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I think you can get the carbon credits if you can make the system work. You should work out the economics: the volume of water one of these tubes can transport
by tlb 5y ago
I think you can get the carbon credits if you can make the system work.
You should work out the economics: the volume of water one of these tubes can transport per year times the amount of CO2 dissolved in that much surface water divided by the installation cost per tube. The flow rate may be low because the relative pressure is very small: only a few feet of water.
I suspect the tubes will be very expensive to install. They need to be long (many kilometers) and the ends need to be anchored, so it probably costs a lot to install each one. You can look at other things installed underwater like pipelines and telecom cables to get a ballpark estimate.
If you can remove a ton of carbon per year per $1000 installation cost, you might have a viable project.
- ncmncm 5y agoSince the real goal is to move carbon out of the atmosphere, it doesn't need to be especially profitable, but if it were, I hope that would drive a large number of them to be placed. More worrisome is https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/OceanCarbon https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/OceanCarbon which seems to suggest that deep water already has more carbon than surface water, so that moving surface water down might have no, or contrary effect. At least, you would need a pH meter at the exit to show exactly how much more acidic is the water leaving than the water already there, and of course you would need to be careful to place the system where there is such a difference. Facts are inconvenient.