As all Daily Sceptic readers know, this site is dedicated to bringing you, among numerous other topics, the latest from the wonderful world of climate change cult virtue-signalling theatre and stunts. The latest development is enthusiastically covered by the BBC:
A ground-breaking project to suck carbon out of the sea has started operating on England’s south coast.
The small pilot scheme, known as SeaCURE, is funded by the UK Government as part of its search for technologies that fight climate change.
There’s broad consensus amongst climate scientists that the overwhelming priority is to cut greenhouse gas emissions, the chief cause of global warming.
But many scientists also believe that part of the solution will have to involve capturing some of the gases that have already been released.
The theory, it seems, is that it might be more efficient to recover carbon from the sea than extracting it from the air:
The project is trying to find whether removing carbon from the water might be a cost effective way of reducing the amount of the climate warming gas CO2 in the atmosphere.
SeaCURE processes the seawater to remove the carbon before pumping it back out to sea where it absorbs more CO2.
The graphic below demonstrates the theory:
Professor Tom Bell of the Plymouth Marine Laboratory has shown the BBC how it works. Strangely, it seems to involve releasing carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere first:
He explains that the process begins by treating some of the seawater to make it more acidic. This encourages the carbon that’s dissolved in the seawater to turn into a gas and be released into the atmosphere as CO2.
“This is the seawater stripper” Prof Bell says with a smile as we turn a corner.
The “stripper” is a large stainless steel tank which maximises the amount of contact between the acidic seawater and the air.
“When you open a fizzy drink it froths, that’s the CO2 coming out.” Prof Bell says. “What we’re doing by spreading the seawater on a large surface area. It’s a bit like pouring a drink on the floor and allowing the CO2 to come out of the seawater really quickly.”
The CO2 that emerges into the air is sucked away and then concentrated using charred coconut husks ready to be stored.
The low-carbon seawater then has alkali added to it – to neutralise the acid that was added – and is then pumped back out into a stream that flows into the sea.
Once back in the sea it immediately starts to absorb more CO2 from the atmosphere contributing in a very small way to reducing greenhouse gases.
If this sounds to you a little like a Toy Town scaled initiative, you might be right:
At present the amount of CO2 this pilot project is removing is tiny – at most 100 metric tonnes per year – that’s about the carbon footprint of about 100 transatlantic flights. But given the size of the world’s oceans those behind SeaCURE think it has potential.
In its submission to the UK Government SeaCURE said the technology had the potential to be massively scaled up to remove 14 billion tonnes of CO2 a year if 1% of the world’s seawater on the ocean’s surface was processed.
For that to be plausible the entire process for stripping the carbon – would have to be powered by renewable energy. Possibly by solar panels in a floating installation at sea.
“Carbon removal is necessary. If you want to reach net zero emissions and Net Zero emissions is needed to halt further warming,” says Dr Oliver Geden who’s part of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and an expert in carbon capture.
As ever, one need only follow the money. There’s nothing like a taxpayer-funded project for keeping scientists busy and off the streets:
The SeaCURE project has £3 million of funding from the Government and is one of 15 pilot projects being backed in the UK as part of efforts to develop technologies that capture and store greenhouse gases.
“Removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere is essential in helping us achieve Net Zero,” says Energy Minister Kerry McCarthy. “Innovative projects like SeaCURE at the University of Exeter play an important role in creating the green technologies needed to make this happen, while supporting skilled jobs and boosting growth.”
So, if the Government’s hopes are realised we can look forward to massive job-creation installations busily sucking carbon out of the sea (regardless of which country put it there) and then pouring torrents of low-carbon water back into the sea. Unfortunately, even if this ambitious scheme takes off, there’s a catch.
Guy Hooper, a Phd student at the University of Exeter has a word of warning:
“Marine organisms rely on carbon to do certain things,” he says. “So phytoplankton use carbon to photosynthesise while things like mussels also use carbon to build their shells.”
Hooper says early indications are that massively increasing the amount of low-carbon water could have some impact on the environment.
“It might be damaging but there might be ways to mitigate that – for example through pre-diluting the low-carbon water. It’s important this is included in the discussion early on.”
What he appears to be saying is that it might make things worse. Fancy that?
Keen-eyed readers will also note that the story makes no mention of the costs, financial and environmental, of powering or building these installations, and supplying the acid, alkali and water needed. Does the whole scheme just belong to the other climate change cult Far Side projects like building vast reflectors in space to block out the sunlight?
Worth reading in full.
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Absolute bunkum, mad as a bag of ferrets.
This is comparable to spraying anti-perspirant on the beach to try and stop the tide coming in.
Don’t give the silly scamming buggers any more moronic ideas. Please!
You mean it doesn’t?
It does if Miliband says it does!
