Geoengineering and Stewardship

Over on David Brin’s blog, there is some discussion of an interesting idea for greenhouse gas mitigation – modifying ocean chemistry to increase carbon sequestration:

Adding lime to seawater increases alkalinity, boosting seawater's ability to absorb CO2 from air and reducing the tendency to release it back again. The process of making lime generates CO2, but adding the lime to seawater absorbs almost twice as much CO2. The overall process is therefore 'carbon negative'. However, the idea, which has been bandied about for years, was thought unworkable because of the expense of obtaining lime from limestone and the amount of CO2 released in the process. Shell is so impressed with a newly developed approach that it is funding an investigation into its economic feasibility. (Note an added benefit. Increased alkalinity would also compensate for potential acidification if iron is added to seawater to boost plankton and foodchain productivity in “desert” sea areas, pulling out even more CO2.)

This is from the post for August 24th – scroll down because there’s no permalink.

A paper published last year in Environmental Science and Technology (linked here) provides a feasibility study of the technology. As with any sequestration technology, implementation could be decades off, even if funded appropriately (and we’re talking trillions of dollars, euros or whatnots, here). However, Shell is supposedly funding a company to develop this technology.

Shell Oil has funded a proposal by Cquestrate to investigate atmospheric carbon removal by adding lime to sea water. This process is heavily energy intensive, but could still be cost-effective near oil fields that have un-utilized natural gas resources. Instead of flaring the gas, it could be harnessed to create lime from limestone. Notably, the company developing this proccess plans to use an “Open Source” development process so that anyone can use the technology.

It’s a neat idea of trying to solve this problem by crowdsourcing it. David Brin has offered up other examples of increasing online public participation in creativity and problem solving. Currently these have the feel of gimmicks, but they may be the seeds of ways for harnessing smart mobs, particularly if you start adequately compensating the smart people. Maybe it will become a trend that produces some robust collaborative tools. Returning to Cquestrate, the sense I get from the website is that this initiative doesn’t exactly have the billions it needs driving it – not if we’re going to get ocean sequestration technology going any time soon (I’m not going to say “greennwashing”, but I did think it just for a moment. . .).

When the topic of geoengineering comes up, there is the accompanying handwringing over making drastic and possibly irreversible changes to the planet:

The idea of deliberately tampering with Earth's climate system raises the specter of unintended consequences, especially because the interventions would be imposed on a climate system already significantly perturbed by the unintentional consequences of human activity. Many scientists are averse to opening that Pandora's box, preferring to mitigate climate through emissions reductions and worrying that those reductions might be undermined by a premature faith in a technical fix.

I suspect it’s too late to have those conversations. As James Lovelock has argued, we may already have significantly perturbed the self-correcting mechanisms governing planetary processes, to the extent that we humans now have stewardship over those mechanisms. We’ll need all of the luck we can muster – along with trillions invested in research and engineering (an effort that will make the Manhattan Project look by comparison like a junior high school science fair project) to pull off climate change mitigation. Just something to think about during this Presidential election season – I don’t think either candidate really gets it.

An Update (09/05/08):

Speaking of the need for extreme measures, I ran across this article today:

Political inaction on global warming has become so dire that nations must now consider extreme technical solutions - such as blocking out the sun - to address catastrophic temperature rises, scientists from around the world warn today.

Figures it would be in the Guardian – you can’t get a US newspaper to cut through the fog like this. It refers to a collection of papers published by the Royal Society, which can be found here. More on this topic soon.