Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astrophysics
Scientific paper
Dec 2007
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2007agufm.u43c1386r&link_type=abstract
American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2007, abstract #U43C-1386
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astrophysics
0428 Carbon Cycling (4806), 1600 Global Change, 1615 Biogeochemical Cycles, Processes, And Modeling (0412, 0414, 0793, 4805, 4912), 4806 Carbon Cycling (0428), 6309 Decision Making Under Uncertainty
Scientific paper
Fossil fuels will likely remain the world's primary energy source for the foreseeable future. Practical, cost- effective, and safe means of significantly reducing fossil energy's CO2 footprint are therefore needed in order to avoid potentially catastrophic climate and environmental impacts. While considerable R&D effort is being invested in fossil fuel CO2 capture and storage above and below ground, the use of Earth's biggest single CO2 absorber and reservoir, the ocean, remains largely unexplored. For example, the US Department of Energy, lead agency in carbon management, has abandoned all ocean carbon research. This is risky and unwise because it forces global CO2 mitigation efforts to focus on only 30% of the earth's surface, ignoring most of the CO2 storage capacity of the planet. In addition to ocean storage of molecular CO2 that is captured from point sources on land, a variety of enhancements to natural marine biotic or abiotic CO2 uptake and sequestration have been proposed. These include increasing the chemical CO2 absorption of the ocean though the addition of alkalinity, or the addition of micro- or macro-nutrients to enhance photosynthetic CO2 uptake and storage. Potentially less impactful schemes include reacting CO2 with wet limestone to form calcium bicarbonate for subsequent ocean storage, or harvesting agricultural residue for long-term sequestration in anoxic ocean sediments. In many instances the cost/benefit of these approaches appear to be quite favorable, but further evaluation is needed, while additional ideas for ocean-based mitigation should be solicited. It is becoming clear that no one mitigation strategy will single-handedly stabilize atmospheric CO2, and the best strategies may ultimately bear little resemblance to those currently favored. Therefore, at this early stage we should not a priori ignore 70% of the earth's surface and a major component of the planet's carbon cycle in addressing the CO2 problem.
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