Re: [geo] Carbon budget/removal in NYTimes interactive
Dear Robert, I am a physicist, not an engineer, so I can't really judge how feasible it is to pump half a percent of the total volume of the ocean (this is what I got from my nutrient calculations, and I think they are correct) from a depth of 1000m or more up to the surface every year by tidal pumping, but I have to admit that I am sceptical. I also cannot fully follow your argument about the concentration of nutrients, but I think your numbers are not correct. The average concentration of nitrate in the deep ocean is around 30 micromol/L (not 3 ppm, which is neither correct in mol/mol, nor in volume/volume); and that of phosphate is not the same, but around 15 times less, i.e. around 2 micromol/L. Anyway, there is a much more fundamental problem with the approach that you are suggesting that is independent of its scale: When you pump up deep ocean water to get at the nutrients therein, you also pump up water that contains more dissolved inorganic carbon than surface ocean water. On average deep ocean water contains as much more dissolved carbon as you can fix with the nitrogen/phosphorus contained in it (again assuming a constant Redfield C:N:P ratio); this is because the higher carbon content in the deep ocean has been brought there mostly by the sinking and subsequent remineralisation of organic matter. Of course, with the nutrients that you bring up, most of that carbon will again be fixed in your algal biomass and can then be disposed of (whereever, maybe as biochar). But: That then leaves almost no room for using the algae to fix additional carbon from power plants, as you suggest. So in effect what you do with that approach is: You pump up the carbon that has been stored in the deep ocean by the natural biological pump, which without anything else would increase CO2 in the surface. Then you fix this carbon in biomass and store it on land. In the end you have only shifted carbon from the deep ocean to the storage on land, and have achieved very little, if anything at all in terms of fixing the fossil-fuel-generated carbon. The only way out of this that I see is to use algae with an elevated C:N and C:P ratio compared to the Redfield ratio, because then you can fix more carbon than you bring up. But then again, I would be sceptical about the possible scale that you mention, from my back-of-the-envelope calculation of the nutrient requirements from my last email. Best regards, Christoph On 08.09.17 01:15, Robert Tulip wrote: Thanks Cristoph. Deep Ocean Water, with volume about a billion cubic kilometres below the thermocline, has about three ppm nitrate and phosphate, about 3000 cubic kilometres of each, as I understand the numbers. Tidal pumping arrays along the world's continental shelves could raise enough DOW to the surface, mimicking natural algae blooms, to fuel controlled algae production at the scale required for seven million square kilometres of factories. Piping CO2 from power plants etc out to ocean algae farms could clean up all the polluted air of the world. Robert Tulip *From:* Christoph Voelker <christoph.voel...@awi.de> *To:* geoengineering@googlegroups.com *Sent:* Friday, 8 September 2017, 8:43 *Subject:* Re: [geo] Carbon budget/removal in NYTimes interactive I must admit that I am getting skeptical when I hear numbers in that order of magnitude: The total net primary production in the oceans presently is about 50 Gt carbon, and 80% of that is converted back into inorganic carbon (and nutrients) by heterotrophs before it gets a chance to sink out from the sunlit upper layer of the ocean. The roughly 10 Gt carbon (some newer works even estimate just 6 Gt carbon) that sink out have to be balanced by the upward mixing of nutrients (and a little bit by atmospheric deposition of bioavailable nitrogen and phosphorus) in the Redfield ratio of about 106:16:1 of C:N:P. So, if you want to remove 20 Gt carbon per year from the atmosphere, you'd have to increase the nutrient supply to the total surface ocean by a factor of three, maybe four. Maybe I am a bit too pessimistic here, because there are species like Sargassum which have a higher C:N:P ratio than the average phytoplankton, so you get somewhat more carbon per nitrogen/phosphorus. But even if it is just doubling, I can't imagine that you can sustain such a nutrient consumption by fertilizing from outside the ocean (especially since phosphorus is scarce already now), you'd have to tap into the inorganic nutrients stored in the deep ocean. How long can you do that? If we assume that we harvest all the 20 Gt carbon in algae from these factories and do something durable with them (to minimize lossed through heterotrophy and problems with creating oxygen minimum zones), we effectively remove nitrogen/phosphorus from the ocean. How much is that per year? Let us for simplicity assume Re
