By Michael Marshall
Here is a radical solution to dangerous climate change: create lakes of liquid carbon dioxide on the seabed, and keep the greenhouse gas out of the air.
As well as cutting our emissions of carbon dioxide, it is becoming increasingly likely that we will have to actively remove the gas from the air to keep Earth’s temperature at a safe level – which is now agreed to be no more than 1.5 °C above that in preindustrial times.
But where should we put the carbon? Most attention has focused on burying it underground, perhaps by injecting it into depleted oil and gas fields. This approach has been tested and seems to work, but it is unclear whether people will accept this fix.
Now Steve Goldthorpe, an energy analyst based in New Zealand, has suggested a radical alternative: dump the carbon dioxide in deep ocean trenches, where it can sit permanently as a liquid lake.
The crucial point, says Goldthorpe, is that once the carbon dioxide reaches a depth of about 3000 metres, its density exceeds that of water – so it will naturally sink to the bottom and stay there.
Very large carbon sink
Goldthorpe used Google Earth to explore the seabed and identify a suitable storage site. He found a deep ocean trench around 6 kilometres down, called the Sunda trench, just south of the Indonesian archipelago. “It is big enough to accommodate 19 trillion tonnes of liquid CO2, which is greater than all the CO2 from the total global fossil fuel emissions,” he says.
HT | Robert Woodward
What actually needs to be dumped in deep ocean trenches is all the [your choice of epithet] pushing the we will have to actively remove the [CO2] from the air to keep Earth’s temperature at a safe level dementia.
On my way to work the other day I walked past a tanker truck that was filled with liquefied CO2. I thought of the energy used to compress CO2 to liquid. Was it from wind or solar? I doubted that. What on earth would one need so much CO2 for (The truck would have been 15 tonnes, laden, or more)? And then I thought of the other stuff we invented that uses or produces CO2. Beer and bread immediately sprang to mind.
Don’t know specifically about your truck load but suspect the gas was cooled to cryogenic temperatures which is also expensive, more than liquefied by increasing pressure. You might be surprised, but there is a big market for CO 2 in part for soft drinks and sparkling water.
Cant wait until the idiots realize the amount of CO2 commercially used in soda, etc and ban such use.
This form of deep water sequestration does not make much sense to me,lots of issues to go wrong besides the expense.
Why would you want to sequester all that Oxygen which is significantly greater than the Carbon in a molecule of CO 2
That tanker of CO2 is used industrially such as water processing plants. Lots of other uses, bottling plants for one.
I was kinda feeling outraged, as usual, with this type of story until I read
Oh my dayz… that was fantastic. When it has finished rotting away, I shall also use Google Earth to explore Goldthorpe’s brain.
The primary greenhouse gas is really H2O and not CO2. Molecule per molecule, H2O is a stronger IR absorber than CO2. Instead of liquifying CO2 we should instead be liquifying H2O and storing the liquid H2O in the oceans. To keep the H2O from reintering the atmosphere we can cover the oceans with a plastic film. Another apprroach would be to freeze the H2O and store it near the south pole or in central Greenland. Maybe we could just let Mother Nature get this done.
At least Goldthorpe is locating his experiment in a geologically stable part of the Earth. Nowhere near the Ring of Fire. Not on any tectonic plate subduction zone. Not near a nation with the greatest number of volcanoes in the world and where earthquakes are a daily nuisance. Nowhere near the epicentre of the 2004 Christmas Day tsunami.
Maybe these things don’t appear on Google Earth.
Wrong on two counts. It was 12/26/2004, Boxing Day, not Christmas Day, and the fault line runs a long distance in both directions, connecting to several other active faults.
The epicenter of the Banda Aceh Boxing Day quake is immaterial. The rifting zone in that area is very active. There are constant quakes there. He’s nuts. Ad you are completely uninformed.
Crisp was being sarcastic.
Okay. I thought he was serious. My bad.
Since the models for global warming do not correlate to co2 concentration why not store Skippy peanut butter under the water and have the same effect.
Sumatra, huh? Oh, I guess that fault line that set off the Banda Aceh 12/26/2004 Boxing Day quake doesn’t really matter, then? Hey, just because it walloped Sumatra that one time, doesn’t mean it’s done, y’know.
Seriously, do these people really get paid money to come up with these looney-tune ideas?
A little familiarity with the deep ocean floor would be helpful. The area this twinkie cream puff is discussing is one where an unexplained so-called warm blob of water was detected in 2001. Three years later, in the same general area, the 9.2M Boxing Day quake shook that plate, dropped the underpinned strata by 33 feet in a subduction zone earthquake, and created a massive tidal wave that washed across the Pacific to Hawaii and the California coast, as well as moving rapidly toward India’s east coast. The total number of people killed by that quakes was in the hundreds of thousands.
This is NOT a safe place to store any kind of volatile substance that is as temperature sensitive as carbon dioxide.
Not a genius idea at all. Blatantly stupid, not well thought out, and there’s that part about who is going to monitor that stuff down there at the bottom of the ocean? Is he?
Naw, I didn’t think so. What a jackass!
now this is lunacy
Academics are shielded from real life all of their lives, and this is what many produce.
Academics should be forced into the real world and then return to academia with some flippin life experience
A golden convergence: super-dumb meets hyper-expensive as uber-futile.
Just thinking about this is a total waste of time.
No observations to date can indisputably link humankind’s release of CO2 to any detrimental effect on this planet.
Limiting CO2 generation, or even storing it, is stupidity incarnate.
I have news for the people who want to sink CO2 to the bottom of the ocean. This process has been going on for hundreds of million years in the form of Foraminifera (forams for short). They are single-celled protists with shells and their shells are deposited at the bottom of the ocean.
When the bottoms of the oceans are uplifted by tectonic movements these layers of carbonates become dry land and are mined for building materials.
The atmosphere once held much more carbon dioxide than now, but the biosphere has converted it into rock. So much so, that during recent glacial periods, the level of CO2 in the atmosphere was too low to sustain the levels of life that thrive during interglacials like the present Holocene.
I wonder if mankind could not liberate CO2 into the atmosphere, would the natural carbon sinks have eventually extinguished life on Earth, say in another 500,000 years?
Why take CO2 out of the atmosphere?
What possible good would that do?
CO2 does not hurt anything, it just ensues life on this planet can proceed, more CO2 and there is more life. So what is the problem?
CO₂ Is Plant Food.
..Learn It,
….Live It,
……Release It!
This actually leads to an interesting question. If it is possible to store liquid carbon dioxide, because there is already some pools of it in the deep areas, then wouldn’t it be possible, theoretically, to mine the liquid carbon dioxide, to help enrich our atmosphere with this marvelous plant food? Pump it up from those deep pools, and get our carbon dioxide up to 1000 or 1500 ppm. The plants would love it. The deserts would shrink. Our food crops would be increased. It would be glorious!