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- hardware
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Well, the electrode that allows direct electrolysis of sea water to create hydrogen without producing corrosive chlorine gas sounds pretty cool.
I am not sure why the media is focussing so much on the CO2 capture aspect of it, which honestly sounds more like a side effect of them trying to deal with the alkaline waste stream.
This will never scale to to point that the carbon capture part will make a big impact, but producing green hydrogen with low environmental impact sounds pretty ok to me.
I don’t know wether to cry or laugh. Take one problem and substitute for another. There is the small problem of space, as in volume and we are back to the 1950-idea of dumping millions of tons of trash onto the sea floor. But hey, at least we didn’t die by cooking.
If the CO2 minerals are actually inert, this could be a relatively viable approach.
I do think we have consider multiple approaches, because we are clearly not meeting CO2 emission reduction targets.
Inert in human time scales at least. What I’m getting at, is the sheer volume we have to deal with and that in and of itself is a problem.
If we are pumping up 100 million barrels of oil per day, Thats 16 000 million liters, or 16 million cubic meters. An ordinary house in these parts is about 40 cubic meters. So, 400 000 houses per day is added to the problem and the scale of what needs to be taken care of.
If we were to dump 400 000 houses worth of sand or other inert material onto any single plot of the seabed that part of seabed is dead. There are no two ways about it.
The oceans are very big place though even the context of 4 million cubic meters per annum (assuming a 25% oil coverage target).
I am not saying we should give up on all other approaches, but it might worth considering this as part of a toolkit.
The oceans are enormous, but so is the rest of the world. Didn’t stop us from affecting most of it. As you say, the ocean may be big enough to handle some, but we can’t afford to dump it all in the ocean. The waste will not build up to a hill, it will in a very short time build up to a mountain.
And the ocean is many orders of magnitude larger than a mountain
Yeah, because “dump-it-and-forgett-it” hasn’t come back to haunt us in the past? We’ve got everything from toxic waste to old ammo and nuclear waste that are ticking time bombs we don’t know how to handle as is. But sure! Let’s add another one to the list!
I agree with you but at the same time there huge swats of the ocean that are the equivalent of aquatic deserts. Specially on the Atlantic. So much so that frequently structures are sinked in order to create better conditions for species that were overfished. But those zones of the ocean being barren is not related to human activity so much as they are just a bit too harsh and empty. So maybe if you could store the carbon there and at the same time create structures to improve conditions it would be net positive for biodiversity.
