Floating solar panels, coral reefs, mariculture, and bird droppings

[Tom Goreau]

Floating solar panels, coral reefs, mariculture, and bird droppings (see below):

 

From: Ronal Larson <rongre...@comcast.net>
Date: Sunday, May 14, 2023 at 1:27 AM
To: Tom Goreau <gor...@globalcoral.org>
Cc: Michael Hayes <electro...@gmail.com>, RAU greg <gh...@sbcglobal.net>, Carbon Dioxide Removal <carbondiox...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: [CDR] Restoring Seabird Populations Can Help Repair the Climate

 

Tom et al:  

 

Several thoughts below

Thanks for these great questions, Ron!

Responses below in red for those genuinely interested.

Floating infrastructures provide many opportunities that have yet to be explored, but which need to be. Widening of the Panama Canal has produced a whole new class of super-sized “Panamax”  cargo ships that are too big to get into dredged channels of many major coastal ports, so offshore floating transfer ports are needed to reload cargo into boats that can get into shallow channels, ports, and docks where they are needed. It’s impossibly expensive to keep the channels dredged that deep, for example into the Mississippi Delta, see:

R. Shaw & T. J. Goreau, 2016, Smart Port Breakwater Design and Construction, PORTS 2016, p. 863-872, Proceedings of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE)/ Coasts, Oceans, Ports, and Rivers Institute (COPRI), New Orleans

On May 13, 2023, at 4:45 PM, Tom Goreau <gor...@globalcoral.org> wrote:

 

As Greg rightly pointed out, birds that take a dump on land are removing nutrients from the ocean.

RWL1:   Most of the land-ocean nutrient flow must be in the other direction.  Sounds great to see guano going back to land - where it is needed.   Just a drop in the bucket, but it helps reduce ocean over-fertilization and soil depletion by coastal populations.

Floating solar panels are another story, birds love to take a dump on them, and the waves and rains wash the goodies right back into the water, fueling phytoplankton, and feeding fishes that love to hide in the shadow of floating objects, intensifying nutrient recycling.

[RWL2:   All positive sounding.  Any downsides to this placement of solar panels? Yes, some heat Is generated due to thermal inefficiency of the solar panels, and this needs to be dissipated.

 Upside-down floating Biorock reefs can grow coral reefs full of life in deep blue waters, attracting dense schools of pelagic (open water) fish like tunas and mahi-mahi.

RWL3:  I have read at least a hundred Goreau reports on coral reef retention via Biorock.  This is the first I have heard of “upside-down floating Biorock reefs" We’ve done it for years, but not published results.

 We’re designing floating Biorock reefs to protect large floating solar panel arrays on atoll islands from waves, for sustainable mariculture, and as seabird toilets.

RWL4:    The word “designing” suggests there are none yet in operation; true?  

No, we grew floating solar powered reefs for several years in Grand Bahama. This was in a suburban seawater canal with poor water quality rather than the open ocean, where we didn’t expect much to grow but slime, but we grew a prolific little reef community of corals, sponges, hydroids, tunicates, and clams that filtered food from the water until a hurricane removed the solar panels. Our approach could clean up stinking sewage-contaminated water in Florida residential canals, dredged out of the Everglades to make landfill and sell “water front property” along the canals through the swamps.

Might the savings be largest because:: 

a.   The needed small current is available from the panels rather than cabling from panels on land

Yes, floating arrays greatly reduces power loss from voltage drop in cables in shore panel installations.

b.   The iron coral support lattice is smaller (less weight) to hang down from the floating panels than to anchor to the ocean floor Yes, much less steel and electricity needed.

c.   The cost of installing on the ocean floor is removed;  maybe almost no extra cost for installing panels with a coral aspect? Some costs for floating arrays to balance the weight of the reef. Trapping hydrogen is an option.

