HPAC meeting with Chris Vivian on Ocean CDR: August 24, 4:30 PM EDT.

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rob...@rtulip.net

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Aug 21, 2023, 4:48:31 PM8/21/23
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Healthy Planet Action Coalition meeting this Thursday August 24, 4:30 PM EDT  (= 9.30 pm UK = 6.30 am Friday Australia AEST )

 

Meeting link is https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88954851189?pwd=WVZoeTBnN3kyZFoyLzYxZ1JNbDFPUT09

 

Chris Vivian: Ocean Carbon Dioxide Removal and Governance

 

HPAC has great pleasure in welcoming Dr Chris Vivian to present at this week’s meeting.  Chris is a regular participant in discussions about effective responses to the climate crisis.  His talk on Ocean Carbon Dioxide Removal and Governance will introduce these themes to open dialogue with meeting participants.  Chris is a member of GESAMP, the Joint Group of Experts on the Scientific Aspects of Marine Protection.  His resume below is from http://www.gesamp.org/about/members/chris-vivian

 

Chris Vivian has worked for Cefas, the Centre for Environment, Fisheries and Aquaculture Science, an agency of the UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), and its predecessor since 1986. He received a BSc in Geology and Oceanography and a PhD in Marine Geochemistry at University College of Swansea in Wales, followed by an 18 months research fellowship at Imperial College, London. He has specialised in advising on the impact of human activities on the marine environment, particularly the disposal of wastes at sea. He has had a long involvement with the OSPAR Convention and the London Convention/London Protocol. He was the Chairman of the Scientific Groups of the London Convention and London Protocol from 2008 to 2011 and the Chairman of the OSPAR Convention’s Biodiversity Committee that dealt with species/habitat protection issues as well as the impacts of human activities from 2006 to 2010. Chris is a member of the Central Dredging Association (CEDA), the International Navigation Congress (PIANC), the Estuarine and Brackish Water Science Association (EBSA) and as a Fellow of the Institute for Marine Engineering, Science and Technology (IMAREST).

 

Hope to see you there

 

Robert Tulip

https://www.healthyplanetaction.org/

 

Jim Baird

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Aug 24, 2023, 9:13:21 PM8/24/23
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Dr. Vivian pointed out a today’s meeting science moves on.

 

The thing is the paper the GESAMP claimed, its based its assessment,” that implemented at a large scale TG would be temporary, regionally heterogeneous and present the type of termination risks usually associated with solar geoengineering approaches, was a work of science fiction from the outset.

 

And what the GESAMP  said verbatim,  on page 76 of the  GESAMP REPORTS & STUDIES No. 98 – MARINE GEOENGINEERING was:

 

“Heat pipe OTEC (also called ‘Thermodynamic geo[1]engineering’) to cool surface waters could effectively reduce warming associated with climate change but implemented at a large scale such effects would be temporary, regionally heterogeneous and present the type of termination risks usually associated with solar geoengineering approaches (Kwiatkowski et al., 2015). Large scale deployment of OTEC heat pipes for purposes of thermodynamic geoengineering would be potentially disruptive to the marine environment considering that, by definition, it would significantly reduce sea surface temperatures on a regional scale while having all the same localized environmental impacts as conventional OTEC.”

 

The Kwiatkowski paper modelled a vertical diffusivity in the top 1000 m of the water column at a rate of 60 cm2 s-1. Whereas  Thermodynamic Geoengineering would actually upwell heat, not water, at a rate of 1 cm/day. In other words, over less than 1//5,000,000 of the rate of perturbation modelled.

