From the Institute of Physics
Researchers analyse ‘rock dissolving’ method of geoengineering
The benefits and side effects of dissolving particles in our ocean’s surfaces to increase the marine uptake of carbon dioxide (CO2), and therefore reduce the excess amount of it in the atmosphere, have been analysed in a new study published today.
The study, published today, 22 January, in IOP Publishing’s journal Environmental Research Letters, assesses the impact of dissolving the naturally occurring mineral olivine and calculates how effective this approach would be in reducing atmospheric CO2.
The researchers, from the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Bremerhaven, Germany, calculate that if three gigatonnes of olivine were deposited into the oceans each year, it could compensate for only around nine per cent of present day anthropogenic CO2 emissions.
This long discussed ‘quick fix’ method of geoengineering is not without environmental drawbacks; the particles would have to be ground down to very small sizes (around one micrometre) in order to be effective. The grinding process would consume energy and therefore emit varying amounts of CO2, depending on the sort of power plants used to provide the energy.
Lead author of the study Peter Köhler said: “Our literature-based estimates on the energy costs of grinding olivine to such a small size suggest that with present day technology, around 30 per cent of the CO2 taken out of the atmosphere and absorbed by the oceans would be re-emitted by the grinding process.”
The researchers used a computer model to assess the impact of six different olivine dissolution scenarios. Olivine is an abundant magnesium-silicate found beneath the Earth’s surface that weathers quickly when exposed to water and air – in its natural environment it is dissolved by carbonic acid which is formed from CO2 out of the atmosphere and rain water.
If olivine is distributed onto the ocean’s surface, it begins to dissolve and subsequently increases the alkalinity of the water. This raises the uptake capacity of the ocean for CO2, which is taken up via gas exchange from the atmosphere.
According to the study, 92 per cent of the CO2 taken up by the oceans would be caused by changes in the chemical make-up of the water, whilst the remaining uptake would be down to changes in marine life through a process known as ocean fertilisation.
Ocean fertilisation involves providing phytoplankton with essential nutrients to encourage its growth. The increased numbers of phytoplankton use CO2 to grow, and then when it dies it sinks to the ocean floor taking the CO2 with it.
“In our study we only examined the effects of silicate in olivine. Silicate is a limiting nutrient for diatoms – a specific class of phytoplankton. We simulated with our model that the added input of silicate would shift the species composition within phytoplankton towards diatoms.
“It is likely that iron and other trace metals will also impact marine life if olivine is used on a large scale. Therefore, this approach can also be considered as an ocean fertilisation experiment and these impacts should be taken into consideration when assessing the pros and cons of olivine dissolution,” continued Köhler.
The researchers also investigated whether the deposition of olivine could counteract the problem of ocean acidification, which continues to have a profound effect on marine life. They calculate that about 40 gigatonnes of olivine would need to be dissolved annually to fully counteract today’s anthropogenic CO2 emissions.
“If this method of geoengineering was deployed, we would need an industry the size of the present day coal industry to obtain the necessary amounts of olivine. To distribute this, we estimate that 100 dedicated large ships with a commitment to distribute one gigatonne of olivine per year would be needed.
“Taking all our conclusions together – mainly the energy costs of the processing line and the projected potential impact on marine biology – we assess this approach as rather inefficient. It certainly is not a simple solution against the global warming problem.” said Köhler.
“…and therefore reduce the excess amount of it [CO2] in the atmosphere…”
Yes, but what are we going to do about the excess amount of oxygen in the atmosphere, or the excess amounts of rivers, lakes and mountains on the Earth, or the excess amounts of moons around the Earth, or planets in the solar system or stars in the sky? There is obviously way too much (or too little) of everything, and it is about time that we humans decide the PROPER amounts for all things, and then make it so.