Re: [geo] Carbon budget/removal in NYTimes interactive
I must admit that I am getting skeptical when I hear numbers in that order of magnitude: The total net primary production in the oceans presently is about 50 Gt carbon, and 80% of that is converted back into inorganic carbon (and nutrients) by heterotrophs before it gets a chance to sink out from the sunlit upper layer of the ocean. The roughly 10 Gt carbon (some newer works even estimate just 6 Gt carbon) that sink out have to be balanced by the upward mixing of nutrients (and a little bit by atmospheric deposition of bioavailable nitrogen and phosphorus) in the Redfield ratio of about 106:16:1 of C:N:P. So, if you want to remove 20 Gt carbon per year from the atmosphere, you'd have to increase the nutrient supply to the total surface ocean by a factor of three, maybe four. Maybe I am a bit too pessimistic here, because there are species like Sargassum which have a higher C:N:P ratio than the average phytoplankton, so you get somewhat more carbon per nitrogen/phosphorus. But even if it is just doubling, I can't imagine that you can sustain such a nutrient consumption by fertilizing from outside the ocean (especially since phosphorus is scarce already now), you'd have to tap into the inorganic nutrients stored in the deep ocean. How long can you do that? If we assume that we harvest all the 20 Gt carbon in algae from these factories and do something durable with them (to minimize lossed through heterotrophy and problems with creating oxygen minimum zones), we effectively remove nitrogen/phosphorus from the ocean. How much is that per year? Let us for simplicity assume Redfield ratios, I grant errors by a factor of two or so. 20 Gt carbon then corresponds to (20 g/12(g/mol)/6.625(molC/molN))*1.0e15 or about 2.5e14 mol nitrogen. The ocean has a volume of 1.33e18 m^3, and the average concentration of available nitrogen (mostly nitrate) is 30 micromol/L or mmol/m^3 (calculated from the world ocean atlas), most of that is in the deep ocean. This gives a total inventory of 4.0e16 mol nitrogen. 2.5e14 mol/year is thus more than half of a percent of the total available nitrogen in the world oceans, which means you could try that for about 150 years, then everything is gone At that pace, nitrogen fixers are unlikely to resupply the loss (nowaday, the residence time of nitrogen is roughly 5000 years), and they can do that only for nitrogen, not for phosphorus anyway. Letting technological problems aside (like: How do you move 2.5% of the total nitrogen in the world oceans evry year up to an area 2% of the ocean surface) I would call the whole idea - at least that the scale suggested - a prime example of an unsustainable process. Best regards, Christoph Voelker On 07.09.17 23:37, 'Robert Tulip' via geoengineering wrote: The assumption behind the NYT interactive model <https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/08/29/opinion/climate-change-carbon-budget.html?action=click=Homepage=story-heading=opinion-c-col-right-region=opinion-c-col-right-region=opinion-c-col-right-region> that the upper bound for carbon removal is 12 GT CO2 by 2080 is too slow and small. We should think five times as much and five times as fast. Immediate aggressive investment to build industrial algae factories at sea could remove twenty gigatons of carbon (50 GT CO2) from the air per year by 2030, using 2% of the ocean surface, funded by use of the produced algae. That would stabilise the climate and enable no change in emission trajectories, a policy result that would satisfy both the needs of the climate and the traditional economy. Robert Tulip *From:* Eric Durbrow <durb...@gmail.com> *To:* geoengineering <geoengineering@googlegroups.com> *Sent:* Thursday, 7 September 2017, 3:13 *Subject:* [geo] Carbon budget/removal in NYTimes interactive FYI There is a slick interactive graphic at the NYTimes that lets people see if they can meet the world’s carbon budget restriction but a combination of reduced emissions AND achieving Carbon Removal. At https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/08/29/opinion/climate-change-carbon-budget.html?action=click=Homepage=story-heading=opinion-c-col-right-region=opinion-c-col-right-region=opinion-c-col-right-region I failed after clicking on Reduce in all geographic areas and Achieve in Carbon Removal. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "geoengineering" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to geoengineering+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com <mailto:geoengineering+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com>. To post to this group, send email to geoengineering@googlegroups.com <mailto:geoengineering@googlegroups.com>. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: [geo] Re: Researchers propose 'cocktail geo-engineering' to save climate