 

Furthermore the authors of this paper where admonition in a paper An Evaluation of the Large-Scale Implementation of Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion (OTEC) Using an Ocean General Circulation Model with Low-Complexity Atmospheric Feedback Effects by Jia et al that “Kwiatkowski et al. used a fully coupled (atmosphere, land, ocean and sea ice) model, the Community Earth System Model (CESM), to explore the consequences of boosting the background vertical diffusivity of the top 1000 m in the ocean by a factor of 600. They argued that the resulting disruption of the thermocline from such greatly enhanced mixing could be regarded as a proxy for the large-scale effects of technologies such as OTEC, which rely on seawater properties from different vertical layers using pipes and pumps. Although OTEC is the first word of the article, the proposed numerical experiments may not be applicable in the context of OTEC. On one hand, the upper-ocean vertical diffusivity is altered everywhere, while OTEC could only be developed in selected tropical areas, over about a third of the whole ocean. Moreover, the magnitude of the imposed upper-ocean vertical diffusivity would preclude the production of OTEC power anywhere since the vertical temperature difference available in the disrupted thermocline is only a few degrees, far shy of the 20 ◦C typically considered for OTEC feasibility.

 

In spite of Dr. Vivian’s claim the GESAMP has no reason to retract its assessment of Thermodynamic Geoengineering, I submit anyone with a technology that it wishes to advance, yet is confronted by the situation in which I find myself  would also no doubt scream bloody murder. Particularly if they were convinced their children and grandchildren were facing a risk that they are certain could be avoided.

 

Regards

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Tom Goreau

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Aug 25, 2023, 9:14:57 AM8/25/23
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The GESAMP statement gets it ack-bassward!

 

They said that TG was a risk because it would lower ocean surface temperature!

 

That’s the biggest benefit!

 

Chris Vivian

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Aug 25, 2023, 9:47:00 AM8/25/23
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Tom,

 

No, we did not get is ass-backwards as very widespread significant reductions in temperature could be disruptive albeit they may seem desirable in current circumstances.

 

However, Jim Baird was objecting to the first part of the text ““Heat pipe OTEC (also called ‘Thermodynamic geoengineering’) to cool surface waters could effectively reduce warming associated with climate change but implemented at a large scale such effects would be temporary, regionally heterogeneous and present the type of termination risks usually associated with solar geoengineering approaches (Kwiatkowski et al., 2015)”. This text was derived from that paper where it said “Such studies have also indicated that the termination of processes bringing warmer surface waters into the deep ocean has the potential to cause near surface temperatures to rise higher than they would have if pipes had never been implemented (Oschlies et al 2010, Keller et al 2014)”.

 

Chris.

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Tom Goreau

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Aug 25, 2023, 10:13:45 AM8/25/23
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You can’t say that TG is risky because surface temperature reduction is “disruptive”: mass mortality from heatstroke is underway in most ecosystems!

 

TG is needed to prevent extreme heat waves, which is measured by Coral Bleaching HotSpot analysis.

 

Surface temperature reduction is essential to prevent mass mortalities of sea life and imminent extinction of coral reefs.

 

Right now we are facing accelerating coral death from high temperatures, also of shallow water marine organisms in many other habitats, and only a method that reduces surface temperatures can save them.

 

See just posted below from Mexico, Florida is as bad and so are many reefs all around the world.

 

It is impossible to get data since dive shops won’t report bleaching because it is bad for business.

 

Experts: Mexican corals face massive death due to rising water temperatures

Aug 24, 2023 - 08:47 PMThe Trust Project

TOPICS:  Mexico

Experts: Mexican corals face massive death due to rising water temperaturesThe experts also stressed that the loss of corals will have a devastating impact on the environment and the economy. EFE

The massive death faced by Mexican corals due to the increase in water temperature represents a serious national problem, experts from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) agreed on Thursday.

Mexican researchers Lorenzo Álvarez Filip and Juan Pablo Carricart Ganivet, from UNAM's Institute of Marine Sciences and Limnology (ICMyL), pointed out that the problem is due to the sum of two important factors: the climate crisis and the phenomenon of El Child.

“If we put it from our perspective, this event is being catastrophic because we are losing a lot of corals,” emphasized Carricart Ganivet, an academic at the ICML Coral Reef Sclerochronology Laboratory.

The experts explained, in the conference entitled "Mass death of corals in Mexican reefs?", that the water surrounding the corals has maintained a constant temperature of between 32 and 33 degrees Celsius for more than 15 weeks, which has caused the bleaching and death of corals in the reefs of the Pacific, Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean coasts.

