Precipitation and co2

[Cory]

If you took 5ppm of calcium from the ocean and precipitated it as calcium carbonate (somehow?) would that make a big impact on global co2 concentrations to alter climate change?

 

[Randy Holmes-Farley Verified Community Expert]

It's a huge amount of carbonate relative to CO2 in the air, but what impact that might have on air CO2 is less clear.

Volume of the world's oceans: 1.3 x 10^21 L

5 ppm (5 mg/L) of calcium takes out 7.6 mg carbonate per L.

Total carbonate removed is ~1 x 10^22 mg or 11,023,113,109,243 tons of carbonate

Total CO2 in the atmosphere: 3,210,000,000,000 tons of CO2

So you would be removing more carbonate than there is CO2 in the air.

 

[Cory]

It's a huge amount of carbonate relative to CO2 in the air, but what impact that might have on air CO2 is less clear.

Volume of the world's oceans: 1.3 x 10^21 L

5 ppm (5 mg/L) of calcium takes out 7.6 mg carbonate per L.

Total carbonate removed is ~1 x 10^22 mg or 11,023,113,109,243 tons of carbonate

Total CO2 in the atmosphere: 3,210,000,000,000 tons of CO2

So you would be removing more carbonate than there is CO2 in the air.

Oh wow thats overkill! So its safe to say precipitating even a minuscule amount of calcium from the ocean (which wouldn't likely effect much) would solve climate change. I wonder if solar powered electrolysis (or solar something) could accomplish that over time? Love calculations like this! So we are talking like .01ppm calcium to accomplish pre industrial levels of co2?

 

[blasterman]

FYI - Seawater is already saturated with calcium carbonate.

Its those big frozen methane deposits on the ocean floor that scare me.

 

[taricha]

Every time I see a picture of the White Cliffs of Dover, I think about how much CO2 some ancient calcifying organisms (coccolithophores) fixed into stone.

 

[Cory]

Every time I see a picture of the White Cliffs of Dover, I think about how much CO2 some ancient calcifying organisms (coccolithophores) fixed into stone.

If we could just control them to grow!

 

[taricha]

If we could just control them to grow!

Part of the hope of the Iron open ocean fertilization experiments was to maybe easily spur growth of carbon fixing phyto.
Early experiments grew less than they hoped. Science is hard!

 

[Cory]

Part of the hope of the Iron open ocean fertilization experiments was to maybe easily spur growth of carbon fixing phyto.
Early experiments grew less than they hoped. Science is hard!

Lol they just need to dose some phosphates and nitrates along with iron. Too bad!