I would not rule out air capture of CO2. I’ve written a lot about it over the years and while it remains much too expensive, I would think it’s going to be more acceptable to the public that marine capture. Most likely we will need both because, as you note, mitigation isn’t going well. I’d love to read more about your work.
If you look at airplane designs from 1903 to like 1950, you see a ton of variety. As the industry matured, one particular design proved to have a cost advantage and which is why these days all airliners look sort of similar.
My guess is we’ll see something similar in carbon dioxide removal. More expensive solutions are not going to be able to compete with less expensive ones.
Phytoplankton is bound to win, because it’s two orders of magnitude less expensive.
The big issue is that NFix is not proven yet, while emissions reduction is.
Of course, I see your point: this MAY be the solution we need, it’s crazy we aren’t pouring a lot of resources into exploring it! I agree.
On the other hand, saying “emissions reduction failed, this is the only way forward” is overplaying it. If we’re in a world where NFix doesn’t scale, we’re stuck with old emissions reduction as our only path.
I Have been putting some thought into the mismatch between ocean decline and co2 removal through fertilization and came up with a different solution around priming sections of the ocean before natural pulses arrive. From my understanding the rate of natural decay can greatly exceed or be on par with capture depending on the type of nutrient and the ecological integrity of the ocean patch in question. Since we have a good understanding of the different natural pulse dynamics and the state of the ocean, by getting ahead of the pulse and applying a preemptive boost the absorption rates of the natural pulse can greatly increase. This can also be directed in the naturally nutrient poor areas and in both cases we are not adding huge amounts of nutrients to alter the balance we are just capturing and using the natural cycle more efficiently. This may be a good safe path way to involving the greater community in addressing some of the safety issues and help prove the technology. We have all the apparatus at our disposal for this and just a little coordination and retooling is required. Some brief AI enhanced articles are on my Substack if you wish to review the process and AI generated results. I agree with this process and it can offer so much more than just straight co2 removal.
Your initial lede is plain wrong - at least from the point of view of the homeowner. Simply opening the drain without stopping the flow is going to cost the homeowner money as long as the flow continues.
That is the central challenge for all biological carbon removal approaches. Capturing CO₂ is relatively easy; storing it for long periods is much harder.
Phytoplankton convert dissolved CO₂ into biomass through photosynthesis. If that biomass is rapidly consumed, decomposed, or respired near the surface, much of the carbon simply returns to the atmosphere on timescales of days to years.
For phytoplankton-based carbon removal to have climate value, a meaningful fraction of that carbon must be transferred into longer-lived reservoirs. This can occur through several pathways:
-Sinking organic particles that transport carbon into the deep ocean, where it may remain isolated from the atmosphere for centuries to millennia.
-Burial in marine sediments, where carbon can be stored for much longer periods.
-Conversion into dissolved organic carbon pools that persist in the ocean for decades to thousands of years.
-Enhancement of ocean alkalinity, which stores carbon as bicarbonate and carbonate ions rather than biomass.
The question we need the answer to isn't "How much carbon do the phytoplankton absorb?" but is going to be "What fraction remains out of contact with the atmosphere, and for how long?"
Most of the scientific debate around marine carbon dioxide removal is therefore focused on permanence, measurement, and verification of these long-term storage pathways, rather than on photosynthetic carbon uptake itself.
i’ve been interested in carbon removal since maybe 2006. I remember reading about stuff like this and growing algae that had phytoplankton in algae ponds. Am i remembering this wrong? Anyway if one did it in a large scale would that screw up the ocean? i remember reading that the phytoplankton simply sinks to the bottom into the sand?
So what are the mCDR options that you are currently looking at Quico? The comments seem to be discussing carbon capture, but I came over here because the biological mCDR was the most interesting part of the post. WHat is the state of play? What is being looked at?
Free rider problems seem overwhelming here. You should read John Kerry’s memoirs on trying to negotiate emissions abatement with China. Just an impossible task!
That’s a fair challenge, and I’d point to South Africa as a useful counterexample. Ending apartheid didn’t require a binding treaty between governments. It happened through divestment, boycotts, and diplomatic isolation, driven by a level of public moral consensus that was strong enough to act on without anyone needing to formally measure it first.