(I thought of adding a /sarc tag to the end, but the authors of the original article did not, and my comment is no more outrageous than theirs.)
jgmccabe: What happened to experiments being proven/disproven by experiments? We have computers for that now. We use them to “dissect” animals, test drugs, etc. Reality was just so hard to get the right answers with! 🙂
/sarc
As an example of eco engineering, this is pretty much a one-way street and cannot be undone,
even if it works. Eco engineering to me means control. For example, a physically controllable
something that can alter the amount of sunlight hitting the Earth, such as a controllable array of sunlight reflectors in near space, that can not only limit sunlight reaching the Earth, but also
add additional sunlight (redirect sunlight that would normally not strike the Earth). Since it all
boils down to solar radiation hitting (or not hitting) the Earth , how about, you know, controlling
solar radiation? We would like to be able to control the Earth’s temperature, regardless of AGW or no AGW. These AGW loonies who think achieving a given level of atmospheric CO2 will
bring eternal bliss are apparently forgetting about those damned ice ages, which seem to show up
at fairly frequent intervals. Their solution is really no solution at all.
@andrewharding
Please don’t disparage us BSc’s…it is the PhDs wot caused it…. 😉
and the kooks just keep on coming….
Firstly, a slight digression – but I’ll get back to to the the geo-thingy rock dissolving antics in a moment. As I write, I’m chuckling as I look out across our snow-covered garden at our neighbour’s ‘we’re gonna save the planet’ large (and ugly) 16 x solar panels installed on his roof. It’s interesting the way that snow seems to cling tightly to the smooth panels, building up to almost avalanche status and then slides down only to form deep compressed folds all the way back to the top of the panels. The snow now sitting on them is much more compact than all the snow on the rest of his roof put together. With temperatures around -5C outside, I doubt if our neighbour will see any significant return on his investment for some weeks to come. Good. Serves him right.
Right, let’s put all this geo-engineering thing into perspective. According to which ever warmist’s propaganda you read for entertainment purposes, they say that about one 7th of armageddon causing CO2 is all our fault. We did it. We’ve caused all this extra unprecedented heat. One 7th is only 14.29 percent of the phenomenal total of 0.0314 percent present in our atmosphere (99.9686 percent is all those other gases, right?) – and they reckon that by pouring magnesium silicate into the oceans will reduce this alarming amount of CO2 – well, a bit.
These grant-funded ‘geo-engineering people’ may find a less destructive (and more plausible) solution to their non-existent problem by chatting with ‘food & beverage-engineering people’ who, collectively, chuck more man-made CO2 into the air every day than most. With its carbonated drinks, bread making (yeast), MAP (modified air processing to preserve food), beer (yeast), wine and snack foods (bicarbonate of soda), we should be blaming them for all this weather.
So, forget the ‘Sahara Bomb’ idea (sounds fun though Mssrs Smith and Evil), perhaps the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Bremerhaven, Germany, should start by suggesting we ban “Twiglets” to reduce CO2. (For those outside the UK, Twiglets are a yummy slim savoury snack biscuit coated with spots of Marmite. The biscuit uses CO2 belching ‘bicarb’ to provide light baked texture and Marmite is a yeast derivative of the beer brewing industry.)
Next week – Why the manmade gas that’s inside the world’s fire extinguishers should not be allowed to escape!
garymount says:
January 22, 2013 at 3:32 am
Since gravity and light travel at the same speed through a vacuum, there is no need to worry about any differential in what you see and what you feel.
Bet you didn’t know that, huh?
As a geologist and mining engineer (and having dabbled in mineral beneficiation to a considerable degree), the problem of finding sufficient minable reserves of olivine, the horrendous task of removing the waste, mining the “ore” and then milling it to produce the necessary 40 gigatonnes of olivine dust is a gargantuan task. I won’t even address the permitting and reclamation issues involved–it gives me a headache.
I’m glad they determined such a project to be less than efficient.
@RockyRoad: You might be surprised at how much I know. Yes I did know that.
I don’t know if you want to optimize for the results of the event under discussion, do you compensate and adjust the timing for the event (detonation) for where the sun actually is located, or where is looks like where it is, and feels like with regards to the gravitational field, which is approximately 8 minutes difference.
