Policy Ideas to implement the 3Rs and the Global Green Transition

William P. Hall, Editor, Climate Sentinel News

Over more than a century and a half of geoengineering effort, humans have mined and burned a substantial fraction of Earth’s fossil carbon. By contrast, it took our planet hundreds of millions of years of biological and geological processes to capture, accumulate, process, and sequester this carbon as coal, oil, and natural gas. Unfortunately for most species of life living today, the carbon-burning was, in effect, an unplanned global-scale geoengineering project.

Human carbon burning has emitted more greenhouse gases faster than any previous geological event except for the one that formed the Chicxulub Crater at the end of what is now the Yucatan Peninsula. This happened when a 10-15 km wide meteorite struck Planet Earth, causing the global mass extinction that ended the Cretaceous–eliminating around 75% of all plant and animal species including all dinosaurs (except for a few birds).

Humans have burned so much carbon that the emitted CO₂ and methane (CH₄) has formed an enhanced greenhouse blanket around our whole planet that is increasing global temperatures at rates far faster than caused by any known geological process other than meteorite strike. If we cannot stop carbon emissions and/or remove carbon from the atmosphere faster than it is being emitted by all human and natural processes combined, we face a mass extinction event from runaway climate change (heating) that will be both faster and more complete than that ending the Permian geological period around 252 million years ago.

In other words, if we cannot effectively REDUCE carbon emissions, REMOVE past emissions from the atmosphere, and REPAIR past damages to our planetary-scale systems we face an almost certain extinction of our species along with most other complex life, probably within a time scale of a century or so.

Some references which describe ideas to apply the 3Rs (REDUCE) (REMOVE) and (REPAIR) on a global basis

Over the last decade, the US National Research Council has reviewed a large number of promising ideas for reducing and removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere and for reflecting a larger fraction of solar energy away from our planet Earth. Very few of these have been adequately researched so they can either be implemented or proven to be unworkableTha

Pierre Gattuso and colleagues have considered possibilities of implementing ocean-based carbon capture technologies to draw down greenhouse gases from a French point of view.

  • Gattuso, et al. 2021. The Potential for Ocean-Based Climate Action: Negative Emissions Technologies and Beyond. Frontiers in Climate, 2. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/climate/articles/10.3389/fclim.2020.575716/full

Two early posts by Climate Sentinel News’s Editor, William Hall, look seriously at the advantages of ocean fertilization, combined with farming phytoplankton to capture carbon, and an ecosystem of zooplankton and larger organisms to harvest the carbon-containing algae and ‘pump’ the carbon down to the ocean floors for long-term sequestration in sediments. This approach is compared with the absurdity of using mechanical technologies to capture CO₂ from the atmosphere.

Of all of these interventions, I personally think that ocean fertilization and farming offers the most feasible process that will rapidly scale to the entire globe. This is because on the self-reproductive abilities of living things enabling exponential growth.

Ocean fertilization and farming to capture and sequester CO2 on the ocean floor

William P. Hall (PhD)

1.   Significant evidence exists that we have already crossed the threshold where global warming will run away if we don’t actually stop and reverse the feedbacks very soon. We need zero carbon emissions ASAP – even if it involves rationing and hardship, but zero emissions on its own is unlikely to be enough to do this.

2.   We need geoengineering (a) to capture and sequester atmospheric global warming potential and/or (b) to increase Earth’s albedo to reflect more solar energy away from the planet.

