Ocean Iron Fertilization
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whoi.edu
As I recall, while it does cause significant blooms in the areas that you seed, it also induces nutrient depletion in other regions, suppressing growth there and potentially damaging ecosystems that developed around the natural nutrient gradient. It became apparent that the “free lunch” wasn’t actually free and it was mostly just rearranging where things grew based on the interaction of various nutrient gradients. The net effect is therefore much smaller than originally thought and there is a risk that it inadvertently reduces the output of important fisheries due to complex oceanic chemistry interactions that are not fully understood.
I don’t think much has changed with respect to our understanding of it. It is currently filed under “probably a bad idea” as far as I know. But that’s why we do the science.
FWIW, I think the danger of excessive blooms is overstated. Most of the ocean is a desert nutritionally.
Iron fertilization may still be pointless since the effectiveness is being debated afaik. On the other hand if it does work well for a competitive price compared to other methods, I would rather have a fish in the middle of the ocean full of algal neurotoxins and lower global temperature than the same fish cooked. No need to at it though.
If iron is the rate limiting ingredient, then when you seed an area with iron a bunch of other nutrients are consumed in the process that currently are not being consumed. This changes the chemical equilibrium driving those other nutrient flows in the ocean and may stop critical nutrients flows into areas that rely on them. Any major local change to nutrient balance changes the equilibrium and thermodynamic gradients of the entire system.
In hindsight this is kind of obvious. There are similar equilibrium problems in large chemical reactors too and the ocean is just a giant reactor vessel to a first approximation. I think the original assumption was that the ocean is so big that no one would notice but long distance effects on local nutrient balances were observed such that increased sequestration productivity in one area was at least partially offset by losses of productivity in other areas due to new nutrient bottlenecks.
In principle modeling the entire system would allow one to inject the right nutrients at the right handful of spots to maximize aggregate sequestration performance with minimal risk. Building such models is still very much beyond us.
suppose there's a flow of nutrients of type A from area one to area two. Currently, iron is the chokepoint in nutrient consumption of A, so that A is never completely consumed while going from one to two.
By adding excess iron into area one, or in the middle of the region between this flow from area one to two, you now have the possibility to consume A completely as iron no longer limits A's consumption.
So what happens to area two's consumption of A, if it became more scarce? May be nothing - or may be you now have another choke point of resources that wasn't there previously, leading to a change. If you weren't sure if this change would occur, or dont know, perhaps adding iron to area one is not a good idea, until such outcomes have been studied and acertained first.
I am starting to think China will be the first to experiment with this in large enough scale.
Second aren't we already doing large scale iron fertilization of the oceans? Not "intentionally" but simply rivers with human economic or residential activity along them.
aren't we already doing large scale iron fertilization of the oceans
But there are wobbly second order effects and the curves finally settle in the third order, often further away from our initial imagination.
Iatrogenics is the branch of science studying outcomes where interventions make the situation worse off.
Not a judgement on this or any other method, but a recurring pattern to be aware of.
A lot of modernity problems would be solved if those in power learned to sit on their hands and do nothing.
Human's have been geoengineering for millenia via clear cutting of forests, bio engineering of crops, fertilization of fields, damming of rivers, and other activities. While there will certainly be consequences and side effects, even a partial sequestering of ~20B tonnes of CO2 per year would meet the Kyoto protocol.
Are the consequences of Geo Engineering so disastrous that we should accept the worst case scenarios of global warming.
Oil consumption didn't reduce coal consumption, it just added a new energy type. Same for natural gas.
So far they've been right. Decreased coal usage in developed countries has been offset by increased coal usage, of the now cheaper coal, in developing countries. German electric consumers are effectively subsidizing Chinese and Indian consumers.
Eventually that will turn around, if only because we start running out of fossil fuels, and the thesis will fall apart. But it will take far longer than we have, and we have far more fossil fuels than we can afford to extract and burn. That means the ONLY way to address climate change, which is a global problem, is through technological innovation. Regulation is a dead end, and just looking at the track record of regulation so far, it's hard to deny that.
That means making green alternatives that are better, and we're making some good progress on that. Electric cars are better in most ways for most uses except price. Solve that last one and they'll quickly displace combustion vehicles for most uses. Range is already good enough most of the time for most of the people.