The free rider problem you’re describing is real, but it’s specific to negotiations between governments, where each government can defect without immediate consequence because the cost of acting unilaterally falls on them while the benefit is shared globally. That’s the dynamic that sank Kerry’s negotiations with China.
But individuals, companies, and institutions outside that negotiating table don’t face the same incentive structure. A pension fund, a university, a consumer, none of them need global consensus to act. They just need visibility into who’s actually cooperating and who isn’t.
What’s missing right now is precision and speed. The apartheid consensus took decades to build through journalism and slow accumulating testimony. If you could clearly expose the gap between what a government is doing and what it’s own citizens actually want, you create a different kind of pressure, one that doesn’t rely on governments negotiating with each other at all.
That’s the bet behind what our group is working on. Not negotiating climate policy, just making public opinion visible enough, in enough places, that the same kind of bottom up pressure that ended apartheid could happen faster and with better targeting.
Take Nippon Steel vs. Baowu, China’s biggest steel mill. Under Japan’s aggressive decarbonization policies, Nippon Steel has a legal obligation to emit less carbon dioxide year after year. Baowu doesn’t. But they’re direct competitors.
Decarbonizing steel-making is really expensive. Hundreds of dollars per ton of CO2, in an industry with thin margins. The compliance cost differential could very well destroy Nippon Steel’s competitiveness. All because China free rides on Japan’s decarbonization policies.
This kind of dynamic is repeated again and again under the Paris Agreement. Without a world sovereign authority to force everyone to decarbonize following a uniform set of rules, countries that try to decarbonize only succeed at destroying their own firms’ competitiveness.
Fair point on the trade dynamic, and you’re probably right that something like a carbon border tariff is the actual tool for that specific problem. I’d guess the EU’s CBAM is closer to solving it than anything we’re proposing.
But there’s a layer underneath the trade question that I think matters more in the long run. Right now the people actually making decisions inside a company like Baowu are almost completely insulated from any real social consequence. They’re protected by scale, by national borders, by the fact that “China’s steel industry” is too abstract for anyone to actually feel exposed by. Nobody specific ever owns the decision.
This is actually the core reason we’re building this. When the printing press made mass communication possible for the first time, it took Europe roughly thirty years of religious war to learn how to handle that level of exposure and disagreement without tearing itself apart. We think we’re in a similar moment now, except the stakes are higher and the timeline is shorter, because the technologies we’re capable of building today don’t leave the same room for a multi-decade war to sort it out.
We’re not hoping to avoid the discomfort of mass visibility. We’re trying to deliberately speed up the process of learning to handle it, judging each other with more context and less reflexive outrage, before circumstances force that lesson on us the hard way. Making local and global opinion visible at a granular level, what people in a specific company or industry actually think about what’s happening around them, is part of that. It won’t fix a cost differential in steel production. But it’s aimed at the bigger and more urgent problem underneath these kinds of disputes, which is that our capacity to coordinate and judge each other hasn’t kept pace with our capacity to do damage to one another.
This keeps the concession on trade so the response doesn’t feel evasive, bu
At the risk of sounding insane, has there been no consideration of oceanic surface seeding of phytoplankton feedstock of the oceanic gyres? As an example, Barbados is placed with the North Atlantic gyre and generates ~20,000 cubic meters of sewage daily. If one wants <$10 per ton CO2 storage, you’d have to keep transport distances very short, which means bringing plankton and fertilizer together at optimal growing depths. Presumably lots of densely-populated metros in the global south might be interested in delivering their sewage farther out to sea and turning a tidy profit in the process…
You’re not a million miles off. The North Atlantic is probably not the best target, though, as it’s already fertilized by dust deposition from the Sahara. Sewage is going to be a tough sell: we’re looking at adding small amounts of particular minerals that seem to be in short supply in given ocean patches.
That’s an amazing amount of misinformation to cram into such a short post!
You start by confusing electricity generation with energy, eluding the huge chunk of hard to abate emissions that can’t be electrified away, ignore buildings, food, land use, all on the way to way to concluding that the US, where emissions have been falling since 2008, is the big hold up.