Álvarez Filip said that the first cases of coral bleaching were detected off the coast of Huatulco, in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca, at the end of May.

In this same region, large areas of the reef had died by August and they warned that the same situation is reported in other parts of the Mexican territory, such as in the states of Baja California, Jalisco, Guerrero and Veracruz.

Filip explained that only in Puerto Morelos, in Quintana Roo, in the Mexican Caribbean, "the corals were already weakened by various factors", such as the stress of enduring high temperatures for so long, suffering from a disease that caused massive deaths in past years, known as the "white syndrome", and the high levels of nutrients that human beings throw into the water daily.

The experts also stressed that the loss of corals will have a devastating impact on the environment and the economy, as coral reefs are home to a wide variety of marine life and play a vital role in protecting coastlines from storms and erosion. .

In addition, they explained that "the tourism industry in Mexico also benefits from coral reefs," with millions of tourists visiting the country each year to snorkel and dive among the colorful reefs, as well as those seeking scenic beauty, with turquoise colors in the waters and white sand.

The researchers asked the Mexican government to take measures to address climate change and protect coral reefs with greater amounts of investment in projects that allow monitoring of what is happening in the area.

In addition, they considered it necessary to make the population aware of the effects that their actions have on marine ecosystems, and supported that decisions be made based on scientific research.

Jim Baird

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Aug 25, 2023, 1:20:47 PM8/25/23
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Global warming is trapped solar energy that can go anywhere and mostly into the ocean and towards the poles.

 

Thermodynamic Geoengineering passes the surface tropical heat through a heat engine to produce engine and removes 92.6% to deep water from where it diffuses back to the surface where it can be recycled at least 13 times. This is close to 3000 years of global warming respite. To that end he increases the global sink rate.

 

Jim

 

From: Ye Tao
Sent: August 25, 2023 7:00 AM
To: Chris Vivian <chris....@btinternet.com>; 'Tom Goreau' <gor...@globalcoral.org>; 'Jim Baird' <jim....@gwmitigation.com>; rob...@rtulip.net; 'healthy-planet-action-coalition' <healthy-planet-...@googlegroups.com>; 'Planetary Restoration' <planetary-...@googlegroups.com>; 'via NOAC Meetings' <noac-m...@googlegroups.com>; 'Healthy Climate Alliance' <healthy-clim...@googlegroups.com>; 'Carbon Dioxide Removal' <carbondiox...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: [CDR] HPAC meeting with Chris Vivian on Ocean CDR: August 24, 4:30 PM EDT.

 

How surface temperature reduction is achieved makes all the difference from a planetary perspective.   Helpful ways to reduce surface temperature include reducing global source rate and increasing global sink rate.  Internal shuffling of heat to expose a temporarily cold surface invites more heat in. The result is a net increase in Earth's Energy Imbalance leading to an increased rate of surplus thermal energy accumulation below the top of the atmosphere.  The approach is fundamentally self-defeating.

Ye

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Anton Alferness

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Aug 25, 2023, 2:09:20 PM8/25/23
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Could TG serve to shave the edge off while other reflective / albedo / radiation management techniques are scaling such that we wouldn't need TG globally, but rather in select areas as part of a combined solution set? 

On Fri, Aug 25, 2023 at 11:05 AM Ye Tao <t...@rowland.harvard.edu> wrote:

When TG passes the surface heat into deep waters, upwelling IR from the surface reduces as Earth's natural Planck feedback gets artificially held back.  Upwelling turbulent fluxes also reduce.   Rate of heat accumulation on the planet will increase.

Hiding heat in the ocean does not create a global sink;  it is heat storage that will guarantee a future, 'explosive' destabilization.

Ye

Tom Goreau

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Aug 25, 2023, 3:13:40 PM8/25/23
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Yes,  precisely, cooling the surface ocean buys us centuries to restabilize CO2 at safe levels by Geotherapy.

Mike Williamson

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Aug 25, 2023, 3:14:50 PM8/25/23
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The cooling benefits of bringing deep water to the surface may be offset by the release of carbon dioxide and methane as that water warms.