It may also mean doing some geoengineering to soften the impact of global warming that will continue for multiple centuries if we don't intervene.
What I think you're saying is:
1. The only solution to this problem is technology that gives us alternatives to fossil fuels.
2. However, even if this technology becomes ubiquitous and cheap, it won't solve the problem by itself. Absent some forcing function, people will continue to use fossil fuels as long as they're convenient and available.
All of which may be true. But then you make the weird third claim:
3. Regulation is a dead end, and just looking at the track record of regulation so far, it's hard to deny that.
It seems to me that the only possible implication you can draw from facts (1) and (2) is that we are going to need massive amounts of regulation to discourage fossil fuel usage, since it won't drop organically even when sustainable alternatives are cheap and available.
PS As a totally unrelated note, here's a chart of global whaling activity. https://ourworldindata.org/whaling
With climate change, I don't think it's possible, and the current track record seems to back me up. When Europe enacts green legislation, the fossil fuels are just consumed elsewhere. It hasn't reduced consumption, just moved it. So, no, I don't see how we can regulate a way out of this problem. I think the only viable option is to innovate.
Maybe I'm too cynical, but that's the way I see the situation.
We’re seeing pretty dramatic decreases in emissions across any advanced society that took major regulatory action to decrease emissions. EU emissions in 2023 were 37% lower than in 1990, despite population increases. A good chunk of the early drops were due to fuel substitution, but now increasingly they’re due to the deployment of renewables. In 2024, about 47% of the EU’s total electricity generation for the year came from renewable sources! These are incredible results, especially if you compare them to a decade or two earlier. If you’d told me that in a matter of 15-20 years, the EU’s pro-renewable industrial policy would have achieved these results (say back in the late 2000s) I would have been very surprised. Yet here we are, and the numbers keep jumping every year. So I would not say “regulatory approaches haven’t worked,” I would say “wow, this is one of the most effective regulatory interventions that human beings have ever devised.”
The reason global emissions haven’t dropped is because China’s emissions kept rising during this time. However: now we’re seeing a similar process unfold in China, just at a much larger scale. There the central government is massively subsidizing and encouraging the deployment of renewables. Current estimates are that China’s emissions may have already plateaued and are entering a structural decline. Again, yes, a lot of this is due to technology being available. But the rapid deployment of the tech is a function of strong government intervention.
We are going to reach a point very soon where 90%+ of any modern nation’s energy can be supplied using renewables, nuclear and storage. It’s actually coming very fast. (And that 90% is really only capped by intermittency issues, not because there are major limits on what we can generate.) At that point we’ll be into the very substantial “mop up” phase where we try to work through the remaining high-emissions industries. This will require massive amounts of regulatory intervention, since most of the barriers will be due to the need to replace existing infrastructure on an expedited schedule.
It's possible that will turn negative at some point, but I think that would only be through innovation when coal power isn't economically competitive anymore.
> We are going to reach a point very soon where 90%+ of any modern nation’s energy can be supplied using renewables, nuclear and storage. It’s actually coming very fast.
That's exactly my point. We have to get there. Until we do, regulations will just move the consumption around. If it's not Europe it's China, if it's not China it's India, if it's not India it's Africa, etc.
I still think the only we get out of this is make green energy much more economically competitive - the full cost of green energy including the cost of dealing with it's intermittent nature. We're not there yet, and it's a very hard problem to solve, because the more intermittent energy you add to the mix, the more expensive it gets to solve the intermittency.
I don't see regulation ever getting us there, except for those cases where it helps drive the innovation faster. Which comes back to my premise that the only way out is through innovation.
The important thing here is that this makes economic sense. Coal is not cheaper than renewables and doesn’t really compete well with them when both are available (especially as the price curve for new renewables keeps dropping) but until storage is vastly more available, fossil backing is pretty much the only way to build out a renewable grid.
My big worry is not that “regulation won’t work” (I think we’ve already pushed ourselves over the economic tipping point where renewables and storage are pretty much inevitable.) My fear is that it will come too late, and that we’ve been much too optimistic about our carbon budgets.