Hi all, this engineering approach of separately switching cocktail components on and off is probably not so simple: attribution and detection of climate change are notoriously difficult (which has been exploited a lot by climate change deniers), with the main problem that both require knowledge of the internal climate variability on the time scales considered. A good introduction to the subject is the chapter 9.1.2 in the 2007 IPCC report: https://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch9s9-1-2.html Cheers, Christoph On 31.07.17 16:23, Stephen Salter wrote: Hi All Florian is worried about separating the effects of different components of a mixture of cocktails. It should be possible to do this for techniques with a high frequency response by turning them on and off with different random sequences and correlating the results at different observing stations. Stephen On 31/07/2017 12:58, Andrew Lockley wrote: As long as the effects were largely exclusive, cocktail geoengineering could greatly reduce impacts from side effects, as they may have non-linear impacts. For example, techniques A have two different side effects, each with damages proportional to the square of the dose. Both are equally damaging. A combination of the two therefore leads to lower side effects that each alone. A On 31 Jul 2017 12:53, "Florian Rabitz" <florian.rab...@ktu.lt <mailto:florian.rab...@ktu.lt>> wrote: I guess a major problem with a cocktail approach would be the amplification of uncertainties. How would we be able to attribute the outcomes to either technique? An increase in global precipitation might result either from the effect of CCT being larger-than-expected or from the effect of aerosols being smaller-than-expected (vice versa for decreasing global precipitation). Seems like this would require a lot of fine-tuning. Also, in my view, the governance implications don't look pretty. Best, Florian On Monday, July 31, 2017 at 1:26:58 AM UTC+3, Andrew Lockley wrote: http://www.tribuneindia.com/mobi/news/science-technology/researchers-propose-cocktail-geo-engineering-to-save-climate/443998.html <http://www.tribuneindia.com/mobi/news/science-technology/researchers-propose-cocktail-geo-engineering-to-save-climate/443998.html> -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "geoengineering" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to geoengineering+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com <mailto:geoengineering+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com>. To post to this group, send email to geoengineering@googlegroups.com <mailto:geoengineering@googlegroups.com>. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering <https://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering>. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout <https://groups.google.com/d/optout>. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "geoengineering" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to geoengineering+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com <mailto:geoengineering+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com>. To post to this group, send email to geoengineering@googlegroups.com <mailto:geoengineering@googlegroups.com>. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "geoengineering" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to geoengineering+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com <mailto:geoengineering+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com>. To post to this group, send email to geoengineering@googlegroups.com <mailto:geoengineering@googlegroups.com>. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in Scotland, with registration number SC005336. -- Christoph Voelker Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research Am Handelshafen 12 27570 Bremerhaven, Germany e: christoph.voel...@awi.de t: +49 471 4831 1848 -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "geoengineering" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to geoengineering+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to geoengineering@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: [geo] Negative Emissions: Arrows in the Quiver, Life Preserver, and/or Moral Hazard?
