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Seaweed could be scrubbing more carbon from the atmosphere than expected (2017)

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Re: Seaweed could be scrubbing more carbon from the atmosphere than expected (2017)

#21

Post by bencompanion »

beerlord wrote: post #4

Can we bio-engineer seaweed which doesn't decompose and can't be eaten? Its not a joke - these were the circumstances of early Earth, before microbes evolved to digest lignin and cellulose. Trees would fall and not decompose, eventually being compressed into coal. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/phenomena/2016/01...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biochar production is one approach to this that is low-tech and doesn't require organism engineering. It's kinda counter intuitive that burning a rich source of carbon would keep it out of the atmosphere, but turning organic material into charcoal stabilises it and renders it inedible and insoluble, and it's really useful as a soil amendment in a lot of places, and it's very likely safe to dump in deep ocean if we ever run short of places to put it.

Farmed seaweed and algae > biochar is a very promising sequestration approach, I think.

Re: Seaweed could be scrubbing more carbon from the atmosphere than expected (2017)

#22

Post by Apfel »

raverbashing wrote: post #2

At least one good news Maybe we should look into farming seaweed (and other algae)

https://www.greenwave.org/

There's some really cool stuff happening in this field. IIRC some farming designs have been open sourced, too.

All you really need is a few hundred metres of rope and some seed spools.

Re: Seaweed could be scrubbing more carbon from the atmosphere than expected (2017)

#23

Post by seventhtiger »

akuji1993 wrote: post #18

Stupid question incoming. Does it really help us to trap even more CO2 under the surface? If something exposes that CO2 again, it will be back up in the atmosphere right? So it feels like this would be a "solution" like storing used uranium underground in lead containers - eventually it will become a problem. Or am I completely wrong here?

The carbon being released now used to be stored underground in oil and coal, or in trees and soil. We're not creating any more carbon. We're just releasing what was stored, and the solution is to put it back in storage.

Re: Seaweed could be scrubbing more carbon from the atmosphere than expected (2017)

#25

Post by Scea91 »

undreren wrote: post #19
akuji1993 wrote: post #18

Stupid question incoming. Does it really help us to trap even more CO2 under the surface? If something exposes that CO2 again, it will be back up in the atmosphere right? So it feels like this would be a "solution" like storing used uranium underground in lead containers - eventually it will become a problem. Or am I completely wrong here?

Your question isn't stupid. Right now though, we are storing our CO2 in the atmosphere. This causes problems. To solve those problems, we need to store the CO2 somewhere else. It can be released again, but lets hope that the massive effort required to yank the CO2 out of our atmosphere causes the sunk cost fallacy to kick in until we've completely moved past fossile fuels.

I do not expect that we will be able to move past fossil fuels in the next 100 years.

There is simply no other source of energy with as much density and as convenient as oil. The only think we know that can rival oil is nuclear energy but it has problems of its own.

Re: Seaweed could be scrubbing more carbon from the atmosphere than expected (2017)

#26

Post by kamaal »

beerlord wrote: post #12
hawkice wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would probably be dangerous to engineer an organism that doesn't break down. Imagine a living, growing plastic. Except not a Dr. Who villain.

Well presumably we could still collect, dry and burn what accumulates on the shore, and the rest would fall to the seabed. If the alternative is a hothouse Earth, with large sections of the planet rendered uninhabitable, geoengineering schemes like this are going to be necessary. We can start with iron fertilisation experiments - Australia has a lot of it, and is near oceans.

>>Well presumably we could still collect, dry and burn what accumulates on the shore, and the rest would fall to the seabed.

Immortal plastic organism will eventually evolve to a lot more that 'trap carbon' work. Human's barely live for 60 years, and yet we can transfer all our knowledge generations one after the other. Imagine what an organism that can never die could do.

Re: Seaweed could be scrubbing more carbon from the atmosphere than expected (2017)

#29

Post by ianai »

s_dev wrote: post #24

Also relevant: Feeding dairy cows seaweed mitigates the amount of methane they pass. Irish famers are beginning to do this because seaweed is easy to come by in Ireland. https://phys.org/news/2018-05-seaweed-relieve-gassy-cows-dai...

I bet it’s the chlorophyll

Re: Seaweed could be scrubbing more carbon from the atmosphere than expected (2017)

#30

Post by ianai »

akuji1993 wrote: post #18

Stupid question incoming. Does it really help us to trap even more CO2 under the surface? If something exposes that CO2 again, it will be back up in the atmosphere right? So it feels like this would be a "solution" like storing used uranium underground in lead containers - eventually it will become a problem. Or am I completely wrong here?

I don’t think it can truly use seaweed to sequester carbon unless we harvest the seaweed and entomb it underground - but it has to be somewhere the decomposition won’t leak carbon into the atmosphere.
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