From: carbondiox...@googlegroups.com <carbondiox...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Tom Goreau <gor...@globalcoral.org>
Sent: Friday, August 25, 2023 7:13 AM
To: Chris Vivian <chris....@btinternet.com>; 'Jim Baird' <jim....@gwmitigation.com>; rob...@rtulip.net <rob...@rtulip.net>; 'healthy-planet-action-coalition' <healthy-planet-...@googlegroups.com>; 'Planetary Restoration' <planetary-...@googlegroups.com>; 'via NOAC Meetings' <noac-m...@googlegroups.com>; 'Healthy Climate Alliance' <healthy-clim...@googlegroups.com>; 'Carbon Dioxide Removal' <carbondiox...@googlegroups.com>

Tom Goreau

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Aug 25, 2023, 3:17:23 PM8/25/23
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No, because TG pumps heat downward with a working fluid, it does not pump surface water itself downward.

Jim Baird

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Aug 25, 2023, 3:19:03 PM8/25/23
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Wrong.

 

At scale TG would offset of the offgassiing of 4.3 gigatonnes of water annually per following.

 

A graph of water temperature

Description automatically generated

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Roger Arnold

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Aug 25, 2023, 5:31:09 PM8/25/23
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 > No, because TG pumps heat downward with a working fluid, it does not pump surface water itself downward.

It's not obvious that using deep waters as a heat sink to cool surface waters -- i.e., heat exchange via heat pipes, as opposed to simple upwelling -- is actually a good approach. Yes, if one wants to exploit ocean thermal gradients for power generation, then the alternative of artificial upwelling is no good. And yes, deeper waters do have higher concentration of CO2; the heat pipe approach does avoid bringing those waters to the surface. HOWEVER, the name of the game we're pragmatically forced to play is CROI -- Cooling Return on (materials and monetary) Investment. And there, the issues are cloudy.

Straight OTEC for power generation has never been a commercial success; its low thermodynamic conversion efficiency and other factors guarantee that it will give a very low energy return on investment. Claiming added value for cooling of surface waters is unlikely to make a significant difference. Under the current socio-economic regime, there's no way to monetize the cooling of surface waters. And if the world socio-economic system were to award enough of a monetary value to surface water cooling to make TG pencil out, TG would immediately be undercut by artificial upwelling. Artificial upwelling would be a more cost-effective way to achieve surface water cooling.

As to the supposed problem of bringing waters with higher levels of CO2 to the surface, it's illusionary. The extra CO2 in deeper waters comes from respiration and aerobic decomposition of organic matter higher up in the photic zone. The extra CO2 is accompanied by higher levels of nutrients liberated by decomposition. When the deeper water upwells, it feeds the growth of phytoplankton that convert the extra CO2 back to biomass. There's no net transfer of CO2 from the ocean to the atmosphere. In fact, there's a marginal transfer in the other direction, from the higher solubility of CO2 in cooler waters and the higher loading of biomass that the recycled nutrients support.

As to the value of ocean surface water cooling, it's a matter of life or death to many corals and other marine organisms that can't survive in the hot tub environment that our tropical oceans are headed for. It's true, as Yao Te notes, that cooler surface waters will emit a lower flux of thermal IR. If that were all there were to it, It would indeed mean that the earth's radiation imbalance would be increased. However, cooler ocean surface waters also mean lower absolute humidity in the atmosphere above. That translates to lower resistance to upward radiative diffusion of thermal energy. That expresses itself as a cooler sky temperature from backscattering of outbound thermal radiation. It's unclear (at least to me) how the balance works out.

- Roger

Jim Baird

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Aug 25, 2023, 6:13:33 PM8/25/23
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From: Roger Arnold
Sent: August 25, 2023 2:30 PM
To: Tom Goreau <gor...@globalcoral.org>
Cc: Mike Williamson <mi...@wassoc.com>; Chris Vivian <chris....@btinternet.com>; Jim Baird <jim....@gwmitigation.com>; rob...@rtulip.net; healthy-planet-action-coalition <healthy-planet-...@googlegroups.com>; Planetary Restoration <planetary-...@googlegroups.com>; via NOAC Meetings <noac-m...@googlegroups.com>; Healthy Climate Alliance <healthy-clim...@googlegroups.com>; Carbon Dioxide Removal <carbondiox...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: [CDR] HPAC meeting with Chris Vivian on Ocean CDR: August 24, 4:30 PM EDT.

