Is artifically boosting ocean CO2 capture bad?

An Australian research body has called for more research into the risks of large-scale ventures to fertilise oceans to boost natural absorption of carbon dioxide.

Following are responses from Dan Whaley, chief executive officer of California-based Climos, which is developing methods to release trace amounts of iron to trigger blooms of tiny phytoplankton in the vast Southern Ocean.

Phytoplankton naturally absorb large amounts of CO2, trapping the carbon inside their cells. When they die, the phytoplankton fall to the ocean floor, locking carbon away for years.

Q: Are you confident iron fertilisation, on a long-term basis, will lead to significant and measureable capture of atmospheric CO2?

A: Phytoplankton productivity and its subsequent transport to the deep ocean is responsible for the majority of long-term storage of atmospheric CO2 on earth. We think that experiments by the oceanographic community at larger scales and longer timeframes can help us understand whether this can be meaningfully increased by humans.

Q: Is your current research looking at the risks, or side-effects, that the Australian report mentions?

A: To date, the primary question has been "does it work?" Without this, there was no reason to proceed. Clearly, moving forward the impact of this technique has to be studied in parallel to its effectiveness.

Q: How are your own plans to launch experiments in 2010 in the Southern Ocean coming along? Still on track? If so, how large will these experiments be in terms of area ?

A: The first window for a project is 2010. The next generation projects that have been discussed by oceanographers are at the scale of 100 kilometres in diameter up to about 200 kilometres.

Q: Do you agree there is a finite limit to the amount of carbon sequestered by ocean iron fertilisation? (The report says about one billion tonnes is about the limit for iron seeding.)

A: Iron fertilisation is no silver bullet for climate change - which underscores the severity of the problem we have, and the urgency for immediate emissions reductions worldwide. World leaders here (at UN climate talks) in Poznan and next year at Copenhagen must find a way to force the largest emitters to agree to caps on emissions as soon as possible.

Scientific studies outline a potential between one billion tonnes of carbon (3.7 billion tonnes of CO2) to about 1.8 billion tonnes (6.6 billion tonnes of CO22) of carbon annually done over extended timeframes. You won't find numbers anywhere near this large with any other single approach.

Iron fertilisation must be considered alongside other techniques in the solutions portfolio - let it compete on its merits.

Q: How do you answer the critics who say humans have done enough damage to the environment and shouldn't be re-engineering the environment to fix a man-made problem, particularly since we don't fully understand the consequences?

A: This point of view prejudges iron fertilisation as dangerous, when in fact we know it's something that nature does herself and has done at much larger scales for much longer times in the geologic past.