And I’ve just seen fairies in my garden.
The futile predicated on the fallacious – another state-sponsored scam, funding environmental folly from public money and ultimately intended to transfer yet-more wealth from UK tax/billpayers to the pockets of green opportunists, parasites and con-artists.
I read this BBC piece earlier
There is no end to the madness. Pity the BBC’s propagandists don’t allow comments.
As usual they confuse Carbon ( which is insoluble ) with CO2.
As for the Plymouth ” environmental scientists”, they have simply rediscovered that playing around with pH of seawater will change the amount of CO2 dissolved. Acidfying that water then attempting to restore the original pH after the CO2 has been outgassed will kill most of the micro-oganisms in that water. Its not easy to control that process – I have had experience in doing so with effluent water from a Chemical Works. The acid and alkali neutralise each other to produce a salt which will change the dissolved solids in the seawater. Normally the academic virtue signallers would call that ‘Pollution’
So the “low-carbon” ( slightly lower CO2) seawater is released into a stream not far from the sea will compromise the ability of crustaceans there to build their protective shells.
Having absorbed a bit more CO2 from UK air, it is merrily transported south from Plymouth to warmer waters where its capability for storing anything in solution is reduced so it simply releases the same amount of CO2 it ‘sucked up’.
Its amazing what stupid and illogical things are done when Academic Department incomes and salaries depend on it !
Isn’t it water temperature that controls absorption of gasses: colder water releases, warmer water absorbs?
So rather than acidifying sea water to encourage out gassing, it just needs warming a little. That would require very little energy – actually solar heat energy – and require no special apparatus. It still is nonsense, but of course they wouldn’t be able to rob the taxpayer.
May as well count the number of grains of sand on the World’s beaches. Insanity on stilts.
Makes the guys making the emperors new clothes look honest. Pure scam.
If this was a make-believe story it would be considered too far fetched. Every single person involved knows it is a full on scam, except that is, the gullible politicians.
As most DS readers know, CO2 isn’t a significant ‘greenhouse gas’ anyway, but any effect it had really ends at around 300 ppm. However, if people still believe in CO2 warming, they should realise that China alone pushes out 15 billion tons p.a.
The only thing this stupid scheme can do is to waste money.
The money is not being wasted it is being stolen. Just another way to strip wealth from the people of this country.
The BBC article uses C02 and Carbon inter-changeably,as if the were the samething. So much for “following the science”– it’s the height of scientific illiteracy.
A real bugbear of mine as well. It is a quick way to show if someone is scientifically illiterate.
I like to throw in a little known greenhouse gas called Di-Hydrogen-Monoxide and watch the fear in their eyes! Am I cruel?
The climate change hoax specialises in misapplying words. I think it is ignorance. The idiots just learn words and slogans and recite them like parrots with no clue as to their meaning.
“Clean” energy is another. Energy is the quantitative amount of heat and light observed when a physical system performs work.
It can neither be clean nor dirty.
Next project: extracting sunshine from cucumbers.
Credit to Jonathan Swift.
The way they talk about the removal of carbon there is something sinister and barren and disconnected about it. This is the operating system of the real predators. They exalt and employ a category of subordinate people who tend to work in the sciences. I have known these people. Lets just say they have certain issues. In the 1950s it was literary figures who were considered to be the fine minds. The nuclear age and the resources provided to the military industrial complex changed all this. This idea that scientists have anything other than the narrow aptitude required for their discipline is very new and very misguided. The real predators are serious about reducing carbon alright but they mean something a bit different. Like in Soylent Green where Charlton Heston says the quiet part out loud – Soylent Green is people! It is a beautifully crafted schtick hence its longevity.
Now we are godless, scientists think they are God and can make world in God’s image. Were they properly educated they would know that Nemesis is always hot on the tails of Hubris.
Do these insane people understand the vastness of the oceans, and that they contain ~50x the CO2 concentration of the atmosphere. They have zero hope of making any difference, or measuring their CO2 reduction, none.
I understand the oceans hold around 95% of the carbon dioxide on Earth.
They will dessicate you even in the realm of ideas. That is the way their drive works.
This is the best idea since cutting down virgin forest, and transporting it in diesel powered ships across the Atlantic to feed into the DRAX power station. Which only just pipped cutting down mangrove swamps in Polynesia for palm oil, which is transported across the pacific in diesel ships to be added to car fuel to help the planet…
This is the dumbest thing I have ever heard of.
Ed Miliband is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard of!
bbc online.
Project to suck carbon out of sea begins in UK
Jonah Fisher
BBC environment correspondent
Reporting from
Weymouth
Published
4 hours ago
A ground-breaking project to suck carbon out of the sea has started operating on England’s south coast.
“Jonah Fisher?”