And/or:

d.  There are plenty of freshwater floating PV panels systems;  any that already include “hanging” features? Not that I know of, but it is being combined with fish farming in lakes and reservoirs.

e.    Are there natural occasions where coral growth is downward rather then upward? Coral larvae are actually scotophilic (“shade loving”), they settle on the dark under surfaces of objects and then grow around into the light. The natural growth of corals is from a bottom surface upwards towards the light, but corals grow happily from hanging platforms and floats and undersides of boats and oil rigs, where they are regarded such a nuisance that most of the time spent by commercial divers is smashing them off! Huge coral reefs grow on oil rigs in warm waters in the Gulf of Mexico, West Africa, and Southeast Asia, and the oil rig reefs are the only habitat for the US Gulf of Mexico’s major fish catch, red snapper. But it is illegal to use these rigs for anything but extracting oil and gas to kill the planet, so fishermen fish around them secretly and cry every time an abandoned oil rig is dynamited, because that is more precious habitat lost. Some years ago I was appointed to the Louisiana Mariculture Board to advise the state legislature on what to do with some 5000 abandoned oil and gas platforms. The board of expert divers on oil rigs (except myself) unanimously recommended the oil rigs were a valuable resource that should be used for fisheries, mariculture, and sustainable energy production rather than destroyed. The Louisiana Legislature never read or acted on our report, which was unfortunately submitted just before Hurricane Katrina hit.

f. Will it be appreciably easier for tourists to visit and see these “inverted colonies”? Yes, much easier if they are not scuba divers.

g. Much more of the ocean will be available.  Are there enough areas more pole-ward where the local temperatures can be ideal and sufficient nutrients will be available? Vast areas, floating oyster and mussel reefs, and fish farms are feasible in colder waters. The major problem is breakage from waves, which can be extreme, if rare.

h.   Which is likely more important for implementation - saving coral or mariculture? Both

i.   If the panels are well away from land, presumably you need another way to use the electric generation.  Hydrogen?  Anything possible with a coral aspect? Thermodynamic GeoEngineering, as Jim Baird suggests, and large scale mariculture of algae and fish, as Mike Hayes points out on this forum. Floating reefs to dissipate surface wave energy and prevent damage to the solar panels, as we are proposing in the atoll countries.

.j. Anything in your design activities that include seaweed or sea grasses? We have designed floating seagrass and salt marshes to filter and clean ocean waters for the perimeters of floating cities for the United Nations Sustainable Floating City Initiative, which is planned for Busan, South Korea. Peripheral floating solar panels installations, with hanging Biorock reefs underneath, are planned.

Should all ocean seaweed production systems also be producing electricity via floating panels (with coral) ? Yes, these are in experimental stages now, but we are developing projects with seaweed farmers in Panama, Zanzibar, and Antigua/Barbuda. The main issue is security of solar panels.

k.    Is there data on how floating off-shore systems can protect the shore? Not that I know, but we are going to need it VERY badly as global sea level rise starts to seriously kick in.

l.   Have you a more serious design issue than the above?

The main issue is survival from extreme wave damage. That’s where the healing power of Biorock electrical currents transform the situation. The reefs that I dived on as a small child grew right back 5 years after they were flattened by hurricanes, now we see essentially no natural recovery due to deteriorating water quality and global warming. In electrical fields the broken corals quickly heal and reattach, while without healing electricity they are unable to recover and attach, and quickly die. See attached recent photo of coral fragments that we rescued and grew on Biorock in Jamaica after Category 5 Hurricanes Eta and Iota hit after the Hurricane Season was over (proof of the new normal climate)! For floating reefs the fragments would be caught by a net below and continue to grow.

RWL5 What can this list do to help? Frankly not much other than spread awareness to a very small self-selected community, this is a discussion list of problem solvers, not of decision makers or of funding agencies, who are ignorant of the issues, and don’t even think they need to know about them, much less solve them, while they sit comfortably on their cash derived from destruction of nature.

Thomas J. F. Goreau, PhD
President, Global Coral Reef Alliance

Chief Scientist, Blue Regeneration SL
President, Biorock Technology Inc.

