The potential scale is best captured by Antoine de Ramon N’Yert and his team at the University of the South Pacific, who estimated that 9% of the world’s ocean dedicated to seaweed cultivation could draw down 53 billion tonnes of CO2 a year.
I am all for 'all of the above' solutions to CDR, but skeptical of Bio/Nature enhanced CCS such as seaweed farming...
Exhibit A in my case is that *ALL* the explosion of the plant life /photosynthesis even human agriculture that occurs Spring ->Winter causes only a ~5ppm annual wiggle on the CO2 Keeling curve which , as we all know, is at 430ppm and climbing fast. Most of this plant life including seaweed, sargassum etc is on Land -and near the continental shelf in the Oceans - which is where the nutrient minerals upwell to the surface - and most of that is in the Northern Hemisphere. (the Amazon forests straddle the Equator, and Southern Ocean, have little life except around Antarctica, again continental shelf). If 5ppm ~ 1% oscillation on CO2 levels is all Nature/Spring can do with ~50% of the entire Earth to work with , can we humans really do much better, even if we can farm seaweed on '9%' of the oceans ?
I am all for 'all of the above' solutions to CDR, but skeptical of Bio/Nature enhanced CCS such as seaweed farming...
Exhibit A in my case is that *ALL* the explosion of the plant life /photosynthesis even human agriculture that occurs Spring ->Winter causes only a ~5ppm annual wiggle on the CO2 Keeling curve which , as we all know, is at 430ppm and climbing fast. Most of this plant life including seaweed, sargassum etc is on Land -and near the continental shelf in the Oceans - which is where the nutrient minerals upwell to the surface - and most of that is in the Northern Hemisphere. (the Amazon forests straddle the Equator, and Southern Ocean, have little life except around Antarctica, again continental shelf). If 5ppm ~ 1% oscillation on CO2 levels is all Nature/Spring can do with ~50% of the entire Earth to work with , can we humans really do much better, even if we can farm seaweed on '9%' of the oceans ?