Oysters as CDRers?

[Greg Rau]

https://grist.org/solutions/could-oysters-store-carbon/

“ scientists are studying two ways that oyster reefs suck up and store carbon. First, they keep the sediment in the river from washing away.

“There’s lots of organic matter in this sediment in the rivers here,” said John Carroll, a professor of biology at Georgia Southern. “So some of that organic matter gets buried behind the reefs.” 

Organic matter has carbon in it, so the oyster reefs can store that carbon and keep it from warming the planet. 

Second, by stabilizing the shoreline, oyster reefs also help marshes expand — and marshes themselves are very good at storing carbon. 

“As the marsh grasses grow toward the reefs, they’ll also trap a lot of carbon,” Carroll said.”

GR since oysters are significant CO2 emitters/acidifiers (respiration and shell formation), wouldn’t plant-based or artificial reefs make a lot more sense if you want to trap/grow/store carbon?

[Bhaskar M V]

Greg

Growing Oysters will certainly help CDR.

The full life cycle has to be analyzed.

Oysters can grow only if food and oxygen is available.

Diatom Algae are the natural food for Oysters and they also provide them with the oxygen required.

Oysters are NOT  "..CO2 emitters/acidifiers (respiration and shell formation),.."
Oysters consume Organic Carbon in their feed i.e., Diatom Algae and some of this is respired out as CO2 and 

some Carbon is released during shell formation and some retained in the shells. 

So the net result is that some Carbon is sequestered. 

Obviously 'plants' have to be grown to grow Oysters, animals can't grow unless there is food and oxygen and these are produced ONLY by plants.

The 'plants' to be grown are Diatoms. 

In Oceans CO2 is captured by 'Plants' mainly Diatoms and some of this Carbon is stored by Animals - oysters, corals, krill, fish, etc.

On Land CO2 is captured by Trees and stored in their own trucks.

Regards

Bhaskar

[Tom Goreau]

Oyster reefs trap organic carbon sediment, especially when grown with salt marsh grass and mussels. We greatly speed up growth of all these ecosystems using solar panels, restoring carbon sequestering habitats in places where they were eroding (see attachment).

 

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[Michael Hayes]

Some oyster farmers are opting for tank-based cultivation:

[...] Small oysters are put into the tank, and can grow to near-market size in five months instead of the up to three years they’d need in the ocean. They can also be grown year-round, instead of only when water temperatures are just right.

Nixon said he can produce 20,000 oysters per array. [...]

https://www.globalseafood.org/advocate/growing-oysters-in-a-garage-meet-the-maker-of-the-worlds-first-3d-printed-oyster-tank/#:~:text=Small%20oysters%20are%20put%20into,produce%2020%2C000%20oysters%20per%20array.

MH] The oyster crop may not be a CDR path itself, yet it can help pay for agricultural practices and related infrastructure that are. With fully confined cultivation systems, all outgassing can be managed/utilized. 

Embedding cultivation tanks, made of HDPE armored with Biorock, in fragile coastal areas such as eroding mangrove forests, might pay for the forest protection work while directly providing protection.

I'm currently investing in a cultivation tank design that can work in any environment. Small forest owners need a form of income that does not require cutting down trees, tank based aquaculture works. Ocean farmers need an infrastructure that can grow terrestrial crops as well aquatic crops. Growing CO2 hungry avocado trees in oceanic deserts is more than just plausable.

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[Tom Goreau]

Great idea, but the oysters need diatoms for food, so enclosed cultivation systems must also grow algae in pure culture.

 

That’s expensive, so it is only done for concentrated oyster spat in hatcheries, which are then put out into the ocean where the food is free and plentiful if they’re lucky, If not, they starve. Many places no longer have enough diatoms, only harmful algae stimulated by nutrient pollution.

 

With Biorock technology, oysters at a former Superfund toxic waste site in New York City grew 9 times faster in length, width, and thickness, or 729 times faster by volume in the summer growing season and they never stopped growing in the winter (see attachment).

 

We also greatly accelerate growth and carbon storage of coastal wetlands, a Biorock wetland for coastal water remediation is planned for the first UN Floating Sustainable City Initiative, which is planned for Busan, Korea.

 

This month we plan to set up a Biorock oyster culture system at a floating dock that will be a model for the kind of floating farms that you describe.

[Michael Hayes]

Tom, I'm glad to hear about the Biorock projects. The biological benefits of the work, specifically the bioelectric aspects, should be exciting to all marine minded folks. 