Technical Advisor, Blue Guardians Programme, SIDS DOCK

37 Pleasant Street, Cambridge, MA 02139

gor...@globalcoral.org
www.globalcoral.org
Skype: tomgoreau
Tel: (1) 617-864-4226 (leave message)

 

Books:

Geotherapy: Innovative Methods of Soil Fertility Restoration, Carbon Sequestration, and Reversing CO2 Increase

http://www.crcpress.com/product/isbn/9781466595392

 

Innovative Methods of Marine Ecosystem Restoration

http://www.crcpress.com/product/isbn/9781466557734

 

No one can change the past, everybody can change the future

 

It’s much later than we think, especially if we don’t think

 

Those with their heads in the sand will see the light when global warming and sea level rise wash the beach away

 

Geotherapy: Regenerating ecosystem services to reverse climate change

 

 

 

From: <carbondiox...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Michael Hayes <electro...@gmail.com>
Date: Saturday, May 13, 2023 at 6:29 PM
To: Greg Rau <gh...@sbcglobal.net>
Cc: Carbon Dioxide Removal <carbondiox...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: [CDR] Restoring Seabird Populations Can Help Repair the Climate

 

Producing a guano enriched Blue Biochar should find customers at all levels. If the combination can rightfully carry the C negative value, funding a rapid expansion of such mCDR operations becomes reasonable to believe.

 

Bat farms are an old farmer's go-to fertilizer station. Designing seabird care and feeding/pooping stations into an offshore platform is likely not overly hard.

 

Regenerative agricultural has little to no waste, mariculture level CDR can likely reach that standard. The birds will show up one way or another.

 

On Sat, May 13, 2023, 3:07 PM Michael Hayes <electro...@gmail.com> wrote:

They can and should play a role in most marine biomass operations because of their guano. We'll never know how to factor for their input at the CDR level, yet free fertilizer is free fertilizer. Pathogens are the only worry. We need clean, healthy, happy birds, and clean, healthy, and happy bird poop.

 

On Sat, May 13, 2023, 2:10 PM Greg Rau <gh...@sbcglobal.net> wrote:

 

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/12052023/seabirds-restoration-climate-change/

 

 

"They [seabirds] distribute nutrients, in the form of guano, that’s beneficial to plankton, seagrass and coral reefs, which, in turn, nurtures fish populations that are eaten by seabirds and marine mammals in a cycle that forms a biological carbon pump. The stronger the pump, the more carbon dioxide it pushes into seabed sediment storage."

 

GR - I don't follow. As air breathers, seabirds remove carbon (biomass) from the ocean and respire (most of?) that C directly into the atmosphere as CO2. This therefore reduces the marine bio C pump (by removing at least some C biomass that would have otherwise sunk), enhances the sea to air CO2 flux,  and lessens the ocean CO2 sink. On the nutrient side, birds remove vital nutrients from the ocean and in a perfect world would excrete/defecate all of those nutrients back into the ocean, causing no net gain in ocean nutrients and therefore no net change in the ocean's bio C pump. But its worse than that. By nesting/resting on land, a significant fraction of those nutrients never make it back to the ocean; guano piles represent the highest concentrations of sequestered (once-marine) P on the planet. Again, birds cause a net reduction in surface ocean nutrients and hence a reduction of the bio C pump relative to the case where seabirds are absent. What am I missing?  

By all means let's preserve/restore seabirds and other marine airbreathers, but for the right reasons, not some sort of wishful mythology.

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[Ronal Larson]

Tom et al

1.  Thanks for starting a new CDR thread.  Wish I had done that.

My questions didn’t have enough CDR flavor - but the quite small applied electric field and currents help with growth of both seaweeds and sea grasses, which can be turned into biochar

2.  Adding Renaud, who sent a private message of thanks to us  Reminds me to ask you/all if there is any methane reduction aspect to this new “inverted” version of Biorock.

3.  New thoughts:

There is a strong similarity now with this floating version of biorock with a relatively new and rapidly growing form of photovoltaics called “agrivoltaics”.  Tom - you should make the choice here, but I suggest “aquavoltaics”, whenever the main focus is electricity and not coral.

