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Amazon funds seaweed farming at offshore wind farm to test CO2 capture
- strstr 4y agoWouldn’t this not be carbon capture if the end product is biodegradable? Naively, I’d expect this to be carbon neutral at best.
- shaoonb 4y agoIs it easier to capture carbon from decomposition than directly from the atmosphere? If so that could be how this works.
- flexiflex 4y agoWhy? carbon goes into the seaweed, seaweed gets turned into bioplastic which contains that carbon. Bioplastic is used and then discarded into a composter. Composter degrades the bioplastic, the carbon (and other nutrients) are in the compost that is created?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- cjensen 4y agoComposting does not sequester carbon. Yes it would replace mineral carbon, but that is not what sequester means.
- efsavage 4y agoI get your point, "biodegradable" is not necessarily indicating the end state, but I think it's generally a better idea than using previously sequestered carbon like oil (depending on the energy needed to produce useful goods, and the source of that energy). As a related example, anything made of wood is biodegradable, but if you then burn it, you're not really capturing any net carbon, although you are sequestering it for a period of time.
- bequanna 4y agoIsn’t this more a question of how long the carbon is “sequestered” before it mostly biodegrades? How quickly does the seaweed biodegrade? Over weeks, years?
- shmoejoe 4y agoProbably just capturing the extra CO2 that will go back into the atmosphere now that they’re making us come back into the office -_____-
- warning26 4y agoCommuting can be completely carbon free if you live near the office.
- ecshafer 4y agoYou are correct. And personally, if I lived a 10-15 minute walk from the office I would go every day. Unfortunately, much of the world (and especially the US) is not designed for such a lifestyle. Even NYC most likely involves riding a bus or subway for 30 minutes or more.
- kurthr 4y agoIs this based on a special diet? Even walking burns calories... I mean a lot less than moving at 60mph, but still those groceries had to get to the city center somehow, and the fertilizer didn't make itself.
- 8note 4y agoIf you're counting that, the efficiencies of using all the electricity to communicate and heat/cool your home because you're in it also matter
- kurthr 4y agoWell, I was responding to a comment only about commuting, but yes. Housing costs and the energy (including direct construction, for those who made it and profited from it, and maintenance/heat etc) used are enormous. It's 30-40% of most people's budget both $ and Carbon. If you're living in a $1M+ house to avoid $10k worth of annual commuting the environmental savings may not be worth it.
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- carapace 4y agoI was just rereading an old but still interesting article about something similar yet totally different, the "Green Wave" ocean farming project. https://medium.com/invironment/an-army-of-ocean-farmers-on-the-frontlines-of-the-blue-green-economic-revolution-d5ae171285a3 https://medium.com/invironment/an-army-of-ocean-farmers-on-t... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11410650 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11410650
- orthecreedence 4y agoCapturing CO2 and then what...burying it deep underground? If you're keeping it above ground, it's just going to biodegrade into carbon again real quick. I don't get why people think this is a thing. The only exception is lumber, because if you keep it dry it can last 100+ years (which is a fairly decent sequestration target given our current timelines). If you're going from capture to release in 5-10 years, I don't see the point.
- fredrikholm 4y agoWhile this group appears to want to use the seaweed as a commodity, often the point of seaweed CO2 capture is to let it sink to the bottom of the ocean, where for a number of reasons (pressure, temperature, lack of sunlight) degradation takes a very long time. Don't remember the article(s), but a problem was guaranteeing that it actually reached the bottom, which it didn't always do (thus making it difficult to calculate exact numbers to compare with costs).
- eric-hu 4y agoDo you recall why the seaweed wouldn't reach the bottom? Is it just ocean currents + high surface area to volume ratio of seaweed?
- AstixAndBelix 4y agoCan't wait to capture all the CO2 and bury it underground so it becomes oil again in millions of years and our descendants can too enjoy the wonders of petrol combustion all over again!