 

 > No, because TG pumps heat downward with a working fluid, it does not pump surface water itself downward.

 

It's not obvious that using deep waters as a heat sink to cool surface waters -- i.e., heat exchange via heat pipes, as opposed to simple upwelling -- is actually a good approach. Yes, if one wants to exploit ocean thermal gradients for power generation, then the alternative of artificial upwelling is no good. And yes, deeper waters do have higher concentration of CO2; the heat pipe approach does avoid bringing those waters to the surface. HOWEVER, the name of the game we're pragmatically forced to play is CROI -- Cooling Return on (materials and monetary) Investment. And there, the issues are cloudy.

 

Straight OTEC for power generation has never been a commercial success; its low thermodynamic conversion efficiency and other factors guarantee that it will give a very low energy return on investment.

The thermodynamic efficiency of conventional of OTEC is less than 3%. For TG it is 7.6% meaning therefore you get 2.5 times the energy at for one third the cost.

 

Attached is pdf showing the costs etc.

image001.png
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Thermodynamic Geoengineering.pdf

Roger Arnold

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Aug 26, 2023, 3:41:30 PM8/26/23
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Jim,

The thermodynamic efficiency of conventional of OTEC is less than 3%. For TG it is 7.6% meaning therefore you get 2.5 times the energy at for one third the cost.

 

> Attached is pdf showing the costs etc.


The claim of 7.6% efficiency for an OTEC process falls in the category of "extraordinary claims". And, as Carl Sagan famously said in his Cosmos series, "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." Your powerpoint presentation is very pretty and professionally done. Unfortunately, it is only that -- a powerpoint presentation. You reference a 2007 patent filing by one Melvin Prueitt as the basis for the efficiency claim. You describe him as an experimental physicist. I know nothing about him, and I haven't attempted to locate his patent filing, but I'm pretty certain that no practical OTEC design will ever achieve anything close to 7.6% efficiency from a temperature delta of 26 K between a surface water temperature of 30 C and a deep water temperature of 4 C. The Carnot limit for an ideal heat engine -- operating between an infinite heat source at 30 C and an infinite heat sink at 4 C. with infinitesimal heat drop from the heat source across the hot side heat exchanger and infinitesimal heat gain across the cold side heat exchanger and heat sink -- is only 8.58%. And that is nothing close to anything realizable in practice. 


It may be possible to do better than the 3% projected for a commercial OTEC design; there has recently been a significant advance in heat exchanger performance as a result of 3D printing. 4% might be achievable. But even the 3%, I believe, is an upward projection for what ought to be feasible, based on the 1.5 to 2% actually achieved in early prototypes that were built. I could be wrong about that; if so please set me straight. 


The bottom line, however, is that there is no fundamental advantage -- that I can see -- from the use of a heat pipe. I don't see how it would enable higher thermal efficiency compared to a more conventional approach. I won't go into details here, but my own conclusion has long been that the heat pipe approach causes more problems than it solves.


I suspect that we'll have to agree to disagree about conversion efficiency. And probably about materials cost as well. But we are on the same page regarding the feasibility and desirability of cooling ocean surface waters / bringing cooler waters to the surface. The lower thermal resistance of the atmosphere due to lower absolute humidity may or may not compensate for the lower Planck radiation from the cooler water, and in any case, it's no long term solution. ("Long term" meaning centuries to millennia.) We will still have to restore CO2 levels to 350 ppm or less. But deep ocean waters are a large enough heat sink to buy us at least decades.


- Roger

Jim Baird

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Aug 26, 2023, 5:35:52 PM8/26/23
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As modeled by Gerard Nihous, the University of Hawaii, the thermal efficiency of the cycle is the turbogenerator efficiency of about 85% times half the Carnot efficiency. That is halved because Nihous introduced the concept of the heat ladder below .