This is the problem with politicized climate narratives. People sincerely trying to grapple with the problem end up intimately convinced of nonsense because it fits the narrative.
Emissions have been falling in the US until the current administration. I was talking about the global consensus, which was all but in place until Trump.
And energy emissions are the biggest chunk. Buildings are made with energy that can be electrified, food is made with fertiliser that can be largely abated with cleaner energy.
Remember that all the surplus co2 comes from burning fossil fuels, which produce heat. This can, nearly always, be replaced by electricity generated from non-fossil sources.
The narrative of capture and storage is, right now, a fantasy. So the emphasis on reducing emissions from energy generation, largely through renewable electricity, is the correct place for emphasis.
I would not rule out air capture of CO2. I’ve written a lot about it over the years and while it remains much too expensive, I would think it’s going to be more acceptable to the public that marine capture. Most likely we will need both because, as you note, mitigation isn’t going well. I’d love to read more about your work.
If you look at airplane designs from 1903 to like 1950, you see a ton of variety. As the industry matured, one particular design proved to have a cost advantage and which is why these days all airliners look sort of similar.
My guess is we’ll see something similar in carbon dioxide removal. More expensive solutions are not going to be able to compete with less expensive ones.
Phytoplankton is bound to win, because it’s two orders of magnitude less expensive.
The big issue is that NFix is not proven yet, while emissions reduction is.
Of course, I see your point: this MAY be the solution we need, it’s crazy we aren’t pouring a lot of resources into exploring it! I agree.
On the other hand, saying “emissions reduction failed, this is the only way forward” is overplaying it. If we’re in a world where NFix doesn’t scale, we’re stuck with old emissions reduction as our only path.
I Have been putting some thought into the mismatch between ocean decline and co2 removal through fertilization and came up with a different solution around priming sections of the ocean before natural pulses arrive. From my understanding the rate of natural decay can greatly exceed or be on par with capture depending on the type of nutrient and the ecological integrity of the ocean patch in question. Since we have a good understanding of the different natural pulse dynamics and the state of the ocean, by getting ahead of the pulse and applying a preemptive boost the absorption rates of the natural pulse can greatly increase. This can also be directed in the naturally nutrient poor areas and in both cases we are not adding huge amounts of nutrients to alter the balance we are just capturing and using the natural cycle more efficiently. This may be a good safe path way to involving the greater community in addressing some of the safety issues and help prove the technology. We have all the apparatus at our disposal for this and just a little coordination and retooling is required. Some brief AI enhanced articles are on my Substack if you wish to review the process and AI generated results. I agree with this process and it can offer so much more than just straight co2 removal.
Your initial lede is plain wrong - at least from the point of view of the homeowner. Simply opening the drain without stopping the flow is going to cost the homeowner money as long as the flow continues.
Whilst being sceptical about your area of research I’m really interested in it.
I work in reduced emissions steel, and I see a great deal of opportunity in that area.
In biological co2 capture, how do you ensure hat once captured by the phytoplankton that it remains, and doesn’t just release as they are broken down?
A proportion will fall into the depths and might even be mineralised over millions of years.
But the rest? Won’t it just return to the atmosphere after a few hundred years?
That is the central challenge for all biological carbon removal approaches. Capturing CO₂ is relatively easy; storing it for long periods is much harder.
Phytoplankton convert dissolved CO₂ into biomass through photosynthesis. If that biomass is rapidly consumed, decomposed, or respired near the surface, much of the carbon simply returns to the atmosphere on timescales of days to years.
For phytoplankton-based carbon removal to have climate value, a meaningful fraction of that carbon must be transferred into longer-lived reservoirs. This can occur through several pathways:
-Sinking organic particles that transport carbon into the deep ocean, where it may remain isolated from the atmosphere for centuries to millennia.
-Burial in marine sediments, where carbon can be stored for much longer periods.
-Conversion into dissolved organic carbon pools that persist in the ocean for decades to thousands of years.