4.  I have removed below everything from your response where I have nothing to add.  Changed to a bold black font

On May 14, 2023, at 6:00 AM, Tom Goreau <gor...@globalcoral.org> wrote:

Floating solar panels, coral reefs, mariculture, and bird droppings (see below):

 

From: Ronal Larson <rongre...@comcast.net>
Date: Sunday, May 14, 2023 at 1:27 AM
To: Tom Goreau <gor...@globalcoral.org>
Cc: Michael Hayes <electro...@gmail.com>, RAU greg <gh...@sbcglobal.net>, Carbon Dioxide Removal <carbondiox...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: [CDR] Restoring Seabird Populations Can Help Repair the Climate

 

Tom et al:  

 

Several thoughts below

Thanks for these great questions, Ron!

Responses below in red for those genuinely interested.

Floating infrastructures provide many opportunities that have yet to be explored, but which need to be. Widening of the Panama Canal has produced a whole new class of super-sized “Panamax”  cargo ships that are too big to get into dredged channels of many major coastal ports, so offshore floating transfer ports are needed to reload cargo into boats that can get into shallow channels, ports, and docks where they are needed. It’s impossibly expensive to keep the channels dredged that deep, for example into the Mississippi Delta, see:

R. Shaw & T. J. Goreau, 2016, Smart Port Breakwater Design and Construction, PORTS 2016, p. 863-872, Proceedings of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE)/ Coasts, Oceans, Ports, and Rivers Institute (COPRI), New Orleans

[RWLX1:   Followup #1.   I’vs also seen quite a few articles on large floating vacation rental “ships” which could presumably add both PV above the rental “cabins” and your Biorock structures below.  PV on roofs are very common - and saves on roofing costs.  Would reduce the thermal problems discussed in RWL2, with living space between the panels and the ocean.   But PV users can generally find a use for that thermal energy which can greatly exceed the value of the lost PV electric energy.

RWL4:    The word “designing” suggests there are none yet in operation; true?  

No, we grew floating solar powered reefs for several years in Grand Bahama. This was in a suburban seawater canal with poor water quality rather than the open ocean, where we didn’t expect much to grow but slime, but we grew a prolific little reef community of corals, sponges, hydroids, tunicates, and clams that filtered food from the water until a hurricane removed the solar panels. Our approach could clean up stinking sewage-contaminated water in Florida residential canals, dredged out of the Everglades to make landfill and sell “water front property” along the canals through the swamps.

[RWL4X:   Followup #2   I also have seen some awful looking canals.   Not clear why your “aquavoltaics” would help in canals, but this could be a nice additional major driver.

e.    Are there natural occasions where coral growth is downward rather then upward? Coral larvae are actually scotophilic (“shade loving”), they settle on the dark under surfaces of objects and then grow around into the light. The natural growth of corals is from a bottom surface upwards towards the light, but corals grow happily from hanging platforms and floats and undersides of boats and oil rigs, where they are regarded such a nuisance that most of the time spent by commercial divers is smashing them off! Huge coral reefs grow on oil rigs in warm waters in the Gulf of Mexico, West Africa, and Southeast Asia, and the oil rig reefs are the only habitat for the US Gulf of Mexico’s major fish catch, red snapper. But it is illegal to use these rigs for anything but extracting oil and gas to kill the planet, so fishermen fish around them secretly and cry every time an abandoned oil rig is dynamited, because that is more precious habitat lost. Some years ago I was appointed to the Louisiana Mariculture Board to advise the state legislature on what to do with some 5000 abandoned oil and gas platforms. The board of expert divers on oil rigs (except myself) unanimously recommended the oil rigs were a valuable resource that should be used for fisheries, mariculture, and sustainable energy production rather than destroyed. The Louisiana Legislature never read or acted on our report, which was unfortunately submitted just before Hurricane Katrina hit.