 Nihous heat ladder

About a quarter of the surface heat is lost to the evaporator and its pinch point. Another quarter is lost to the condenser and its pinch point, and half of the heat reaches the turbogenerator.

 

With Nihous’ heat ladder, half of the heat of the cwp design is lost to the condenser and the evaporator, which for an OTEC ΔT of 24 would be a loss of 12oC. Physicist Melvin L. Prueitt, of Los Alamos National Laboratory, concluded, however, with a heat pipe, which he referred to as a heat channel, heat losses through the evaporator and condenser would be limited to 4oC, 2°C each. He reasoned that since the surface water was contiguous to the evaporator and the cold water was contiguous to the condenser more of both could be used to boil the working fluid and to condense its vapor. He also determined that a vertical column of ammonia vapor 1000 meters long would warm by 5.3°C as the weight of the vapor above compressed it, increasing its temperature and the pressure.

 

Prueitt claimed: a system efficiency of 7.6% for his design and benefits including; smaller movements of both warm and cold water, lessened ecological damage when cold water remains in deep water, smaller pipe diameters and smaller pumping losses with the movement of 1.37 tons of working fluid per second compared to 71 tons of cold water from a one-kilometer depths with cwp OTEC

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Greg Rau

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Aug 26, 2023, 5:44:38 PM8/26/23
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Guys, the CDR list is not the place to argue the merits of OTEC unless you make a link to CDR. That link is that OTEC could power offshore CDR in addition to producing transportable energy such as in the form of H2 (e.g., here). The notion that upwelled water could promote biotic CDR is trickier as Roger points out since both nutrients and CO2 can be brought to the surface in conventional OTEC (but not in heat pipe mode). I'd say in the short term (decades-centuries) such artificial upwelling would create a net air CO2 source because not all nutrients will stay at the surface and be consumed, thus biology will not be 100% efficient in reconsuming the excess CO2 released (though, admittedly, neither might the release of excess CO2 to air be 100% efficient). The caveat is whether the C/nutrient uptake ratio of phytos can be increased so as to compensate for the preceding inefficiency and turn upwelling into net bio CDR. But then you are talking about changing surface ocean species composition that may not be desirable.  
Greg 

rob...@rtulip.net

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Aug 27, 2023, 7:35:32 AM8/27/23
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Thank you to those who joined the HPAC meeting with Dr Chris Vivian. 

 

The presentation addressed a range of methods of ocean cooling, with focus on the relation between iron fertilization and ocean gyres, and overall governance of marine geoengineering.  The recording of the meeting is at https://youtu.be/8QIp4ChIfA0

 

I appreciate the discussion started by Jim Baird on OTEC.  It made me wonder if Queensland could consider OTEC to mitigate coral bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef.  OTEC could initially be developed near Brisbane in the East Australia Current or next to Cape York/Pajinka, and later on the Queensland Plateau to cool the North Caledonian Jet and North Vanuatu Jet that feed warm Pacific water to the reef. 

 

Cooling the EAC could protect southern kelp forests, with major CDR benefit.  It might be possible to use OTEC electricity to power the production of offshore algae for CDR.

 

These diagrams of ocean currents and depth show the gradient between warm surface water on the continental shelf and cold deep abyssal water, indicating cooling potential for thermal geoengineering.  Some places have a 1km drop within 5km.  The abyssal plain is more than 5km deep.

 

 

 

sources: currents and depth

 

Regards

 

Robert Tulip

https://www.healthyplanetaction.org/

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Tom Goreau

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Aug 27, 2023, 1:33:16 PM8/27/23
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Thanks for this, I missed the presentation, but greatly appreciated the video.

 

Some comments;

 

For Jim Baird. Could you please post a short side by side comparison of TG and OTEC with regard to key parameters such as heat transport, water flow, degassing of CO2, and upwelling of nutrients? This would clarify the confusions between the two with regard to CDR aspects.