“Groundbreaking?”
This has got to be a wind-up.
Sucking Money Out Of The Taxpayer – The Latest Pseudo Scientific Boondoggle.
In theory if enough taxpayer’s money is chucked at this scheme, they find a way to bury the CO2 (how many coconut husks are produced per year?) and use a bit of creative accounting a scheme like this could help the UK achieve net zero, at least on paper.
Obviously this is irrelevant as we only produce 1-2% of global emissions but when you’re idealogically driven/virtue signalling this makes no difference.
In “Gulliver’s Travels”, particularly in the Academy on the island of Laputa, Gulliver encounters a group of scientists who are obsessed with impractical and often harmful experiments, which Swift uses to satirize the pursuit of knowledge without regard for its practical application or morality.
One example is the attempt to extract sunbeams from cucumbers. Another involves using bellows to draw bad air out of a dog. These experiments, along with others visited by Gulliver, are criticized for being:
Yes, it works as an excellent allegory of of current pseudoscientific endeavours like this one. It echoes the fact that climate issues are about 20th on the list of public concerns according to poll data. Of course, ranking stratospherically higher than this are the cost of living, immigration, access to housing and healthcare – all the things much more basic to our way of life that are being neglected.
Coming to an energy bill near you:
‘Your taking carbon dioxide out of seawater to enable it to reabsorb it’
Levy is……..
Idiots. There is no other word. Seaweed and other marine plants need CO2 for photosynthesis. As has been demonstrated on land the higher levels of CO2 have increased crop yields, so no doubt do the same in a marine environment. For Scientist read con artist.
If we mess with nature, nature will mess with us. Utter hubris.
Canute anyone?
It’s April 19th …. not April 1st.
Quite frightening in that these people are threatening our very survival. Just suppose one of these schemes to remove CO2 was upscaled, perhaps with some GM bacteria, and ran out of control. All green plants and life would die. The mindset of government and scientists who work with them is evil.
“charred coconut husks ready to be stored.”
fu#king seriously?
Remember all the hammer house of horror films set in victorian lunatic asylums?
boy, do we need more lunatic asylums!
I remember years ago visiting an environmentally friendly paper mill. Worried about polluting their bit of river, they purified the water before returning it to the river after the paper production process. Result, the river was sterile with no life for a distance down stream. I can see the ocean being the same around these extraction plants after they have put chemicals into the water and then more in to neutralise it. Madness
This is the epitome of human arrogance and control freakery. How many “seawater strippers” do they think will be required to even make a dent in the approximately 321 million cubic miles of seawater contained in the world’s oceans, in which is absorbed an estimated 38-40 TRILLION tonnes of carbon?
So at the moment, an easy calculation yields that at the current extraction rate of 100 tonnes a year, to remove even 1% of stored carbon would take about 4 billion years!
But even if the project were scaled up its full potential of a claimed 14 billion tonnes of carbon removed per year (very unlikely), it would still take about 28 years to remove that 1%. So, the in the very best case scenario, you’ve extracted about 3.5% of carbon from the world’s oceans by the year 2135 (adding in about 10 years for the development and distribution of the tech – a wildly generous estimate).
Plus, according to the article, this extraction rate is based upon the processing of 1% of seawater – only on the surface – per year. That is about 3.8 – 4 trillion tonnes of water. And all this when sea-life is critically dependent upon the carbon content of the water, and when atmospheric CO2 levels according to the geological record are at a historical all-time low!
This is a fantastic money-making scam. Sorry, I meant to say venture.
The person behind this venture is very clever to sell it to politicians who are all extremely well educated in science and technology and who are not at all gullible in any way or form.
However, as anyone who has studied basic chemistry will know, as I’m sure Ed Milliband has, the chemical reaction involving carbonic acid goes like this…..
H2O + CO2 = H2CO3 (please accept my apologies if the 2 and 3 don’t appear as subscript.)
If you put heat into the system, the reaction will move to the left. That is to say the acid will de-gas.
This means that building the facility on the south coast of the UK might not be a good idea. Far better to build it in Scandinavia or even in Greenland or Iceland where it’s a lot cooler and where the locals could charge the British government billions to lease it.
I’m off to the patent office.
“Once back in the sea it immediately starts to absorb more CO2 from the atmosphere contributing in a very small way to reducing greenhouse gases.”
You cannot be serious!
Every day, zillions of tons of C02-free water is flowing into the sea from rivers, the sky and that catastrophic melting ice we keep hearing about, which is able to absorb more C02. And it doesn’t cost us £3 million.
So we have another on the list of Operation Net Zero Grift.
Net Zero is a farce.
Almost up there with Carbon capture and storage.
Who is going to spill the beans on Chem trails? States in the USA are now banning it.