Carbon sequestration
Carrie Peyton Dahlberg – Updated on Apr 04, 2008 – SCMP
Dan Whaley wants to change the world’s oceans. Right at the edge between hopeful and scary, the San Francisco entrepreneur wants to fight global warming by altering the amount of carbon in the sea.
Mr Whaley hopes to sell carbon credits for “ocean fertilisation”, a plan that mixes big money and big science so ambitiously that some researchers fear science will never fully understand what it will do.
This year, Mr Whaley’s company, Climos, expects to seek permits to drizzle an iron slurry over about 10,300 sq km of ocean.
In its wake, a green film of phytoplankton would bloom, absorb carbon dioxide, and either fade, naturally, or become some other creature’s meal. As waste and decomposing fragments from this eruption of life drift downward, carrying their internal carbon with them, some could sink deeply enough to be sequestered for 100 years or more, potentially slowing down global warming.
It is an elegant theory that researchers have explored for 20 years. Along the way, businesses have latched on to that theory, hoping to make millions or even billions of dollars.
Climate change driven by greenhouse gas emissions already is moving faster than predicted and some scientists say the unknown impact of ocean fertilisation might be mild compared with the disruption expected from the growing load of carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere.
In January a group of 16 ocean specialists from around the world wrote in Science magazine that the option should be investigated, even though it can’t be demonstrated that fertilisation will work or is safe.
“The carbon problem will be harder than we think,” said Scott Doney, an ocean chemistry specialist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts and one of the essay’s co-authors. “While ocean fertilisation alone is not the golden bullet, potentially it could be one of a dozen or several dozen approaches that in aggregate might slow the rise of carbon dioxide.”
Planktos is the only other US company to make a recent effort to profit by fertilising the ocean.
Today, Planktos’ stock is trading at around 1.2 US cents per share and its website has been reduced to a single page blaming the company’s inertia on “a highly effective disinformation campaign”.
In the California office where Planktos founder Russ George once outlined his dreams for cold fusion, tree planting and ocean fertilisation, the letters are flaking from a worn sign that now reads “lanktos Inc”.
“Planktos has completely collapsed”, its ship having been sold to pay bills, Dr George said. “I have left the company.”
He said he was starting a new Bay Area business that would raise US$2 million to US$5 million to spread iron in the ocean, a task he vowed to complete before the end of this year.
“The smell of money” has transformed the way people view ocean processes that once fascinated only academics, said Kenneth Coale, director of the Moss Landing Marine Laboratories and one of the earliest researchers into iron’s ability to nurture plankton blooms. Dr Coale told of being offered US$1 million just to lend his name to a Japanese firm pursing fertilisation’s potential. He declined.
“We need to separate the money from the science,” he said, calling for an international panel of experts to decide the next research steps. Dr Coale also signed the Science policy essay, which argued that it was premature to sell carbon credits until much more is known.
Among the unknowns are questions such as whether new plankton blooms would consume nutrients that would otherwise be used elsewhere in the ocean, and so not reduce carbon dioxide. Would organic carbon residue from those blooms sink deeply enough to stay out of the atmosphere for 100 years, considered the limit for selling credits? Would decomposing sea life emit more potent greenhouse gases, such as nitrous oxide or methane, counteracting any benefits?
“The waters of the ocean move … effects will be manifest at many depths,” said John Cullen, an oceanography professor at Dalhousie University in Canada.
Complicating things further, the ocean is already changing, plagued by massive and mysterious fish kills such as the one that occurred off the northwest coast of the US in 2006. If scientists started fertilising the ocean, he asked, how would the world know whether the next die-off was triggered by fertilisation, climate change or something else?
Professor Cullen said the initial experiment proposed by Climos for 2009 would probably not have any permanent impact on the ocean, but he wanted would-be fertilisers held to a higher standard than that.
“The proponents must be able to demonstrate that the long-term and widespread effects of multiple fertilisations can be predicted and monitored accurately,” he said. “I am doubtful it can be done.”
Without such certainty, Professor Cullen said, pretending researchers could understand ocean fertilisation from a few experiments was like saying it was possible to assess a 2,000-home subdivision by tracking changes caused by two houses.
Deepening the unease, Climos plans to sell any carbon reductions it can prove it has made, beginning with its first experimental voyage – a commercialisation that many scientists warn goes too far, too fast.
Climos says it will need only a permit from a nation that has signed the London Convention on marine pollution and is near the company’s still-undetermined research site. Yet the regulatory issue is murky, and an international conference will discuss it further in Ecuador next month.
McClatchy-Tribune