-Enhancement of ocean alkalinity, which stores carbon as bicarbonate and carbonate ions rather than biomass.
The question we need the answer to isn't "How much carbon do the phytoplankton absorb?" but is going to be "What fraction remains out of contact with the atmosphere, and for how long?"
Most of the scientific debate around marine carbon dioxide removal is therefore focused on permanence, measurement, and verification of these long-term storage pathways, rather than on photosynthetic carbon uptake itself.
i’ve been interested in carbon removal since maybe 2006. I remember reading about stuff like this and growing algae that had phytoplankton in algae ponds. Am i remembering this wrong? Anyway if one did it in a large scale would that screw up the ocean? i remember reading that the phytoplankton simply sinks to the bottom into the sand?
Working on a fat post that answers all these questions :D
Next week!
So what are the mCDR options that you are currently looking at Quico? The comments seem to be discussing carbon capture, but I came over here because the biological mCDR was the most interesting part of the post. WHat is the state of play? What is being looked at?
As I mentioned to David, I really do wish there was more effort for finding world consensus, then we could stop the flow in much more efficiently.
Our group has a plan on how to find world consensus and we’re looking for people to help.
Free rider problems seem overwhelming here. You should read John Kerry’s memoirs on trying to negotiate emissions abatement with China. Just an impossible task!
That’s a fair challenge, and I’d point to South Africa as a useful counterexample. Ending apartheid didn’t require a binding treaty between governments. It happened through divestment, boycotts, and diplomatic isolation, driven by a level of public moral consensus that was strong enough to act on without anyone needing to formally measure it first.
The free rider problem you’re describing is real, but it’s specific to negotiations between governments, where each government can defect without immediate consequence because the cost of acting unilaterally falls on them while the benefit is shared globally. That’s the dynamic that sank Kerry’s negotiations with China.
But individuals, companies, and institutions outside that negotiating table don’t face the same incentive structure. A pension fund, a university, a consumer, none of them need global consensus to act. They just need visibility into who’s actually cooperating and who isn’t.
What’s missing right now is precision and speed. The apartheid consensus took decades to build through journalism and slow accumulating testimony. If you could clearly expose the gap between what a government is doing and what it’s own citizens actually want, you create a different kind of pressure, one that doesn’t rely on governments negotiating with each other at all.
That’s the bet behind what our group is working on. Not negotiating climate policy, just making public opinion visible enough, in enough places, that the same kind of bottom up pressure that ended apartheid could happen faster and with better targeting.
Excuse the use of AI here, it helps me a lot.
Take Nippon Steel vs. Baowu, China’s biggest steel mill. Under Japan’s aggressive decarbonization policies, Nippon Steel has a legal obligation to emit less carbon dioxide year after year. Baowu doesn’t. But they’re direct competitors.
Decarbonizing steel-making is really expensive. Hundreds of dollars per ton of CO2, in an industry with thin margins. The compliance cost differential could very well destroy Nippon Steel’s competitiveness. All because China free rides on Japan’s decarbonization policies.
This kind of dynamic is repeated again and again under the Paris Agreement. Without a world sovereign authority to force everyone to decarbonize following a uniform set of rules, countries that try to decarbonize only succeed at destroying their own firms’ competitiveness.
Fair point on the trade dynamic, and you’re probably right that something like a carbon border tariff is the actual tool for that specific problem. I’d guess the EU’s CBAM is closer to solving it than anything we’re proposing.
But there’s a layer underneath the trade question that I think matters more in the long run. Right now the people actually making decisions inside a company like Baowu are almost completely insulated from any real social consequence. They’re protected by scale, by national borders, by the fact that “China’s steel industry” is too abstract for anyone to actually feel exposed by. Nobody specific ever owns the decision.
This is actually the core reason we’re building this. When the printing press made mass communication possible for the first time, it took Europe roughly thirty years of religious war to learn how to handle that level of exposure and disagreement without tearing itself apart. We think we’re in a similar moment now, except the stakes are higher and the timeline is shorter, because the technologies we’re capable of building today don’t leave the same room for a multi-decade war to sort it out.