- baron816 4y agoThere’s a type of seaweed you can feed to cows that eliminate their methane emissions, right? Something like 30% of water in the Western US goes to farming cattle feed. If you managed to replace that cattle feed with efficiently grown seaweed, couldn’t you kill two birds with one stone? Three if you replace that farmland with solar farms.
- orev 4y agoGrowing seaweed is significantly more expensive than growing cattle feed (i.e. corn), and corn farming is heavily subsidized by the US taxpayers. Corn fields also have the advantage that they can be very close to the fields where cattle are, so you don’t need to transport the feed as far as you would from the ocean (which would itself emit CO2). The methane reduction benefits also happen when only a small portion of the feed is replaced with seaweed, so it’s not the whole diet that becomes seaweed.
- myshpa 4y ago> growing seaweed ... more expensive than growing cattle feed ... heavily subsidized by the US taxpayers ... corn fields have the advantage ... can be very close to the fields where cattle are a] there's no other food that's worse from the climate and environment standpoint than beef & dairy [0][1] b] transport is usually a tiny fraction of food's carbon footprint ... "eat local" is ruse & big ag propaganda [2] c] seaweed is more expensive than corn because of subsidies? so take those subsidies from one of the most destructive industries and give it to seaweed. even if it's expensive now, it's because we plant corn and not grow seaweed. if more people would grow seaweed, the price would go down. there's no reason why it should be expensive other than there is more demand than supply now. d] big cost of those corn fields and pastures is deforestation and land use change, a factor which is often undercounted and overlooked [1] e] about 70% of seaweed naturally sinks to the bottom of the sea ... so even if we wouldn't be able to eat and use it all, it still make sense to grow it [3] [0] https://ourworldindata.org/less-meat-or-sustainable-meat https://ourworldindata.org/less-meat-or-sustainable-meat [1] https://ourworldindata.org/land-use https://ourworldindata.org/land-use [2] https://ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local https://ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local [3] https://phys.org/news/2019-08-seaweed-deep-carbon.html https://phys.org/news/2019-08-seaweed-deep-carbon.html
- slt2021 4y agoHas anyone evaluated warmer oceans and proliferation of zooplankton in capturing carbon? High CO2 => global warming => warming of the ocean => proliferation of zooplankton => zooplankton captures carbon and cools down planet https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/10.1146/annurev-marine-010814-015924 https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/10.1146/annurev-marine-010...
- oa335 4y agoOn a related note, Freeman Dyson mentions that an 1/10th of an inch per year of topsoil to the Earths area that currently has soil, would sequester all the carbon all the carbon we release each year. https://youtube.com/watch?v=8xFLjUt2leM https://youtube.com/watch?v=8xFLjUt2leM see around minute 13.
- tuatoru 4y agoTo have more zooplankton, you need more phytoplankton, which are constrained by Liebig's Law of the Minimum. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebig's_law_of_the_minimum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebig's_law_of_the_minimum
- tinglymintyfrsh 4y agoFINALLY! I've been ranting and raving about robotic seaweed and/or phytoplankton farming for bio CSS for years. Fractioning air with hand-waving energy sources can't possibly scale the way life has terraformed Earth. All you have to do then is burn/grind that kelp, and sink it in deep ocean trenches.
- teruakohatu 4y ago> All you have to do then is burn/grind that kelp, and sink it in deep ocean trenches. That could destory the ecosystem in deep ocean trenches if they are turned into massive sea weed rubbish dumps.
- klooney 4y agoOr turbocharge it, that's a lot of calories going down
- yongjik 4y ago> Internet giant Amazon is providing $1.6 million in funding for the development of the world’s first commercial-scale seaweed farm, which will be located between the turbines in an offshore wind farm in the Netherlands. I'll assume that the writer meant to say "... the world’s first commercial-scale seaweed farm located between wind turbines ...", because otherwise it makes no sense. Seeweed has been farmed in East Asia for centuries.