“E.M.Smith says:
…
There are easier ways to get silicates into the oceans.
Just wait for a volcano…”
Paging Dr. Evil!
I forgot to add, the earth is also spinning, which might mean the force vector might not produce the results expected. Like if you are holding a spinning bicycle wheel by the axial then quickly jerk the wheel, the wheel will rotate about 90 degrees from what a none spinning wheel would.
“around 30 per cent of the CO2 taken out of the atmosphere and absorbed by the oceans would be re-emitted by the grinding process.”
Common sense isn’t going to stop them, but here goes: what about environmental and CO2 impact of mining and distributing across the oceans 3 gigatonnes a year – about 10% more than all the iron ore mined globally; what about costs of at least $300/t mined, hauled, crushed, ground, jet-milled, handled, shipped – especially packaged for 1 micron size (cigarette smoke is 2 microns), and applied – certainly not sub-aerially! What about capital costs, reclamation costs, – lets forget what it might do to things larger than plankton. Price ~1 trillion a year and perhaps the death of the fisheries and macroscopic productivity of the oceans to solve a non-problem
If you design an elaborate experiment to solve a (questionable) problem and it turns out to be totally impractical, why would you report on it. The idiots that funded the proposal when on its face it is simply a stupid idea tells us that this kind of idiocy has become the largest industry in the world. Wegener (and Planck on other occasions) must be revolving continuously in their graves. This is the new generation from which the Nobel committee has to choose – other asterisked hall of famers.
This sounds like an extremely expensive way to do something that is really simple : iron fertilisation of the surface to stimulate CO2 use by critters. This idea has been screamed against by the Greens since it was first mooted 30 years ago. The reaction was bizarre at the time because the objection had no scientific foundation (and still doesn’t). The intervening years have managed to pop up little theoretical objections now and then but so much more is now known about why it will work (and well). Describing iron fertilisation as ‘pollution’ is insane, literally. Rivers send massive amounts of iron in the form of laterite into the oceans each day. It that ‘pollution’ too? Where do they think the iron comes from?
In other words the agenda was and is to reject iron fertilisation and the justification of the rejection can be attempted later. Why? Because it is cheap and effective and there is basically no money to be made from it unless carbon trading is available. If carbon trading is available, there is NO technology that will make as much profit as sea surface iron fertilisation because it is so effective. Bye-bye-windmills. That of course is not the plan. The plan is to raise funding through controllable channels. If the money existed without CO2 being involved the whole process of controlling the funds would be so much more convenient.
OT I hope everyone noticed the EU tax on financial transactions has started. At least that leaves the physical environment alone.
Precedente crazy idea
http://scholar.google.com.uy/scholar?q=iron+fertilization+sequestration&hl=en&as_sdt=0&as_vis=1&oi=scholart&sa=X&ei=ZLX-UPv6JY2E9QSqoIHQBw&ved=0CCYQgQMwAA
Worst, was tested
http://www.google.com.uy/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&frm=1&source=web&cd=5&cad=rja&ved=0CEwQFjAE&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwattsupwiththat.com%2F2009%2F03%2F27%2Focean-iron-fertilization-experiment-a-blooming-failure%2F&ei=ZLX-UPv6JY2E9QSqoIHQBw&usg=AFQjCNFmqPxJGeJ4fMlhYtlPS2oySobUPA&sig2=YRAiO_qWH1OrbvQ5dIXWeg
Look this is exactly like dumping C02 into the air. The null hypothesis is that it will cause no harm. So dump away.
garymount: Doesn’t really matter where nuclear explosions are detonated at the surface, as a disturbance inside the atmosphere won’t affect the Earth’s movement much. The photons from nuclear explosions will give a little push to the planet, but not enough to matter — the Sun is already giving us plenty of photons. One has to do some complex engineering in order to apply an Orion drive to the planet (include the task of asteroid mining to get enough fissionables to run the operation — so it’s probably better to just put Orion drives on asteroids and use gravitational tractoring to move Earth around).