We’re not hoping to avoid the discomfort of mass visibility. We’re trying to deliberately speed up the process of learning to handle it, judging each other with more context and less reflexive outrage, before circumstances force that lesson on us the hard way. Making local and global opinion visible at a granular level, what people in a specific company or industry actually think about what’s happening around them, is part of that. It won’t fix a cost differential in steel production. But it’s aimed at the bigger and more urgent problem underneath these kinds of disputes, which is that our capacity to coordinate and judge each other hasn’t kept pace with our capacity to do damage to one another.
This keeps the concession on trade so the response doesn’t feel evasive, bu
At the risk of sounding insane, has there been no consideration of oceanic surface seeding of phytoplankton feedstock of the oceanic gyres? As an example, Barbados is placed with the North Atlantic gyre and generates ~20,000 cubic meters of sewage daily. If one wants <$10 per ton CO2 storage, you’d have to keep transport distances very short, which means bringing plankton and fertilizer together at optimal growing depths. Presumably lots of densely-populated metros in the global south might be interested in delivering their sewage farther out to sea and turning a tidy profit in the process…
You’re not a million miles off. The North Atlantic is probably not the best target, though, as it’s already fertilized by dust deposition from the Sahara. Sewage is going to be a tough sell: we’re looking at adding small amounts of particular minerals that seem to be in short supply in given ocean patches.
Hmm, thank you for thoughtful reply!
The two are not equivalent. Removing co2 is harder than not adding it in the first place.
That’s not to say that capture and storage is not an important part of the mix.
But there is no possible storage solution that is as good as the one provided by nature in fossil fuels (and rocks).
Stopping the flow requires coordinated efforts throughout the world. If this was easy, we would already be doing it.
Carbon capture can be done without world consensus.
Personally, I would like to work on the World consensus, part a lot harder, but I understand that we shouldn’t hold our breath for that to happen.
If anybody’s interested in our group plan for World consensus, just let me know
The world consensus is on its way, because renewables and storage are now actually cheaper, and more stable, than fossils.
The op is correct that it is slowing down too slowly, but the rate is increasing.
All except the US that is.
That’s an amazing amount of misinformation to cram into such a short post!
You start by confusing electricity generation with energy, eluding the huge chunk of hard to abate emissions that can’t be electrified away, ignore buildings, food, land use, all on the way to way to concluding that the US, where emissions have been falling since 2008, is the big hold up.
This is the problem with politicized climate narratives. People sincerely trying to grapple with the problem end up intimately convinced of nonsense because it fits the narrative.
Added to that problem of misinformation, is the fact that a lot of people think that they’re in the majority, and that’s on both sides of the debates.
Climate is a big problem, but finding worldwide consensus is bigger
Emissions have been falling in the US until the current administration. I was talking about the global consensus, which was all but in place until Trump.
And energy emissions are the biggest chunk. Buildings are made with energy that can be electrified, food is made with fertiliser that can be largely abated with cleaner energy.
Remember that all the surplus co2 comes from burning fossil fuels, which produce heat. This can, nearly always, be replaced by electricity generated from non-fossil sources.
The narrative of capture and storage is, right now, a fantasy. So the emphasis on reducing emissions from energy generation, largely through renewable electricity, is the correct place for emphasis.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co-emissions-by-region?tab=table&time=2016..2021
It's not hard to look this stuff up. U.S. emissions were 5.25 billion tons in 2016 and 5.02 in 2021, then 4.90 in 2024 (the latest there's data for.)
In the same period, emissions from China rose from 9.74 to 12.29 billion tons.
It's hard to debate people who refuse to look at facts.
“. I was talking about the global consensus, which was all but in place until Trump.”
You assume that there was consensus, and then you assume the consensus changed with Trump?
You actually think that the majority of the people of the world changed their minds when Trump got elected?
This is the heart of the real problem, nobody actually knows what the real consensus is.
I know it works in your favour when you can use it in your argument so you don’t have to worry about actual facts.
Perhaps we should be fixing this lack of ability to measure public opinion, don’t you think?
The consensus of nations changed when Trump withdrew from the Paris agreement.
Of course what people think didn’t change.
typo in title