[RWL4eX:  Followup #3.   As we have discussed, my brother was active in this topic and had similar illogical experiences with mandated costly rig removal.  This list could be helpful in advocating for rig retention.

g. Much more of the ocean will be available.  Are there enough areas more pole-ward where the local temperatures can be ideal and sufficient nutrients will be available? Vast areas, floating oyster and mussel reefs, and fish farms are feasible in colder waters. The major problem is breakage from waves, which can be extreme, if rare.

[RWL4gX:  Followup #4 - floods are also rare, but flood insurance is maybe almost universally available  Is this a show-stopper?  The major one?

i.   If the panels are well away from land, presumably you need another way to use the electric generation.  Hydrogen?  Anything possible with a coral aspect? Thermodynamic GeoEngineering, as Jim Baird suggests, and large scale mariculture of algae and fish, as Mike Hayes points out on this forum. Floating reefs to dissipate surface wave energy and prevent damage to the solar panels, as we are proposing in the atoll countries.

[RWL4iX:  Followup  #5:    You and I have communicated with Jim Baird - whose work is related to OTEC (Ocean thermal Energy Conversion).  I hope he and others see the value in adding both PV and Biorock to other ocean energy approaches.  Especially with CDR aspects that you have.

.j. Anything in your design activities that include seaweed or sea grasses? We have designed floating seagrass and salt marshes to filter and clean ocean waters for the perimeters of floating cities for the United Nations Sustainable Floating City Initiative, which is planned for Busan, South Korea. Peripheral floating solar panels installations, with hanging Biorock reefs underneath, are planned.

[RWL4jX:  Followup #6:  Great to hear that hanging Biorock is planned in that important program.  A good short recent summary is at https://press.un.org/en/2022/dsgsm1730.doc.htm.

Apparently something similar in the Maldives.   And the UN is hoping for more volunteer cities after Busan.  Maybe there is a role here for helping refugees at the US border (today especially is bad).  Both lodging and jobs?

Hope all such floating cities can add biochar for energy backup;  likely to be cheaper than the days needed for storage batteries to provide the needed reliability

l.   Have you a more serious design issue than the above?

The main issue is survival from extreme wave damage. That’s where the healing power of Biorock electrical currents transform the situation. The reefs that I dived on as a small child grew right back 5 years after they were flattened by hurricanes, now we see essentially no natural recovery due to deteriorating water quality and global warming. In electrical fields the broken corals quickly heal and reattach, while without healing electricity they are unable to recover and attach, and quickly die. See attached recent photo of coral fragments that we rescued and grew on Biorock in Jamaica after Category 5 Hurricanes Eta and Iota hit after the Hurricane Season was over (proof of the new normal climate)! For floating reefs the fragments would be caught by a net below and continue to grow.

[RWL4lX:  Followup  #7:   The net idea is new for me.  Should minimize some of the hurricane issues.

Thanks for such complete response.  There are more CDR issues here than I had realized.

Ron

[Michael Hayes]

Ron, Renaud, et al.,

Methane, either from seaweed digestion or seeps, can be used in a tank-based system.

Cultivation of the below CH4 consuming bacteria for fish feed is already at industrial scales.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methylococcus_capsulatus

[Michael Hayes]

As a CH4 note, most wells leak CH4 even after being capping. The above conversion of CH4 to protein tech path can use most land or sea capped well heads for a rather steady stream of CH4. The previous estimation of marine well sepage of CH4 was far lower than recently found:

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/methane-emissions-are-higher-than-thought-from-gulf-of-mexico-drilling-180981934/

A tank-based mCDR operation can be installed above marine drilling fields so as to use the CH4 seepage for cultivation while carrying on more abiotic mCDR work. Free CH4 is like free guano fertilizer, using it is likely easier than trying to stop it.

Best regards 

[Michael Hayes]

Based upon prior chats, Jim has no problems with his TG design being made largely from HDPE, as such, building his type of infrastructure can use the same HDPE/Biorock marine tech being proposed for mCDR mariculture. 

Having a Biorock/HDPE TG platform as a hub for many other mitigation technologies is worth looking at. 

