The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has signed off on a long-planned experiment that aims to fight climate change by pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and storing it in the ocean for thousands of years.
It took two years — and two public comment periods — for the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution to earn the permit for the LOC-NESS project that’s set to take place this summer, 60 miles northeast of Provincetown.
WHOI Associate Scientist Adam Subhas said his team will use a research boat to release 17,000 pounds of liquid sodium hydroxide, which will mix into seawater over the course of four to 12 hours.
“And then we're going to spend the next seven days, 24 hours a day, on a research vessel monitoring where this patch goes, how it spreads out, the biological response, any other environmental impacts, and also the efficiency of this reaction of taking up carbon from the atmosphere and storing it as bicarbonate,” he said.
If the plan works, he said, the approach also could de-acidify seawater.
“We just need to know what's on the table, right? We need to what's going to work. What are the benefits? What are the trade-offs? How effective are they? And we're really excited for this research,” Subhas said.
WHOI initially withdrew its proposal to the EPA and pushed back from its target date last summer after losing access to a research boat.
But the delay, Subhas said, gave his team time to do additional testing.
“We just got done doing a sort of simulation, a dry run of how this will actually work in a 10 million liter open air, naval test tank in New Jersey in March.”
In a statement, the EPA said the experiment would not “unreasonably degrade or endanger” human health, the marine environment, or the fishing industry, despite some concerns from fishermen.
“We were committed from day one to make sure that this was a rigorous and environmentally benign experiment,” Subhas said. “And we're really happy that all these agencies have concurred with that assessment and that we're able to move forward here.”
Jaime Palter, who studies ocean circulation as a professor of oceanography at the University of Rhode Island, is not involved in the project, but said it sounds promising.
“[The ocean] has 50 times as much carbon as the atmosphere. So changing the ocean storage of carbon a little bit can have a big impact on the atmosphere and a small impact on the ocean,” she said.
Palter said she has “essentially no concerns” about the experiment’s safety.
“They have done so much to prove how small a perturbation it will be. Like the challenge for them will be detecting it right, not hurting something. It is a very, very tiny thing in a very huge ocean.”
Both scientists said that to avoid the worst impacts of climate change, the world needs to reduce carbon emissions, not just store carbon. But, it’s complicated.
“I'll be the first to say that this is not a silver bullet,” Subhas said. “This is going to be part of a whole portfolio of solutions that requires the biggest slice of that pie to be emissions reductions.” But, he added, “emissions reductions need to be supplemented by these carbon dioxide removal techniques in order to hit these warming targets.”
