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Posts Tagged ‘carbom’

Global warming is mainly caused by green house gases especially carbon oxide. Carbon capture is necessary to reduce this global warming among other efforts. Many 3g technologies are being put forward to tackle the rising carbon dioxide. Some have not helped in sustainable development while others are not just feasible. There hasn’t been an outright discovery to capture carbon till now.  However, we need to sail through the possibility of finding one otherwise our only way forward is south.

Any suggested methods of carbon capture should be ecologically safe. It should be economical and sustainable, which means the captured carbon has to stay that way for a number of years.

Naturally, plants capture carbon. However, once they die they release the carbon back into the atmosphere. Also with the accelerated emission of carbon doubled with cropping problems and deforestation, the remaining plants aren’t able to take in more carbon. They have become saturated. A team of American scientists seem to have found a way though for capturing carbon through plants. If crop residues are buried in the bottoms of the deep oceans it will make sure the carbon remain captured. This is similar to putting back the carbon as sediments in deep water which enabled the formation of fossil fuels millions of years ago. It is estimated this process can mitigate 15 percent of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
The team suggested that these crop residues could be baled and carried to ocean sites and then stabilize it with stones and sunk. They say this technology is feasible because of the oxygen deficient deep ocean waters ensuring the residues do not degrade.

We have heard of soil sequestration many times in recent past. This method ensures soils store up to 2 petagram (Pg) of carbon every year. (1 Pg=1 trillion kilogram) What it does is once crops are harvested the residues are ploughed back into the soil. It enables the carbon to stay underground that way for a few years.  In about 20 years almost more than 90 percent are lost in the soil due to decay and degradation.

There are other methods also for capturing carbon. However, they are not as efficient as the ones I have mentioned above. For instance, Forest capture is another form of capturing carbon. It captures 0.1-3 Pg of carbon annually. But with time the ability to capture reduces drastically. Forest fires and deforestation doesn’t help either releasing much of the captured carbon into the atmosphere.

Another method which hasn’t fully grown is ocean fertilization. Here iron dust is sprayed across the ocean to create an algal boom. 1-2 Pg of carbon can be removed annually with this. However the problem is algal die after a point of time and 60-80% of the captured carbon is emitted back after their deaths.

With the lack of efficiency in capturing carbon with some of the methods, the sinking crop residual method, the first one we discussed, sounds like the most effective one among all existing technologies. It is cheap as the residual comes naturally in the process of crop cultivation. The scientist group, however, warn against complete removal of crop residue as this will negatively affect the carbon flow in the soil. Also there could be unwanted changes underneath the ocean floor.

To conclude, scientists have been trying hard for ways to counter the dangerous carbon level in the atmosphere. They’ve been able to come up with few interesting ideas but all of them are running short in some way or the other. There needs to be an absolute sharing of knowledge and technology among scientists of the developed nations. The sooner, the lesser the destruction will be for us.