Moreover, finding other CDR related uses for the heat that TG can control can start with dewatering biomass.

 

On Sun, May 14, 2023, 4:03 PM Ronal Larson <rongre...@comcast.net> wrote:

[Jim Baird]

TG is a hybrid ocean energy system  arranged in the shape of a chevron with an ocean surface area of about 43,000 square meters, which converts a number of renewable energies sources available from the seas and the oceans ranging from ocean thermal energy conversion (OTEC), wind, wave, and solar energy sources they be photoelectric, photothermal, photochemical or photobiological.

 

The 250 MW Energy Island invented by Dominic Michaels was a hexagon 291 meters along each side, having a surface area of about 220,000 square meters which derived 19% of its energy from the ancillary energy sources and 81% from OTEC per the following table.

 

 

Ocean surface is some of the most expensive real estate. So, TG minimizes this cost by limiting the wind, wave, sea current and solar component to about only 10 MW, just enough to move the system through the water to force water for the heat exchangers.  

  

For example Axion Power  says a 1 MW solar PV power plant takes up roughly 4 acres of space which is 16,000 square meters  or 16,000,000 square meters for 1 GW of power.

 

It is about 300 times more expensive therefore using PV than OTEC to produce ocean energy.

 

That said, TG power would be ideal for Tom’s  Biorock approaches.

 

 Jim

[Michael Hayes]

Thanks, Jim.

Funding is likely available for a small family scale mCDR tech package that has a $600K purchase limit. 

https://www.fsa.usda.gov/programs-and-services/farm-loan-programs/beginning-farmers-and-ranchers-loans/index

I've been exploring designs at the $600K scale that can come together around a hub to create a larger system.

1) Can your design be launched with $600k?

Or

2) Can your design be segmented in any way to allow for a compilation of $600K 'farms'?

Best wishes

[Michael Hayes]

Also, within the USDA there are funding programs that help farming communities build community storage facilities, community drainage or water systems etc. Farming community support systems are typically evaluated on a case by case basis and get their own budget. The TG hub can be presented as such for the mCDR farming community. 

Self-replicating HDPE structures:

The use of the TG hub for large HDPE pipe extrusions can likely provide the farms with the cheapest/fastest capacity expansion. Below is a state of the art large HDPE pipe factory. The individual farms can deliver to the TG hub biomass/bio oil for the HDPE material:

https://youtu.be/E8J_Xy8zsnQ

[Michael Hayes]

Funding

As HDPE has a service life of geological time scale, simply building huge HDPE pipes is a form of C storage, yet it is the ability to rapidly scale up that is challenging just as it is with all CDRs.

Coupling together known technologies, CDR or not, that can support a blindingly fast scale up of on-water long lasting processing/cultivation/storage capacity likely is possible judging just from the expert level comments made in this expert CDR group. 

By providing the mCDR focused NOAA/USDA/AGU cohort with a clear indication that a 'mCDR farming' technology package is likely available at the concept stage, funding for a group effort to deploy and evaluate the system of systems might become available sooner than later. 

We will need atleast one government/university lab involved, and Seattle is well situated as a hub for marine related organizations and resources. 

With best regards

[Jim Baird]

Michael, per this video http://gwmitigation.com/Videos/TG5minladderpiitch.m4v this lab scale model that would produce about 3 kilowatts of power would come in the range of $600 K. As discussed the tanks could be made with HDPE instead of acrylic and instead of the heat exchangers in the video, they could be of a 3D printed thin film design. The purpose of the prototype would be prove that CO2 would migrate from the atmosphere section into the water as the surface is cooled., the thermodynamics – that the heat can be converted to work, and third it could test different working fluids. In particular I would like to try to use CO2 as a working fluid. Theoretically  it shouldn’t have as good thermodynamics but due to the proximity of the density of the vapor and gas states at these working temperatures, the losses due to pumping the working from a depth of 1000 meters to the surface would be less, so hopefully the overall efficiency should be close to be about what is using ammonia as the working fluid.

 

Jim