes it is. but the point isn't to sequester carbon for no reason, it's to reduce overall atmospheric CO2. and if you can replace more carbon-intensive food production with seaweed farming, that's a win.

also, regardless of how quickly it grows and is harvested any sort of farming does sequester carbon for as long as those crops are still crops, and seaweed can (afaik) grow year-round, permanently replenishing itself. if the total biomass in your seaweed farm stays relatively stable at 10T, that's ~10T of carbon removed from the atmosphere for as long as that farm exists. the fact that some of it is getting harvested is irrelevant as long as more keeps growing.

At least with Bull kelp, it doesn't go year round.

But we do? It's just really expensive, price per kj wise. Especially roasted seaweed, which is delicious.

It's great for weight loss - low calorie and filling

I'll have to disagree on the filling, I think I could eat kilograms of it ;)

It's expensive because we don't grow enough of it. Otherwise it grows like mad, without heavy machinery, pesticides and fertilizers ... so there is no reason why it should not cost much less than it currently does.

But, seaweed makes me gassy...

IF you increase the carbon biomass, you can offset humanity. We have cleared a lot of land to graze cattle. Restoring forest both above and below water will have a positive impact.

I don’t understand your objection. You have X million tons of carbon sequestered in Y million cubic feet of substrate. If the substrate is seaweed instead of lumber, you lose Y/5 from Y each year, instead of losing Y/100 from Y each year. That just means you need to produce Y/5 cubic feet per year instead of Y/100 cubic feet per year. It doesn’t affect X. Is it easier to produce Y/5 cubic feet of seaweed than Y/100 cubic feet of lumber? The whole point of this project is to find out.

It's objectively better to build a few mountains out of diamond. We do this not because it is easy, but because it is hard.

You'd love Charm- https://charmindustrial.com/ that's exactly what they're doing. Using green crude, basically.

Has anyone evaluated warmer oceans and proliferation of zooplankton in capturing carbon?

High CO2 => global warming => warming of the ocean => proliferation of zooplankton => zooplankton captures carbon and cools down planet

https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/10.1146/annurev-marine-010...

On a related note, Freeman Dyson mentions that an 1/10th of an inch per year of topsoil to the Earths area that currently has soil, would sequester all the carbon all the carbon we release each year.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=8xFLjUt2leM see around minute 13.

To have more zooplankton, you need more phytoplankton, which are constrained by Liebig's Law of the Minimum.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebig's_law_of_the_minimum

How are phytoplankton constrained by this law?

the idea is that rising temperatures and global warming will lift the limit of Liebig's law for plankton - and nature will find CO2 equilibrium even with global warming - which our planet went through before

There’s a type of seaweed you can feed to cows that eliminate their methane emissions, right? Something like 30% of water in the Western US goes to farming cattle feed. If you managed to replace that cattle feed with efficiently grown seaweed, couldn’t you kill two birds with one stone? Three if you replace that farmland with solar farms.

Growing seaweed is significantly more expensive than growing cattle feed (i.e. corn), and corn farming is heavily subsidized by the US taxpayers. Corn fields also have the advantage that they can be very close to the fields where cattle are, so you don’t need to transport the feed as far as you would from the ocean (which would itself emit CO2).

The methane reduction benefits also happen when only a small portion of the feed is replaced with seaweed, so it’s not the whole diet that becomes seaweed.

> growing seaweed ... more expensive than growing cattle feed ... heavily subsidized by the US taxpayers ... corn fields have the advantage ... can be very close to the fields where cattle are

a] there's no other food that's worse from the climate and environment standpoint than beef & dairy [0][1]

b] transport is usually a tiny fraction of food's carbon footprint ... "eat local" is ruse & big ag propaganda [2]

c] seaweed is more expensive than corn because of subsidies? so take those subsidies from one of the most destructive industries and give it to seaweed. even if it's expensive now, it's because we plant corn and not grow seaweed. if more people would grow seaweed, the price would go down. there's no reason why it should be expensive other than there is more demand than supply now.

d] big cost of those corn fields and pastures is deforestation and land use change, a factor which is often undercounted and overlooked [1]

e] about 70% of seaweed naturally sinks to the bottom of the sea ... so even if we wouldn't be able to eat and use it all, it still make sense to grow it [3]

[0] https://ourworldindata.org/less-meat-or-sustainable-meat [1] https://ourworldindata.org/land-use [2] https://ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local [3] https://phys.org/news/2019-08-seaweed-deep-carbon.html

Replace that farmland with forests. Why?

- we've cut those forests to have fields & pastures

- protect biodiversity

- stop extinction of wildlife

- capture co2

- capture water, replenish ground water

- biotic pump effect [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biotic_pump]

- stop droughts and dust storms

- stop desertification

Why not solar fields?

An area of 254 km x 254 km (64516 km2) would be enough to meet the total electricity demand of the world [0]. We use 37 mil. km2 for animal agriculture [1].

[0] https://www.dlr.de/tt/Portaldata/41/Resources/dokumente/inst... (page 25)

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/land-use

> we've cut those forests to have fields & pastures

There are actually many who think that pre-industrial heavy forestation is an artifact of early humans killing off all the giant herbivores (mammoths, sloths, mastadons), and that the "default" state of much of the northen hemisphere is steppe/grasslands.

