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Canadian Start-Up Wants To Alter The Ocean’s Chemistry With Antacids

by Anthony Watts
February 20, 2023, 9:57 AM
in News and Opinion
Reading Time: 3 mins read
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oceanOn February 11th, NBC News published a story by writers Kenzi Abou-Sabe, Yasmine Salam, and Cynthia McFadden titled “Can giving the ocean an antacid help curb climate change?”, describing ways to artificially induce the world’s oceans to capture and store more carbon dioxide.

Whether artificially altering the ocean’s chemistry is a worthwhile or valuable goal to fight climate change is unclear; what is fairly clear, it is impractical due to scale, and could possibly produce unintended negative consequences. [emphasis, links added]

The NBC News story is perhaps best summed up in the first few paragraphs of the story:

Just over a year ago, Canadian oceanographer Will Burt was in Fairbanks, Alaska, teaching college students about the effects of global warming on marine life when a former colleague approached him about a startup seeking to use the ocean to remove carbon from the atmosphere.

“I didn’t have to think about it,” Burt said.

…

Burt works for Planetary Technologies, a Canadian startup that’s attempting to harness and accelerate that potential by adding antacid powder to the ocean.

The theory goes that by altering seawater chemistry, the ocean’s surface could absorb far more atmospheric carbon than it does naturally.

The premise is that with human intervention, the world’s oceans could absorb more carbon dioxide (CO2) to be dissolved in them, in order to slow or reverse the growth of CO2 in the atmosphere.

However, Burt and other researchers seem to misunderstand basic chemistry, which tells us that as the temperature of the oceans increases, CO2 will outgas from it. This has been known for decades, as seen in the figure below.

Figure 1: Temperature versus solubility of CO2 in water. Source: Engineeringtoolbox.com

So, just like soda pop fizzes out more carbonation when it is warm vs. cold, the oceans outgas more CO2 as they warm. The Earth is modestly warming and has been since about 1850.

As water temperature increases with a warmer planet, CO2 solubility becomes less, and the oceans outgas more CO2.

As seen in Figure 2, CO2 has been rising in the atmosphere, partly due to human contributions, but also due to the outgassing of CO2 from the oceans as the Earth warmed since the end of the Little Ice Age, which ended around 1850.

Figure 2: Global CO2 levels since 1800, based on ice core samples and atmospheric measurements since 1958. Note that CO2 levels began an uptick in 1850 at the end of the Little Ice Age. Sources: sealevel.info, Mauna Loa Observatory, Law Dome ice cores.

Adding antacids won’t have any effect on the temperature-dependent chemical process in the oceans, and these researchers will soon discover that their efforts would be minuscule in the big picture.

Of course, when Burt said “I didn’t have to think about it”, he was correct, and any logical person can see the folly of his quest just on the impossibly large scale alone, never mind the uphill battle against decreasing CO2 solubility and ocean outgassing as temperature increases.

And, have oceanographers like Burt given any thought whatsoever to dumping huge amounts of an antacid compound into the ocean?

On the one hand, we are told the oceans are fragile, on the other hand, we are told by Burt and others they should be used for an experiment in industrial-scale antacid tests.

The article says, “Planetary intends to recycle mine waste from a defunct asbestos mine in Quebec to produce pure magnesium hydroxide, which the company believes would help accelerate the ocean’s carbon uptake ability in the areas where it’s used.”

Dumping asbestos mine waste in the ocean? Surely there must already be an environmental law against such a thing.

The idea that we ought to attempt to intentionally alter global ocean chemistry by dumping refined asbestos mine waste into them is wrongheaded.

Even if it made sense, with no unintended consequences, the scale needed to appreciably reduce atmospheric CO2 is likely impossible.

Read more at Climate Realism

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Comments 3

  1. Spurwing Plover says:
    2 years ago

    What’s next for these screwballs Alka Seltzer the size of the Moon maybe

  2. David Lewis says:
    2 years ago

    The article is right in that some of the increase in carbon dioxide since the mini ice age is from out gassing due to warmer water temperatures. Anyone can conduct an experiment to see this. Take rain water that hasn’t had gasses added to it from the pressure in household plumbing. Put the water on the stove and bubbles will form before it reaches the boiling point. The article is wrong in that it says adding anti-acids would have no impact. In sufficient quantity they would at least partially counter act the impact of warming by trapping in the CO2 in salts. However, the “sufficient quantity” of the plan is not achievable. There is also the question of the environment impact.

    The most import reason not to do this is in comparison to the Earth’s past, we are in a period were the carbon dioxide I below the optimum level. We need more CO2, not less.

    • Sonnyhill says:
      2 years ago

      The chlorophyll molecule needs one magnesium atom. Plankton needs sunlight, CO2 and chlorophyll. Whales live on plankton. Ask the whales.

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