For those new to Integrated Multi-Trophic Aquaculture, below is a good state-of-the art overview. It is a rather complex system compared to typical feed systems, yet it is showing to be a reliable tool for environmental remediation.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/agricultural-and-biological-sciences/integrated-multi-trophic-aquaculture

A few drawbacks of reliance upon the free food in open water is the now rapidly changing marine environment, pathogens and grazer blooms, and the gross level of human toxins being released into the water. At yearly gigaton CDR scales, the more uncertainties that can be done away with the better, the only way to do that is through highly controlled reactor use.

However, using both open water and reactor-based operations together will likely be needed to reach GtC/y CDR levels, and there are second order synergies between them.

A simplistic example, seaweed releases CO2 at night which reduces it's CDR value, yet a nearby reactor farm can use that CO2 enriched water 24 hours a day to help grow more seaweed. If so, the CDR value of the open water crop would be increased.

[gattuso]

That is incorrect. Individual oysters are "CO2 emitters", both through respiration and calcification. As the later process precipitates CaCO3, it releases CO2 see:

Frankignoulle, M., Canon, C., & Gattuso, J.-P. (1994). Marine calcification as a source of carbon dioxide- Positive feedback of increasing atmospheric CO|2|. Limnology and Oceanography, 39(2), 458-462. https://doi.org/10.4319/lo.1994.39.2.0458

Jean-Pierre Gattuso 

[Tyler Cyronak]

Using oysters as CDR gets pretty complex, and is counterintuitive considering they release CO2 from seawater by taking up alkalinity for CaCO3 building and through respiration as Jean-Pierre pointed out. The calcium carbonate oysters create would have to be accounted for in a life cycle analysis as alkalinity removal (i.e., negative cdr). However, the build up of marsh behind the oyster reefs and subsequent blue carbon burial could be counted as CDR, plus alkalinity generation from marsh biogeochemical processes (sulfate reduction and sulfide burial) in the newly created sediments. Those processes would need to outweigh the oyster calcification and respiration.

[Tom Goreau]

Oysters also dump carbon-rich fecal pellets and create sediment deposition in their lee.

 

On top of that they do double duty because they dump carbon rich pseudo-fecal pellets as well!

 

Psuedo-feces is the stuff they prefilter out as unsuitable to swallow and digest, like the wrong kinds of algae, plastic, etc. and safely package to get rid of, so they don’t swallow it again (for those who don’t know their feces).

 

Oysters don’t just do doo, they do doo-doo, making them doubly efficient in clearing the waters: Chesapeake Bay waters used to be filtered every few days by oysters, but after they were wiped out by overharvesting it took months for the water to exchange with the ocean and for sediment, human and animal feces, and harmful algae blooms to clear. Since light no longer reached the bottom, the seagrass and bottom macro-algae that once fed the famous blue crabs died, then the crabs.

 

Other than coral reefs, oyster reefs provide the major structural barrier trapping and protecting carbon-rich coastal wetland sediments from storm erosion, and are therefore directly responsible for their carbon sequestration, which much outweighs calcification and respiration CO2 sources.

 

From: carbondiox...@googlegroups.com <carbondiox...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Tyler Cyronak <tcyr...@gmail.com>
Date: Tuesday, December 12, 2023 at 11:01 AM
To: Carbon Dioxide Removal <carbondiox...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: [CDR] Re: Oysters as CDRers?

Using oysters as CDR gets pretty complex, and is counterintuitive considering they release CO2 from seawater by taking up alkalinity for CaCO3 building and through respiration as Jean-Pierre pointed out. The calcium carbonate oysters create would have to be accounted for in a life cycle analysis as alkalinity removal (i.e., negative cdr). However, the build up of marsh behind the oyster reefs and subsequent blue carbon burial could be counted as CDR, plus alkalinity generation from marsh biogeochemical processes (sulfate reduction and sulfide burial) in the newly created sediments. Those processes would need to outweigh the oyster calcification and respiration.

On Tuesday, December 12, 2023 at 8:40:54 AM UTC-5 gattuso wrote:

That is incorrect. Individual oysters are "CO2 emitters", both through respiration and calcification. As the later process precipitates CaCO3, it releases CO2 see:

Frankignoulle, M., Canon, C., & Gattuso, J.-P. (1994). Marine calcification as a source of carbon dioxide- Positive feedback of increasing atmospheric CO|2|. Limnology and Oceanography, 39(2), 458-462. https://doi.org/10.4319/lo.1994.39.2.0458Error! Filename not specified.