I've heard the opposite happened, namely that the reason why Africa is so Savanah is because of mastery of fire and a 'prisoners dilemma' of arson vs rival bands. Of course this is all second hand.

I suppose weirdly both could be true at once if the mass killings came before fire did.

I'd like to read more, if you have sources.

But I doubt that mammalian herbivores ever had the potential to permanently deforest vast areas.

Few decades ago some farmers in africa lobbied for killing tens of thousands of elephants for their supposed destructive effects on vegetation. Since then we've learned that even with all thair trampling and gobbling their positive effects on flora outweight any perceived negatives.

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

Thanks for the link.

Still not fan of the human predation hypothesis for the decline of mammoth steppe (not that human predation is not responsible for megafauna extinction), but I'll read more and we'll see. I've been wrong before.

It doesn't significantly reduce emissions and certainly doesn't eliminate it. The numbers often touted for it are rather misleading as they miss how little it can change overall emissions

https://www.wired.com/story/carbon-neutral-cows-algae/

Not sure if this has been replicated or is being scaled up, but it looks promising at face value.

https://www.dcceew.gov.au/climate-change/publications/from-b...

Probably just capturing the extra CO2 that will go back into the atmosphere now that they’re making us come back into the office

-_____-

Commuting can be completely carbon free if you live near the office.

You are correct. And personally, if I lived a 10-15 minute walk from the office I would go every day. Unfortunately, much of the world (and especially the US) is not designed for such a lifestyle. Even NYC most likely involves riding a bus or subway for 30 minutes or more.

Is this based on a special diet? Even walking burns calories... I mean a lot less than moving at 60mph, but still those groceries had to get to the city center somehow, and the fertilizer didn't make itself.

If you're counting that, the efficiencies of using all the electricity to communicate and heat/cool your home because you're in it also matter

Well, I was responding to a comment only about commuting, but yes. Housing costs and the energy (including direct construction, for those who made it and profited from it, and maintenance/heat etc) used are enormous. It's 30-40% of most people's budget both $ and Carbon. If you're living in a $1M+ house to avoid $10k worth of annual commuting the environmental savings may not be worth it.

Well the home gets heated anyway. The fridge pump is pumping anyway.

Everyone is encouraged to get a certain number of steps in per day (often 10,000) for health. If you don't get those steps walking to the office, you're going to have to get them some other way, like by going for a walk without a purpose or, worse, using a treadmill that also consumes energy in the process.

Yes, sacrifice your lifestyle, raise no family, give up your desires and get back to offices. Hopefully people considering tech as a job understand why these companies pay well - it’s not because they value people’s talent it’s because they want total ownership of them. Sit at your desk, work and be contempt. Burn out and shut up. Either avoid such corporations or simply avoid tech if you wish for a better standard of living. This is not the 80s and an office job is not the only good paying career.

The best tech companies I worked for all understood the importance of employees maintaining a good WLB.

Getting back to the main point, Microsoft uses buses for getting employees to work. You can just drive to a pickup spot and "carpool" in

Indeed, factories do provide such buses.

... the implication is that being called a factory worker is somehow an insult?

Yes correct, that was very, very clearly the implication he was making.

Man, I'm so tired of this "we need to interpret everything companies do in the most uncharitable manner possible" attitude

I was just rereading an old but still interesting article about something similar yet totally different, the "Green Wave" ocean farming project.

https://medium.com/invironment/an-army-of-ocean-farmers-on-t...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11410650

> Internet giant Amazon is providing $1.6 million in funding for the development of the world’s first commercial-scale seaweed farm, which will be located between the turbines in an offshore wind farm in the Netherlands.

I'll assume that the writer meant to say "... the world’s first commercial-scale seaweed farm located between wind turbines ...", because otherwise it makes no sense. Seeweed has been farmed in East Asia for centuries.

FINALLY!

I've been ranting and raving about robotic seaweed and/or phytoplankton farming for bio CSS for years. Fractioning air with hand-waving energy sources can't possibly scale the way life has terraformed Earth.

All you have to do then is burn/grind that kelp, and sink it in deep ocean trenches.

> All you have to do then is burn/grind that kelp, and sink it in deep ocean trenches.

That could destory the ecosystem in deep ocean trenches if they are turned into massive sea weed rubbish dumps.

Or turbocharge it, that's a lot of calories going down

Wouldn’t this not be carbon capture if the end product is biodegradable? Naively, I’d expect this to be carbon neutral at best.

Is it easier to capture carbon from decomposition than directly from the atmosphere? If so that could be how this works.

Why? carbon goes into the seaweed, seaweed gets turned into bioplastic which contains that carbon. Bioplastic is used and then discarded into a composter. Composter degrades the bioplastic, the carbon (and other nutrients) are in the compost that is created?

Composting does not sequester carbon. Yes it would replace mineral carbon, but that is not what sequester means.

I get your point, "biodegradable" is not necessarily indicating the end state, but I think it's generally a better idea than using previously sequestered carbon like oil (depending on the energy needed to produce useful goods, and the source of that energy). As a related example, anything made of wood is biodegradable, but if you then burn it, you're not really capturing any net carbon, although you are sequestering it for a period of time.

Isn’t this more a question of how long the carbon is “sequestered” before it mostly biodegrades?

How quickly does the seaweed biodegrade? Over weeks, years?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com