 

For Chris Vivian. As a marine biologist trained in oceanography I greatly appreciated your discussions of both the science and governance. It seems most people proposing ocean climate solutions have grossly oversimplified views of the physics ocean circulation, the biological cycle, and the carbon cycle, leading to serious errors in efficacy claims of many proposals. Eelco has done an excellent job pointing out some of the major errors in marine carbon chemistry, but there are many more common major errors in understanding of biological effects and ocean circulation patterns spinning out there in pointless gyres.

 

Chris, your point about the fundamental ecological differences between gyres and wind-driven and planetary rotation-driven ocean boundary currents, more so with coastal zones subject to land-based erosion and anthropogenic inputs, and yet more so to upwelling zones, is something few non-oceanographers grasp, and it needs a critical review along the lines of what Eelco did. In general the “ocean gyres as the deserts of the oceans” metaphor, like “coral reefs as the rainforests of the oceans”, has some real points. The Southeast Pacific Gyre, the largest of all, has the lowest chlorophyll content, biomass, and productivity in the world ocean. The primary production largely comes from cyanobacterial micro-phytoplankton like Synechococcus and Prochlorococcus, but it is extremely efficiently remineralized in-situ by bacteria, so the ocean floor below has the lowest organic content of any sediments. The Sargasso Sea, despite its productivity, is also seriously depleted in nitrogen, phosphorus, and silica, and chlorophyll, and the Sargassum algae there is in fact starved of nutrients and growing at extremely slow basal metabolism rates. When the gyre boundary flow carries them towards the Equatorial Atlantic they suddenly start growing faster when they hit nutrient plumes flushing down the Congo, Amazon, and Orinoco Rivers, caused by massive deforestation of tropical jungles, and erosion of nutrients and soil. But when they reach the Caribbean they get the full sh*tload of nutrients from sewage and fertilizer runoff, and REALLY take off, growing flat out before they hit the beaches!

 

The governance issue is far more complicated than many realize. It’s odd how many people want to blame “leftist” environmentalists, but the NGOs are totally ignored except for the very rich Big International NGOs (BINGOs) who have bought their place at the table, many via backroom deals to “mitigate” fossil fuel companies by peddling carbon “credits” from alleged “negative emissions”! Governments are in the driving seat, and many of them will do anything to maintain their fossil fuel profits, so routinely block UN consensus on action. It’s important to realize that many fossil fuel consuming countries that need to import their energy are also opposed to any change in business as usual, because their politicians have been bought by their local energy industries, which incestuously write national climate change policies of most countries, while paying politicians pocket money and campaign expenses!

 

Lack of government consensus to admit there is a problem that needs solution has completely hobbled UNFCCC from having any effect. This is not only a matter of lack of political will, but also of lack of technical guidance. Any effort to prevent serious damage of ecosystems on land and sea by controlling GHGs needs to have COMPLETE GLOBAL ACCOUNTING OF ALL GHG SOURCES AND SINKS. That was in the original draft of UNCCC (I put it in when I was the United Nations Centre for Science and Technology for Development Senior Scientific Officer for Global Climate Change and Biodiversity) but was eliminated by governments! The result is a treaty that lacks the tools to reach its own goals of saving critical ecosystems or determining if they have been achieved. A much better treaty is needed! But as Chris pointed out, there are a lot of governments out there needing serious education to remediate functionally illiteracy in understanding how the ocean, atmosphere, and climate respond to dumping! Most don’t think they need to learn at all, their major role is to defend the narrowest nationalist political interests.

Jim Baird

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Aug 27, 2023, 3:52:27 PM8/27/23
to Tom Goreau, rob...@rtulip.net, Roger Arnold, Mike Williamson, Chris Vivian, Planetary Restoration, via NOAC Meetings, Healthy Climate Alliance, Carbon Dioxide Removal

Tom, I think the following graphic says it all about the difference between TG and OTEC.

 

A map of the world with different colors

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It is adapted from the paper An Assessment of Global Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion Resources With a High-Resolution Ocean General Circulation Model by  Krishnakumar Rajagopalan and Gerard Nihous from the University of Hawaii.

 

It  shows what I believe the GESAMP was getting at when it said OTEC (and lumped TG into this) is temporary, heterogenous and a potentially a termination risk.