Hi All, I am astonished at the lack of courtesy, also in a scientific manner, here. Before suggesting that IPCC has made a 'blunder', or that someone who defends the AR5 report uses 'weasel words' it would be helpful going back to the sources. The figure in the AR5 is taken from Cao and Caldeira (2010) and shows the results of idealized experiments with a global carbon cycle and climate model, where no such thing has been committed as to 'ignore the warming effect of accumulated CO2'. The model solves for the carbon balance, so there is no way how the accumulated carbon (and hence its warimg effect) could have vanished. One might criticise the model for being overly simplistic, but a simple 'blunder' it certainly isn't. Best regards, Christoph Am 15/11/16 um 10:47 schrieb Stephen Salter: > > Hi All > > "Approximately" is the weasel word. > > Stephen > > > On 15/11/2016 08:39, Olivier Boucher wrote: >> >> >> Dear John, >> there is no blunder here. This is an idealized scenario. If CO2 >> emissions go to zero abruptly (red curve), then the committed warming >> (ie the warming in the pipeline because the ocean hasn't equilibrated >> yet) is approximately compensated by the decrease in CO2 emissions >> induced by zero emissions (because natural sinks to vegetation and >> ocean keep working). >> Regards, >> Olivier >>> *Blunder 2*. IPCC has ignored the warming effect of accumulated >>> CO2. They say that global temperature rise will be halted when net >>> CO2 emissions have fallen to zero, ignoring the effect of >>> accumulated CO2 and other forcing agents in the atmosphere. >> >> -- >> >> Our opinion piece is now published in PNAS >> <http://www.pnas.org/content/113/27/7287> >> -- >> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google >> Groups "geoengineering" group. >> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, >> send an email to geoengineering+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com >> <mailto:geoengineering+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com>. >> To post to this group, send email to geoengineering@googlegroups.com >> <mailto:geoengineering@googlegroups.com>. >> Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering. >> For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google > Groups "geoengineering" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send > an email to geoengineering+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com > <mailto:geoengineering+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com>. > To post to this group, send email to geoengineering@googlegroups.com > <mailto:geoengineering@googlegroups.com>. > Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. > > > The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in > Scotland, with registration number SC005336. > -- Christoph Voelker Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research Am Handelshafen 12 27570 Bremerhaven, Germany e: christoph.voel...@awi.de t: +49 471 4831 1848 -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "geoengineering" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to geoengineering+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to geoengineering@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: [geo] Re: Real Climate Change Solutions Too Cheap To Meter - Russ George
Dear Baskar, where did you get the numbers from? They don't agree with common estimates of biomass in the ocean (which may be wrong, but then please enlighten me): Taking your number of a decline of 10 billion tons of phytoplankton (btw, are you talking about phytoplankton carbon or phytoplankton biomass here? The difference is a factor of roughly 2) earnestly, I would arrive at the conclusion that now the biomass of phytoplankton is probably negative: the total biomass is commonly assessed to be around 3 Pg of carbon (see e.g. the overview figure on the global carbon cycle in the IPCC assessment report 5). I don't have the time right now to check the sources for that, but I believe it not to be too far off. So, depending on whether you mean carbon or (wet) biomass, that leaves us now with -2 or -7 Pg C biomass in the ocean. Miraculous, isn't it? Or do you think that this is the biomass after the reduction that you claim? Then biomass should have been 8 (or 13 if your 10 is carbon) PgC before the change; I think such a change would have been noticed before. Btw: in your comparison with the anthropogenic carbon emissions you mix up two very different things: The emissions are per year, while the decline in stocks are totals. So even if I assume all your numbers are true and in carbon units, the total decline in biomass is only about 2 years worth of anthropogenic emissions. So, no, I don't think that biomass restoration is the point here. If there is a point then it is an increase of anual carbon fluxes into the deep ocean, i.e. the biological pump. And that is estimated at around 10 PgC/year; a realistic change that may be attainable (independent of if one may want that) may be around 1 PgC/year, so ocean fertilization can probably be not more than a 10% contribution to the solution. Cheers, Christoph On 5/21/15 1:29 PM, M V Bhaskar wrote: The only thing that appears to have declined substantially in the 20th century is the biomass in Oceans. Fish declined - http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20120920-are-we-running-out-of-fish Whales and Krill declined - http://www.fbbva.es/TLFU/dat/02SMETACEKSEPARATA.pdf Phytoplankton declined - http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/phytoplankton-population/ The decline is about 8 to 14 Billion tons of Fish, 100 million tons of Whales, 500 million tons of Krill, 10 Billion tons of Phytoplankton. All this adds upto a much higher figure than the 10 Billion tons of Anthropogenic Carbon emissions. Mere restoration of the biomass in the oceans appears to be adequate to deal with all the carbon emissions. Regards Bhaskar -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups geoengineering group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to geoengineering+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com mailto:geoengineering+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to geoengineering@googlegroups.com mailto:geoengineering@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- Christoph Voelker Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research Am Handelshafen 12 27570 Bremerhaven, Germany e: christoph.voel...@awi.de t: +49 471 4831 1848 -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups geoengineering group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to geoengineering+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to geoengineering@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: [geo] Energy Planning and Decarbonization Technology | The Energy Collective
. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to geoengineering+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com mailto:geoengineering+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to geoengineering@googlegroups.com mailto:geoengineering@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- Christoph Voelker Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research Am Handelshafen 12 27570 Bremerhaven, Germany e: christoph.voel...@awi.de t: +49 471 4831 1848 -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups geoengineering group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to geoengineering+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to geoengineering@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: [geo] FW: emitting or capturing CO2
Dear all, I have no real expertise on that, but I'd like to add a word of caution: Have you ever added some fine-grained powder to a liquid oversaturated with a gas? You get a lot of bubbles quickly. The result could well be that the grains trigger a spontaneous ebullition of the CO2 before it has time to react with the olivine. That would be catastrophic, so even if the chance is very low I'd rather be cautious. Best regards, Christoph On 1/3/15 2:22 PM, Schuiling, R.D. (Olaf) wrote: Dear All, Andrew suggested that I should share this discussion with the group on whether to emit the CO2 from that acid lake in Spain to the atmosphere, or capture it as bicarbonate by adding fine-grained olivine to the lake, while at the same time reduce its acidity, Olaf Schuiling *From:*Schuiling, R.D. (Olaf) *Sent:* vrijdag 2 januari 2015 12:23 *To:* andrew.lock...@gmail.com *Subject:* emitting or capturing CO2 Dear Andrew Just a few additional data on olivine use instead of degassing. I have no money to carry out full-scale field experiments, so I am limited to the following. 1. There is an olivine mine (the PASEK mine) in NW Spain, close to the sea, with a harbor for small (up to 8.000 tons) freighters. They have no clients for their finest fraction, which would be excellent for the acid lake, so they have to store it back in their own mine (slight negative value!) 2. The acid lake is not easy to reach, but the river Guadalquivir (navigable to Sevilla) makes it possible to bring that olivine cheaply by ship not too far from the acid lake. 3. I have done experiments with a well-known table water (Spa red), bottled under CO2 pressure. Its starting pH was 3.9. After passing through a tube filled with medium sized olivine grains (a passage that took somewhere between 15 and 30 minutes), the pH had risen to 8.2! 4. When the lake is neutralized this way, the reaction will also release some silica in solution. This will attract siliceous algae (diatoms), a favorite fish food, so the lake may become a favorite spot for fishing after treatment, and it will also have become suitable for irrigation in dry summers. 5. I attach a paper describing the experiment of converting a CO2 rich table water into a healthy magnesium bicarbonate mineral water. (Schuiling, R.D., Hogesteger, A.W. and Praagman, E.(2011) From Spa to Corinth, a road to CO2 sequestration) I think we should use any way to reduce CO2 emissions, so capturing CO2 instead of freely emitting it should normally be preferred, Olaf Schuiling -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups geoengineering group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to geoengineering+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com mailto:geoengineering+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to geoengineering@googlegroups.com mailto:geoengineering@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- Christoph Voelker Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research Am Handelshafen 12 27570 Bremerhaven, Germany e: christoph.voel...@awi.de t: +49 471 4831 1848 -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups geoengineering group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to geoengineering+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to geoengineering@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