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[Ken Caldeira]

Do we see large deposits of oyster generated organic matter in the geologic record?

Are there any fossil carbon reservoirs that are thought to have been generated by oyster beds?

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2017.0891

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[tcyr...@gmail.com]

I’m not sure about in the geological record, but modern oyster reef restoration can increase sediment and carbon accumulation behind the restored reefs and promote marsh growth.

 

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11852-021-00829-0

 

Our study shows that oyster reef construction alters the surrounding sedimentary system in ways that dramatically enhance carbon accumulation over a surprisingly large area in the first few years after construction. Areal accumulation rates are higher than those of terrestrial ecosystems, and comparable to the rates reported for other coastal ecosystems (Mcleod et al. 2011 and Fodrie et al. 2017). Constructed oyster reefs can also reduce the erosion rates of nearby salt marshes, protecting the carbon there, as well (Ridge et al. 2017). Thus, the construction of a relatively small area of oyster reef can have a relatively large impact on the carbon within the whole system. However, the persistence of that carbon is likely dependent on the stability of the constructed reefs.

 

 

From: Ken Caldeira <kcal...@carnegiescience.edu>
Sent: Tuesday, December 12, 2023 11:28 AM
To: Tom Goreau <gor...@globalcoral.org>

[Tom Goreau]

Not sure, they are best developed at times of sea level rise and high erosion inland, so tend to mark transgressions of sea level like those we are about to see in coming years, decades, and millenia, and which are characteristic of oil source rocks.

 

From: Ken Caldeira <kcal...@carnegiescience.edu>

Date: Tuesday, December 12, 2023 at 11:29 AM
To: Tom Goreau <gor...@globalcoral.org>

[Bhaskar M V]

Sure. Individual Oysters are CO2 emitters, but in the Ocean Oysters don't exist as individuals, they are a part of a large ecosystem.

Where does the Carbon in CO2 exhaled or released come from?

The Carbon comes from the Organic Carbon in the food they consume.

Where does the food come from?

It comes from the Phytoplankton that consume CO2 and convert it into OC.

The carbon in the shells of Oysters is sequestered.

The Carbon exhaled and released by them is merely recycling of the CO2 initially consumed by Phytoplankton.

We just need to work out the ratio of the Carbon in the Shells to the CO2 consumed by Phytoplankton, it may be 10% or so.

Thus in each Nitrogen / Food cycle, ~10% of the Carbon consumed is sequestered. 

Regards

Bhaskar

Director

Kadambari Consultants Pvt Ltd

Hyderabad. India

Ph. & WhatsApp : +91 92465 08213

https://www.linkedin.com/in/bhaskarmv/

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[Bhaskar M V]

Where is the Carbon corresponding to the Oxygen in the atmosphere?

Oxygen in the atmosphere is about 1.1 million billion tons, 23% by mass, 20.9% by volume.

All of this is from Photosynthesis.

Carbon corresponding to this is ~400,000 billion tons.

Where is this?

Accounting for Carbon in a piecemeal manner is not the right way.

Carbon sequestered due to Ocean Biological Pump, Shellfish, Corals, Vertebrate Fish, Whales, etc., are individual processes.

What is the Gross amount of Carbon sequestered in Oceans, corresponding to the O2 in the atmosphere?

Regards

Bhaskar

Director

Kadambari Consultants Pvt Ltd

Hyderabad. India

Ph. & WhatsApp : +91 92465 08213

https://www.linkedin.com/in/bhaskarmv/

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[Tom Goreau]

This is very well understood, the organic carbon has been buried in sediments.

[Bhaskar M V]

Where? on Land or on Oceanbed?

i.e., how much Carbon has been sequestered due to Photosynthesis on Land vs in Oceans?

Regards

Bhaskar

Director

Kadambari Consultants Pvt Ltd

Hyderabad. India

Ph. & WhatsApp : +91 92465 08213

https://www.linkedin.com/in/bhaskarmv/

[Tom Goreau]

The organic carbon in sediments includes BOTH marine sediments and brackish and freshwater wetlands and soils, but most NET organic deposition is in the ocean.

 

From: Bhaskar M V <bhaska...@gmail.com>

Date: Wednesday, December 13, 2023 at 7:59 AM
To: Tom Goreau <gor...@globalcoral.org>