 

As to the termination risk, why would one anyone to shut off an energy supply that mitigates warming?

 

Somewhere in Nihous’ papers he says that a system using OTEC would relax rapidly to its pre OTEC condition as soon as it terminated operations, but I can’t find that reference at the moment.

 

As to cost, Paul Curto, former chief technologist with NASA said in an article, American Energy Policy V -- Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion, said, “With a slightly different design, using an ammonia heat pipe instead of a cold water pipe, proposed by Jim Baird and Dominic Michaelis (British Patent No. GB 2395754), no water from the bottom is released into the upper strata of the ocean, trapping all the CO2 deep beneath the thermocline. Little pumping energy is used to circulate the ocean water, simply enough to pump warm surface water to flow over the evaporator end of the heat pipe. If the condensing end of the heat pipe is exposed to a thousand feet or more of near freezing temperatures below the thermocline, no cold water pumping is required. The parasitic losses are cut in half. The costs for the cold water pipe are eliminated, along with the cold water return pipe and condenser pumps, the cleaning system for the condenser, and the overall plant efficiency approaches 85% of Carnot vs. about 70% with a cold water pipe.


The parasitic losses could be reduced as much as 50% and the complexity, mass (and cost) of the system reduced by at least 30%. The vast reduction in operating costs and environmental impacts would be worth investigation alone.”

 

This was 10 years ago!

 

The thermodynamic efficiency of OTEC is about 3 percent and the 97 percent of the surface heat diluted by the cold water,  is dispersed outward towards the poles that in the case of the Arctic is warmed 4 degrees over the course of 1,000 years at the same time as the tropics are cooled by the same amount.

 

It upwells cold water at a rate 2 cubic meters/second to produce 1 MW of power so  at a scale of 14 terawatts, which is the limit that is sustainable according to the paper, this is like putting a fire house at the bottom of your swimming  and seeing how fast the oil slick from your sun tan lotion is pushed out to the periphery of the pool.

 

OTEC dumps the excess heat and cold from the evaporators and condenser to a depth of between 70 and 100, in the mixed layer of the  ocean. Since the diffusion rate of heat in this layer is 1 meter/day that heat  and cold would be back at the surface in about 3 months, so you get no climate respite and you get temporary and heterogenous warming of the tropics and the poles.

 

In 1000 years you push the heat of warming towards the poles about 3000 times in 1000 years.

 

TG on the other hand, dumps the unconverted of warming to a depth of 1000 where it provides 226 years of  respite that can be extended by recycling in the heat to produce more work  at  least 13 times. But  only about 4 times in 1000 years.

 

I pointed out to this group Melvin Prueitt calculated the efficiency of a system like TG is 7.6% compared to the <three of OTEC but I believe TG can actually be higher than 7.6% but this is something I still need to protect with intellectual property.

 

After 5 years of my efforts being stymied, I have lost my initially patent and numerous other opportunities.

 

The Resplandy paper calculated about 28% of the heat  of warming was the result of the offgassiing of oxygen and CO2. In the case of oxygen this is diminishing the viability of fish stocks. And with CO2 it is adding about 4.3 gigatonnes to the atmosphere annually.

 

Cooling the surface with TG eliminates this annual addition. And OTEC provides no such benefit.

 

Regards,

Jim

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Jim Baird

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Aug 28, 2023, 12:24:58 PM8/28/23
to Tom Goreau, rob...@rtulip.net, Roger Arnold, Mike Williamson, Chris Vivian, Planetary Restoration, via NOAC Meetings, Healthy Climate Alliance, Carbon Dioxide Removal

Do non petrostates need anyone’s permission to do the right thing?

 

There are a lot more of us (the global public) than them.

 

If the petrostates want to continue to make energy more expensive and dearer by ladling on the cost of CDR to their product then that is on them.

 

They will be the losers in the global market.

 

IMHO

 

From: Tom Goreau

Sent: August 27, 2023 10:33 AM
To: rob...@rtulip.net; 'Jim Baird' <jim....@gwmitigation.com>; 'Roger Arnold' <silver...@gmail.com>

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