From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
By Paul Homewood
h/t Graham Worthington
From The Times:
A Canadian company plans to dump hundreds of tonnes of a mineral off the Cornish coast to slow climate change, despite calls by environmentalists to halt the trial.
The pioneering scheme by Planetary Technologies is designed to remove CO2 from the atmosphere by increasing the alkalinity of the water. The UN climate science panel said last year that removing billions of tonnes of CO2 from the air would be vital for the world to meet the Paris agreement’s goals.
Planetary Technologies will release between 200 and 300 tonnes of magnesium hydroxide in its mineral form, brucite, in St Ives Bay over three months this spring.
Magnesium hydroxide is probably better known as the compound Milk of Magnesia, used as a laxative. Senior company figures are attending public meetings in Hayle and Truro to assuage concerns about the project.
The approach is called ocean alkalinity enhancement, and uses an alkaline mineral to shift the pH value of the sea. Making the water more alkaline speeds up the natural way oceans lock CO2 away by neutralising dissolved CO2 and turning it into a salt.
The method has the bonus of reversing ocean acidification, a threat to marine life that has been caused by cars, power stations and factories releasing CO2.
“We’re trying to restore the ocean and restore the climate for generations,” said Peter Chargin, vice president of commercialisation and community relations at Planetary Technologies. “We’re transforming CO2 in the air into salt in the ocean. We think this can be a big arrow in the quiver of solutions for climate change,” he added.
The Nova Scotia-headquartered firm studied locations around the world for the test. It chose Cornwall’s waters because they are shallow, which is important for CO2 removal because the alkalinity-enhanced water needs to be in contact with the air for a long time. The water is also very well-mixed, or turbulent, which should help the process.
The experiment, which will operate under a licence issued by the regulator for England, the Environment Agency, marks a significant scaling up of previous tests.
Planetary Technologies released about four tonnes in the area last year, at a rate that Chargin calls “hysterically small”. While the increase to 200-300 tonnes over 90 days marks a big increase, Chargin said it was still relatively small, a “drop in the bucket”.
Brucite is the mineral form of magnesium hydroxide
Sue Sayer, director of the Cornwall Seal Research Trust, said she welcomed companies exploring such approaches but felt the release should be blocked until further research had been conducted.
She said: “I am all for the project in that we need to find some innovative solutions to climate change, and find them quickly. It’s a very exciting project, potentially.
“My main thoughts are that we need to make sure there are no unintended effects. My feeling is there isn’t sufficient data on this introduction [of the mineral] and therefore no release should be done until the data is available. It’s not me trying to do the nimby thing, St Ives Bay is a really vital bay for the Cornish economy and the environment.”
Sayer said it was not obvious what the negative side effects might be, but that she was concerned about possible impacts on the marine food web affecting mammals such as grey seals.
Ruth Williams, marine conservation manager at the Cornwall Wildlife Trust, said the company’s approach was innovative and she welcomed its engagement with locals.
However, she said: “Whilst we support their ambition of trying to find a way to help tackle our current climate emergency, and agree that in principle the chemistry should work, we are very aware that there is potential for unintended consequences with new ideas such as this, and there has been very little environmental research done to mitigate concerns to date that we are aware of.”
Chargin said he hoped the public meetings would put people’s fears to rest. “We feel compelled to act, because the environment is at risk from ocean acidification and climate change. Cornwall is a great place to do it,” he said.
The company is also running trials in Canada and hopes to increase the concentration and duration of its brucite releases in future projects.
This is absolutely crazy. Maybe somebody would like to do the sums, but I would imagine the amount of CO2 sequestered in this way would be infinitesimal.
But as Sue Sayer points out, there could be unintended effects from messing around with the natural eco-systems.
One last question – who is paying for this nonsense?
Dumping a bunch of crap into the ocean with likely unforeseen consequences. What could possibly go wrong?
And AGAIN the “precautionary principle” is nowhere to be seen…
In a few generations, our descendants will look upon this generation and regard us how we regard the doctors who used bleeding to treat fevers.