[1] https://www.raponline.org/blog/changing-how-coal-power-plant...
But even if they manage to turn that around decades from now, the coal will go to India or Africa, it’s not going to stay in the ground until it’s really uneconomical (and even then more likely to be replaced by natural gas than renewables.) Again, some countries may achieve success with regulation in isolation, but what matters is what the whole world does. There I think regulation doesn’t work because we don’t have one government, but instead many competing nations. Tragedy of the commons rules more often than not. This is where we disagree. The data is currently on my side, fossil fuel consumption is at record levels and increasing still. I think your position is this will change at some point in the future, with the help of regulation.
Renewables are way cheaper than coal power in many places, but at the extreme they basically need backing by equal fossil fuel infrastructure as they come to dominate the grid. Because you have to have electricity when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing. When you add that to the costs, then they don’t currently win. Fixing that is the innovation that can solve this, which I think we both agree on.
I agree with you that the coal capacity buildouts are worrying. The best we can hope is that China has just structurally misallocated a bunch of funds, and when it comes time to burn that coal, continued improvements in renewables and storage will make all those plants unprofitable. That’s what’s happening most other places.
The hard part is actually measuring how much carbon you can sequester per kg of 'fake' whale poop.
Recent Bloomberg video: https://youtu.be/ZnXHJD0UI5U?t=812
(Disclosure - I am peripherally involved.)
Do we have a rough estimate of this number? I assume the cost of whale poop can be low once it is mass manufactured. But the real cost is the actual deployment?
Later .. 200 litres of 'aqua food' for one tonne of sequestered carbon.
Our Annual CO2 emission is about 40B tons. In order to be Carbon Negative we need to capture 60 - 80B tons / year.
That is about 80B x 200 Litres of Aqua Food. Or 16 Trillion Litres. Roughly 3 to 4 times the amount of soft drinks Coca cola sold per year.
And doing it continuously for 20 years we would revert back to about 80s.
I'm no ocean ecologist, but it seems like there might be several consequences to adding billions of tons of plankton to the ocean
Carbon capture is for offsetting historical emissions, and the few niche ones that are so hard to replace that we'll need decades of research.
https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pirate_Global_Warm...
Being a get-rich-quick alternative to whaling, piracy captured enough of the workforce to slow down the extinction of whales.
I jest, of course, but it's fun to look for ways a mere correlation might be a causal relationship.
This is one of the few carbon capture approaches that appears to be able to approach global scale, so I'm rooting for it. Even enhanced weathering suffers from needing to move billions of tons of rock, but scattering trace minerals seems pretty high leverage. The sheer mass of material that must be removed from the atmosphere is otherwise very intimidating.
As uncomfortable as it is to experiment on the only planet you have, even worse would be to wait too long and then, in a panic, try to do everything that might possibly work all at once and to as extreme a degree as possible.
Very, very few animals can handle the pressure differential between the top and bottom of the ocean. It's pretty much just whales, and they can only do it because they're so goddamn big
It has lots of niches where it's actually cheaper anyway. It just can't be the dominant form of energy generation.
1. Incredibly cost effective 2. Mimic natural effects 3. Could pretyy easily cause anotger ice age if miscalculated
I wonder at what point the potential benefits will outweigh the potential risks for using these geoengineering techniques. Cant be far off, right?
Sulfur dioxide injection could halt global warming in its tracks for a measly $18 billion a year. I wonder if a vigilante billionaire climate activist gonna take a try in the next few decades..
I think other nations will demand they stop - with threats of sanctions - simply because there are other nations who now depend on the higher temperatures and increased agricultural output.
Could they? At least for stratospheric aerosol injection it would be easy to just stop doing it if things seemed like they were tipping. It doesn't happen _that_ fast, we'd have time to notice and react.
I'd say that things are not bad enough for anyone with the means to take the risk. When the things get bad enough for the Overton window to admit geoengineering, it may be too late for simple and affordable solutions, as usual.
(It would be ironic if the world's response to fossil CO2 emission is to mandate extra high sulfur jet fuel, but nothing would surprise me)
The Western mind will think it is "unnatural" and playing God with nature on a completely unprecedented scale but large-scale geo engineering like this is probably the few options we have left.