Comment by cjbenedikt
1 month ago
You can actually capture CO2 from sea water thereby reducing ocean acidification and improving its capability to continue as our planets biggest CO2 sink.
1 month ago
You can actually capture CO2 from sea water thereby reducing ocean acidification and improving its capability to continue as our planets biggest CO2 sink.
Well here's the thing - there's quite a lot of water out there too.
How long and how many terawatts of power do you think it'll take to suck a significant fraction of the earth's seawater through a capture facility?
It is actually amazingly energy efficient as the electrolysis produces H2 at one electrode and consumes it at the other. Hence, very little additional energy is needed. As offshore wind produces a lot of surplus energy at night - this could be used. So far it was possible to capture approx. 92% of the CO2 in the amount of seawater handled. Could likely be increased to 94% - 96%.
You're still ignoring the fact that there is an absolutely unfathomably insane amount of water on the planet.
The world's largest pump (according to a quick search) can pump 60,000 liters per second. The oceans contain over 1.3 billion cubic kilometers of water. One cubic kilometer is a trillion liters. It would take this pump - the largest pump in the world - 192 days to move one cubic kilometer of water.
Let's be charitable and say we can make a noticeable dent in ocean CO2 if we could only process 1% of the ocean's water per year. That's about 13 million cubic kilometers. Let's be generous and say one of these pumps can do 2 cubic kilometers a year even though it's a bit less. So we'd need 7.5 million of these pumps - and of course we'd also need each of them to be connected to a facility that's capable of processing all the water as quickly as the pump can supply it.
This is the problem with carbon capture. We can't build many/large enough capture facilities to make a difference.
You're right, it's expensive and hard, so it's better to not do anything and... migrate all humanity onto space stations so we don't die with the earth, I guess is the alternative you're suggesting?
It's not expensive and hard, it's impossible. The largest carbon capture facility in the world is called mammoth, and in order to offset our current emissions we would need a million of them. We can not build a million of them.
This is why climate scientists have been saying for a hundred years that we need to stop producing all this CO2, because we can't take it back. We can't just fix it. We can't just get back all the ice that's melted and keeps melting, we can't unthaw the permafrost. We can't stop all the methane and other climate gases that have been trapped under ice for millions of years from being released and making it even worse. We just can not do it.
We were warned, we ignored the warnings and now we're seeing the consequences.
The earth doesn't die because CO2 levels increase. There have been multiple epoch with higher CO2 concentrations than we have now.
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there's also lots of water to wash then.
The problem is the same, the relative concentration of oxygen in air is less than 0.05% (~450pars per million). In water much less.