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Ocean Carbon Removal: Captura's marine carbon capture explained

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41–50 of 78 posts

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

#41

Whenever I read about Geo engineering stuff like this, I remember the last episode of "Dinosaurs" [0] and immediately get a bad feeling about it. Hopefully I'm just paranoid. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Changing_Nature

Beware of generalising from fictional evidence. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rHBdcHGLJ7KvLJQPk/the-logica...

What a dumb take on the topic.

There's hard sci-fi, for starters. Even outside that realm, nothing wrong with using them as cautionary tales. Asimov's tales excel at this, even if they're not "physically accurate"; who tf cares about that, honestly.

No one in their right mind would treat this literature as if they were textbooks.

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

#42
I'll be honest, why even fucking with any other kind of geo-engineering other than high altitude sulfur dioxide injection. We literally have seen a big jump in warming from problably removing the sulfuric byproducts of cargoship fuel. At its heart global warming is an issue of energy in vs energy out. Its a lot harder to remove billions of tons of co2 to increase energy out versus using a couple thousand tons of sulphur dioxide to reduce energy in. Maybe not as a permanent fix, but a better fix than this nonesense.

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

#43

I'll be honest, why even fucking with any other kind of geo-engineering other than high altitude sulfur dioxide injection. We literally have seen a big jump in warming from problably removing the sulfuric byproducts of cargoship fuel. At its heart global warming is an issue of energy in vs energy out. Its a lot harder to remove billions of tons of co2 to increase energy out versus using a couple thousand tons of sulp…

That sulfur was removed to reduce acid rain, so its not without some pretty terrible side effects.

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

#44
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wrote a short story the other day about making the carbon problem obvious to every human on earth[1]. I’d love to read yours when you finish it. We need more fiction that focuses on this along with the nonfiction imo. [1] https://jck.earth/2024/12/20/heaven-scent.html

Very nice! mine is not likely to get written unfortunately.

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

#45

It seems like they will do anything except the obvious because that would affect the economy. Why harm one business by forcing them to reduce emissions and profits when you can have two profitable companies where one pollutes and the other cancels that out (ideally...)? There has to be some other, unannounced benefit to funding these things like contributing research insights to naval warfare problems.

Benefiting the economy is good, actually. Having resources to consume is good. It's not a conspiracy to do something stupid.

We also probably benefit from geoengineering regardless of what happens to CO2 production (depending on whether we think the weather was better a few decades ago or not).

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

#46

I'll be honest, why even fucking with any other kind of geo-engineering other than high altitude sulfur dioxide injection. We literally have seen a big jump in warming from problably removing the sulfuric byproducts of cargoship fuel. At its heart global warming is an issue of energy in vs energy out. Its a lot harder to remove billions of tons of co2 to increase energy out versus using a couple thousand tons of sulp…

That sulfur was removed to reduce acid rain, so its not without some pretty terrible side effects.

The idea (in theory being the key word) is by injecting into the stratosphere minimises acid rain production and maximises cooling requiring less SO2

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

#47

I don’t see how any approach where you have to put the CO2 somewhere is ever going to work. Artificial weathering is the only approach that I’ve ever read anything remotely convincing about.

Algae seeding and having it sink to the sea floor taking the carbon with it also seems plausibly physically-possible on the face of it since it uses the exponential growth of microorganisms in rich growth media. And it's even using the same relatively concentrated carbon source as this plan. And it's almost 100% solar powered to boot (the iron seeding ships presumably would not be).

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

#48

It seems like they will do anything except the obvious because that would affect the economy. Why harm one business by forcing them to reduce emissions and profits when you can have two profitable companies where one pollutes and the other cancels that out (ideally...)? There has to be some other, unannounced benefit to funding these things like contributing research insights to naval warfare problems.

Bill Bryson's description of an ecological disaster of zinc smelter superfund site being amazing for GDP comes to mind.

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

#49
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. This idea sounded like the beginning of a post-apocalyptic science fiction movie to me. When you start making ocean-sized changes to the earth, you better get it right. My second thought was: where are they going to put all that CO2?

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

#50
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…

> how much do you produce to make the devices, maintain and run them, the boats Boats consume way more fuel than a layman may think. I’ve been on a ~80m / 20people crew coast guard ship for 6 weeks and did a napkin math onboard based on tank levels and refueling date. It was +1000l/person/day of diesel (can’t remember precise numbers). We were moving ~50% or the time. In addition of the motors there were many BIG gen…

I have wondered if you could tow a barge with the processing, then incentivize the box transports to pull the barge along behind. There are challenges with seas and storms and things like the tow line breaking.

I read a proposal for an air extraction system that fit in a container, so that you could stack a few on a container ship and they would process air as they went from port to port. Typically power challenged though (you want some clean energy powering them). Nuclear powered container ships would be good for this.

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