Loser: Ocean Carbon Sequestration

Here's an interesting little article from IEEE Spectrum, choosing oceanic carbon sequestration as one of its technology losers for 2007. The reason: even if iron dust were dumped into all of the oceans amenable to phytoplankton growth, only about 10% at most of the world's annual production of carbon could be sequestered deep in the ocean -- about 1 Gigaton-Carbon/yr. (We're putting about 7.2 GtC/yr into the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels, and about another 1.6 GtC/yr from land use changes.)

Not to mention, you'd be conducting a pretty massive biology experiment withn unforeseen consequences.

“If the trade-off is having to alter the biology of a big chunk of the ocean and what I get is a gigaton a year” of carbon uptake, “then I’m not interested,” says John Cullen, an oceanographer at Dalhousie University, in Halifax, N.S., Canada.

But... you have to start somewhere and study all this, as I think it's next to impossible for us to carbon-cut our way out of the global warming problem. Too many trends are all pointing too strongly in the wrong direction.

The Planktos ship Weatherbird II is currently somewhere in the equatorial Pacific ocean conducting a sequestration experiment.