Someone’s wife was selling leeches to their friend’s wives?
hmmmmm
Supporters have to talk out of both sides of their mouth in order to say:
‘the amount is very small, so it won’t have a bad impact environmentally’
‘this is great, it will make a significant impact on climate change’
and one could add”
this is a great idea, especially for the government to rob taxpayers in order to pay this company a load of cash to do this…… I hope my stock in their company goes up a lot too
“someone has 300 tons of magnesium hydroxide that they want to dispose of“
What? How?
There’s enough shit off the coast of Cornwall without giving the fish a laxative.
couldnt find a place much further from home to screw round with could they?
what cost n whos paying for this one wonders?
Generally speaking, organisms can adapt better to slow changes in their environment than to sudden changes. If the oceans were to become more alkaline over a century, it would probably be less disruptive than over hours. Although, many surface dwelling organisms already have evolved the ability to tolerate substantial diurnal and seasonal changes in temperature, salinity and pH.
As I recollect, the historical data on ocean pH was dismissed as being unusable and a model was used to determine what it probably was a hundred years ago. In other words, the claimed 0.1 decrease in average open-ocean pH is based on a questionable model, rather than empirical measurements. Where have we seen that before?
Worthy of a full post
These people are beyond dangerous. Maybe the scale isn’t big enough with this one, but this sort of meddling could result in catastrophic consequences. “Unintended consequences”? IMO we don’t know enough about the earth’s ecosystem to even know all the possible consequences. What happens if there are unknown unknowns?
If magnesium hydroxide Mg(OH)2 dumped in seawater was to react with CO2, a mass balance shows that 58.33 tons of Mg(OH)2 would react with 44.01 tons CO2, so that 1.325 tons of Mg(OH)2 would be needed to sequester 1 ton of CO2. If the goal is to sequester the 30+ billion tons per year of anthropogenic CO2, who will produce 40 billion tons a year of Milk of Magnesia just to dump it into the ocean?
The mass balance above is idealized, assuming that every molecule of Mg(OH)2 will meet up with and react with a molecule of CO2. The problem is that there are many inorganic ions dissolved in seawater, particularly Na+ and Ca++ cations, and HCO3-, CO3= and Cl- anions. These other anions would compete with CO2 to react with Mg(OH)2, and magnesium bicarbonate, magnesium carbonate, and magnesium chloride are all very soluble in water.
Natural seawater contains relatively high concentrations of Ca++ ions, which (if they react with CO2) can form insoluble CaCO3, which is used by shellfish to form their shells. Dumping lots of Mg(OH)2 into seawater could react with CO2 to form soluble magnesium carbonate or bicarbonate, depriving the shellfish of needed CaCO3.
The “Cornish Sea” is not a great place for such experiments, located near the west end of the English Channel. It is true that the water is very turbulent, due to the persistent westerly winds in the area, which would tend to push the water eastward into the relatively narrow and shallow English Channel, where any effects on marine life would be amplified relative to dumping the magnesium hydroxide into the deep open ocean.
If this experiment is allowed to continue, beware of the Law of Unintended Consequences!
But there is no real evidence that CO2 has any effect on global climate. There is plenty of scientific rationale to support the conclusion that the climate sensitivity of CO2 is zero. Hence all efforts to reduce CO2 emissions will have no effect on global climate. Polluting the oceans is not good for ocean wildlife and is not a good idea.
Foresters can’t cut trees and clear forest floor fuel to abate forest fires because of the spotted owl, but friends of the government can decimate endangered raptors and whales with windmills. The US is appropriately awash with guilt over racism and slavery in the past but the same people who use the guilt for political advantage are OK with buying batteries, electric cars and solar panels made with slave and child labour in far off places.
We can’t mine or explore responsibly for necessary minerals and fuels that make society thrive, but idiots with no forethought can irresponsibly dump chemicals in the ocean as an experiment condoned by the English environmental agency whose job, it appears, is to poison fisheries. The US EPA is continuing on a mission to invoke unsupported environmental regulations that will make many pristine national parks and landscapes out of compliance with EPA standards even in the absence of human impacts.
The common thread is the election of far left “progressive” imbeciles and charlatans whose goal is the decline of human society. We still have the vote. We MUST use it to save ourselves and future generations from annihilation.