Ocean deserts for carbon sequestration
Dark blue to lavender areas are potentially farmable ocean deserts above abyssal depths suitable for long term carbon sequestration
Opportunity
Most of Earth’s photosynthesis and biomass occurs in the oceans.
  • The biosynthesis of chlorophyll and the transfer of electrons in the photosynthetic pathway both require iron-based cofactors. A single atom of magnesium in the center of the chlorophyll molecule plays a crucial role in using energy from a photon to free an electron necessary to drive the process.
  • Around half the surface of the world’s oceans (shades of dark blue and lavender) is a desert because the availability of iron or magnesium is too low to support the formation of chlorophyll molecules that carbon-fixing phytoplankton require for photosynthesis.
Fertilization
  • Depending on local circumstances the addition of trace quantities of soluble iron or magnesium (i.e., as nitrates, sulfates, chlorates, etc. is sufficient to enable phytoplankton to bloom – capturing carbon from the atmosphere to produce biomass.
  • Enabling the continued blooming of phytoplankton will support proliferation of zooplankton and develop a complete ecosystem of larger consumers able to package significant proportion of the carbonaceous biomass into feces and dead animal remains that will sink to ocean floor to form before decomposers can oxidize the carbon back to CO₂.
Farming (i.e., management)
  • Carbon fixation optimized by selective seeding with appropriate combinations of phytoplankton species. May benefit from fertilization with additional phosphates (possible limiting resource – but some could be diverted from animal husbandry on land – see pt. 3, and iv-3, below) and nitrates (explore adding/engineering nitrogen fixing species).
  • Carbon sequestration optimized by selective seeding with appropriate combinations of zooplankton and larger consumers (possibly up to and including whales able to short-circuit food chains by vacuuming up krill and bait-fish) able to transport the maximum mass of carbon to the ocean floor.
  • Consider managed harvesting of premium quality animal protein from larger consumers (e.g, tuna!) for human consumption with the aim of reducing/eliminating the need to farm large animals on land for protein consumption and optimizing the redundant agricultural land for carbon capture and sequestration in the soil. Note that all carbonaceous offal and organic waste from the harvested fish would also be allowed to carry its carbon to the ocean bottom; also there would be a direct economic return from the seafood harvest.
Logistics requirements can be met with zero-carbon shipping
  • Stopping anthropogenic carbon emissions will release large numbers of bulk transports used for coal and oil. High port to port transport speeds will not be required, so green energy generation should suffice for transport power. These can be refitted with ‘fertilizer’ dispenser technology, and wind and photovoltaic generators to drive electric propulsion – probably for substantially less cost than for new-builds.
  • Smaller vessels required for farm management functions could also be electrically fueled – e.g., recharging from large transports repurposed as mother ships connected to large floating solar arrays or wind turbines. Consider a large container ship able to deploy and retrieve standard container-sized folding arrays as a strategy for minimizing damage from cyclones. It is likely that such mother ships would also optimally include fish processing, packing, freezing, and containerization for shipping to the land modules.
Resource requirements
  • Iron: powdered raw ore directly from the mine would suffice, however the ability to dispense the iron as an ionic liquid (e.g., as a solution of ferric nitrate where the ion can be immediately be absorbed by plants) to facilitate transport and dispensing. Existing mines would probably suffice to provide the iron in the trace amounts required. It may be possible to produce soluble iron directly from concentrated ores without the need for energy intensive smelting.
  • Magnesium: common element, but costly in terms of energy to refine as a metal. One major source for refining is magnesium chloride salt harvested from concentrated brines. Probably the brine itself would be a suitable magnesium fertilizer – short cutting all energy intensive processing steps
  • Other possible macronutrient requirements that may become limiting as photosynthesis ramps up:
    nitrogen – explore seeding photosynthetic layer with existing nitrogen fixing organisms or genetically engineering suitable phytoplanktonic species.
    Phosphorus – diverted from land-based animal husbandry for protein production that is replaced by marine protein; should also explore explore lichen-based leaching from igneous rocks and separation from high phosphorus iron ore in beneficiation processing to increase the value of the ore.
Scalability and eco-safety considerations for global projects
  • Roughly half the surface of the world’s oceans qualify as ‘ocean deserts’ (i.e., roughly 25% of the Earth’s total surface). Potentially ALL of this area could be farmed to capture and sequester carbon. Without doing all the calculations this would seem to be more than enough to process the bulk of the planetary atmosphere within a few years. I know of no other technology that even approaches this apparent capacity.
  • Aside from the fertilization that allows it to happen, solar energy drives the self-reproduction and multiplication of all biological components of the carbon capture and sequestration processes. The resources required for the fertilization and management are small to miniscule compared to other proposed mechanical and chemical technologies for carbon capture/ sequestration.
  • The technology will undoubtedly require a lot of experimentation and in-practice learning to achieve maximum optimization, but some capture and sequestration will begin as soon as algae begin to bloom.
  • The system is inherently ‘safe’ in that it comes with a built-in off switch. Stop the fertilization and the ocean will return to its ‘desert’ condition within a few months as the biomass starves, dies, and carries its iron/magnesium content out of the photic zone to the ocean bottom. Living systems simply cannot exist without the necessary trace elements they need for life.
The issue of abyssal anoxia.
  • Abyssal waters are already anoxic, or nearly so.
  • The farming system needs to be optimized so carbon-rich detritus falls rapidly through the photic zone and mid-level depths.
  • Recent studies of turbidity currents flowing out from marine canyons transports massive amounts of organic carbon to the abyssal plains where the ocean that produces completely anoxic bottom water. These areas are quickly colonized by the kinds of organisms adapted to live in the anoxic areas around sea-floor vents that support complex ecosystems.
  •  Given that the alternative to sequestering carbon is likely to be global mass extinction worse than the End Permian ‘Great Dying’, abyssal anoxia is a trivial issue.

Ultrawhite paint reflects radiates more heat away than it absorbs

  • good for passive local cooling thereby reducing the need for electrical energy.
  • based on barium sulfate.
  • Barium is a comparatively rare element
  • unlikely to work for global scale geoengineering.