Abstract
Electrochemically splitting seawater and releasing the acidified effluent stream at depth could be used to artificially accelerate dissolution of deep ocean carbonate sediments and enact CO2 sequestration with storage times of 300–2500 years.
Highlights
Stabilizing the earth’s climate into the centuries will require a near total decarbonization of the world energy supply, i.e. reducing emissions from their current peak levels
With the aim of accelerating such dissolution most prior work has focused on terrestrial minerals, while less attention has been paid to the alkaline carbonate sediments in the deep ocean
Our electrochemical approach of pumping surface acidity into deeper ocean layers could provide a means to induce the dissolution of alkaline mineral deposits in the deep ocean while accelerating CO2 uptake at the surface
Summary
Stabilizing the earth’s climate into the centuries will require a near total decarbonization of the world energy supply, i.e. reducing emissions from their current peak levels. Paper several mechanisms act to regulate the atmospheric CO2 concentration: over periods of hundreds of years the oceans will absorb the majority of the excess CO2 leading to very significant surface acidification.[4] Subsequent downward transport of the CO2 brings the acidity in contact with CaCO3 deposits, dissolving them and releasing alkalinity, and stabilizing the pH.[5] On even longer timescales (100 ka), weathering of terrestrial silicate rocks releases new alkalinity to the oceans and allows the previously dissolved. The response time of even the first of these two buffers is too slow to keep up with the rate of human emissions,[8,9] leading to a temporary but dangerous spike in atmospheric CO2 concentrations, warming and surface ocean acidification
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