You know, it really might actually work. Nature this week reports that each atom of iron welling up from the seabed then sequestrates 100,000 further carbon ones.
Clearly the six or so experiments conducted so far in copying this process aren’t achieving that level of success. But further experimentation might get to some reasonable approximation, don’t you think? 10%? 1%?
Sure, my chemistry is extremely hazy but would you even need elemental iron? Would red iron oxide work? Spill an Australian ore carrier’s worth (say, 50,000 tonnes) into an iron deficient part of the ocean and then pull, what, 500 million tonnes of carbon out of the atmosphere? OK, at 1%, 50 million tonnes?
Damn, iron ore is around the $100 a tonne mark (old figure but right order of magnitude) and we know that theoretical efficiency of 100,000 to one is possible. So if we get efficiency of 10 to one (ie, one ten thousandth of what we know is possible) then it’s costing us $10 per tonne carbon to sequestrate…which is a hell of a lot lower than the Stern Review’s cost of CO2 emissions of $85 per tonne (note carbon as compared to CO2 there).
If we can get efficiency up to 100 to one (ie, 1,000 th of what we know is possible) then it’s costing us a buck a tonne to get rid of the carbon. OK, sure, early days yet but surely this is something that’s worth spending a few hundred thousand $ trying to figure out? After all, Richard Branson‘s offering $25 million to the first person to demonstrate an effective method of removing CO2 from the atmosphere, isn’t he?
As an added bonus, all those plankton created will attract lots of fish. Yummy!
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