Ocean Carbon Removal: Captura's marine carbon capture explained

I feel like it is missing most of the important questions. What's the impact on sea life (one sentence saying we need monitoring...) The techniques used mean that all the microorganisms, planktons, algaes will be destroyed by those processes. What is the yield of those approaches, you remove 1000 tons, but how much do you produce to make the devices, maintain and run them, the boats... What do you do with the CO2, that's now weight you have to move as well and put in containers that required CO2 to be made. This all should count in the equations for the credits, and from what we have seen in the past it is unlikely it will.

Re: Ocean Carbon Removal: Captura's marine carbon capture explained

#7

Post by gmuslera » Thu, Dec 26, 2024, 5:06 PM UTC

What could go wrong? Something must be done, that is for sure, and this approach targets the main carbon capture engine of the planet. But at the scale it must reach to do something significant it will probably (surely?) cause unintended consequences.

It's like the butterfly effect applied to complex systems, if you do something big enough for causing a change it will probably affect a lot of things, most that will be obvious only on hindsight, and by Murphy it will end being something essential. Like what happened with the mandate of reducing the sulphur content in ship's fuel oil.

Re: Ocean Carbon Removal: Captura's marine carbon capture explained

#8

Post by Avicebron » Thu, Dec 26, 2024, 5:11 PM UTC

ta988 wrote: post #6

I feel like it is missing most of the important questions. What's the impact on sea life (one sentence saying we need monitoring...) The techniques used mean that all the microorganisms, planktons, algaes will be destroyed by those processes. What is the yield of those approaches, you remove 1000 tons, but how much do you produce to make the devices, maintain and run them, the boats... What do you do with the CO2, th…

Yeah this is seems like it's reduced the complexity down to one dimension (removing the CO2) and has blown past any of that, didn't even think about the algae initially, just energy expenditures getting this up and running, but yeah, that's pretty much saying you'll solve climate change by chopping down trees and planting golf course grass

Re: Ocean Carbon Removal: Captura's marine carbon capture explained

#9

Post by cmckn » Thu, Dec 26, 2024, 5:14 PM UTC

gmuslera wrote: post #7

What could go wrong? Something must be done, that is for sure, and this approach targets the main carbon capture engine of the planet. But at the scale it must reach to do something significant it will probably (surely?) cause unintended consequences. It's like the butterfly effect applied to complex systems, if you do something big enough for causing a change it will probably affect a lot of things, most that will b…

I had the same thought when I read:

> If you want to strip out 1 gigatonne of CO2 from the ocean, you probably have to put the upper few meters of the Atlantic through your machines every year

That sounds…drastic! And this seems quite hand-wavy about the risks:

> a lot of environmental monitoring needs to be done to prove that marine carbon-removal strategies aren’t harming aquatic life

Re: Ocean Carbon Removal: Captura's marine carbon capture explained

#10

Post by exe34 » Thu, Dec 26, 2024, 5:32 PM UTC

gmuslera wrote: post #7

What could go wrong? Something must be done, that is for sure, and this approach targets the main carbon capture engine of the planet. But at the scale it must reach to do something significant it will probably (surely?) cause unintended consequences. It's like the butterfly effect applied to complex systems, if you do something big enough for causing a change it will probably affect a lot of things, most that will b…

I've had this idea for a short story for a while, where humans try to do carbon capture and end up going too far, leading to a snow ball.