Prof. Dante Simonetti stood on a 100-foot barge Wednesday morning, tethered close to shore just outside one of AltaSea’s massive warehouses at the Port of Los Angeles.
In one hand, Simonetti, who helps head up UCLA’s Institute for Carbon Management, held a copper block called an electrochemical reactor. When a jolt of electricity is applied to the device and ocean water passes through it, he explained, a chemical reaction turns any dissolved minerals from that seawater into powder-fine solids.
In Simonetti’s other hand, he held a small plastic container filled with powder-like bits of limestone and brucite created through this process.
The point of it all was locked inside that powder, where carbon dioxide that had once been absorbed and dissolved into the sea gets trapped, sequestered from our acidifying oceans and ever-warming atmosphere for more than 10,000 years.
Even better: Once there is less carbon dissolved within the ocean, physics tells us the ocean will naturally pull more carbon from the air. And if the ocean starts absorbing more of the carbon that humans can’t seem to stop churning out, that could potentially help us all avoid learning firsthand what more extreme climate change will do to our planet.
With that goal in mind, Simonetti and his team spent two years scaling up that handheld ocean carbon capture system, making it about one million times larger. On Wednesday, they showed off that first-of-its-kind system, with multiple large electrochemical reactors, water tanks and other equipment rigged up on a barge that in a previous life hauled cargo to remote villages in Alaska and the Arctic Circle.
Gaurav Sant, director of UCLA’s Institute for Carbon Management, said in about a week his team plans to launch a similar demonstration system in Singapore. Each shore-side pilot, which they’ve dubbed Project SeaChange, will be capable of drawing more than 40 tons of carbon from the air each year, removing up to 4.6 kilograms of carbon…
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