These guys would let tides & waves grind ultramafic rocks deposited into coastal seas to dust. They are talking about a quantity of 7 km³/annum, cost-effective meaning several hundred billion dollars (presumably collected as taxes) spent in a year.
Earth Syst. Dynam. Discuss., 2, 551–568, 2011
doi:10.5194/esdd-2-551-2011
Rolling stones; fast weathering of olivine in shallow seas for cost-effective CO₂ capture and mitigation of global warming and ocean acidification
R. D. Schuiling and P. L. de Boer
garymount says:
January 22, 2013 at 7:36 am
Well, if you did know that, then you haven’t incorporated it into your logic. Where the sun appears to be by gravity or by sight is the same. No adjustment between the two is necessary–we’re influenced by the sun’s gravity on our current location, not where the sun currently is.
Steven Mosher says:
January 22, 2013 at 8:05 am
Just when I think there’s no hope for you, Steven, you come along and restore my faith in a lost sheep. Welcome back.
(Or do you have any evidence that falsifies the null hypothesis? No, I didn’t think so.)
Where is the brake pedal? Where is the reverse gear? Would you go for a ride in a car without either? Not me. All these geo-eng ideas are based on the faulty belief that CO2 is too high and is a danger. I see evidence for neither.
I don’t mind scientists theorizing about what would be the most cost effective way to do these things but brakes, reverse and prove it is actually required. I think geo-eng ideas on how to prevent the next ice age would be a better use of funds as that is highly likely whereas CO2 at double or triple current levels causing us problems is highly unlikely.
Lemme see–considering this will be “government grade” olivine, I predict (with capitalization, campaign donor fees (production will go to a “friend” of the administration, of course), unionized mines and mills, and a pile of environmental restrictions and regulation thrown in) each tonne of “Eco-green Olivine” will cost around $1,000. Multiply that by 40 billion tonnes and the cost is a meeeeeesly $40 Trillion.
Why, sure–all we have to do is let the Treasury start printing $Trillion notes so just 40 will be sufficient (just think of the savings in paper costs, especially with Obama’s mug on each bill!).
(By the way, the World GDP for 2011 was about $70 Trillion, so we’re only spending 57 % of that to fertilize the oceans. But say we’re able to drop the cost of this Eco-green Olivine to $500 a tonne due to economies of scale (although I’d be very surprised if anybody could), we’d be spending only $20 Trillion a year! Ok, ok, that’s more than the US GDP, but so what, you Conservative? Just marvel at how much colder it will be! No need for iced tea!)
/sarc in a very big way!
Lets put this nonsense into perspective: This olivine is about 2.84 short tons / yard (at the wiki SG of 3.37) At 3 gigatons / year, that’s only 1.057 billion yards / year. At 3,097,600 square yards / square mile, that would be a hole one mile square about 341 feet deep per year. By way of comparison, the Panama Canal excavation is 268,000,000 yards. So, it would be digging the Panama Canal about 3.9 times PER YEAR. These clowns need to be forcefully slapped up side the head and told to quit being stupid.
Julian Flood says:
January 22, 2013 at 5:47 am
“There has been an increase in dust from agriculture/forest clearance etc since the 18th century.”
It might be interesting to see a time-line graph of this going back a few tens of thousand years. Having lived on the edge of “The Palouse” – a region of wind deposited silt (loess) – I have driven many visiting friends on a quick tour of the landscape. As I recall, researchers claim glacial periods are dry, windy, and dusty. These characteristics seem less so during interglacials. The recent anthro-dust might be hard to notice unless careful scaling (as with CO2 diagrams) is adopted.
Steven Mosher says:
January 22, 2013 at 8:05 am
“Look this is exactly like dumping C02 into the air. The null hypothesis is that it will cause no harm. So dump away.”
I wouldn’t mind you spending your money on olivine. But warmists generally use Other People’s Money for that (the Null hypothesis of the relationship between warmists and money).
Quem deus vult perdere, prius dementat.