Re:Massive permafrost thaw documented in Canada, portending ...
by dTal on Thursday March 02, 2017 @06:48AM
(#13773410)
If we have massive amounts of clean power a lot of the problem goes away anyway. It's not worth taking any proposal that uses vast amounts of electricity seriously, since it's the generation of vast amounts of electricity that causes the problem in the first place.
This is the only proposal I've seen regarding ocean acidification.
In brief, we need massive amounts of lime to dump into the ocean as an artificial carbon cycle. The problem is how to get lime? If we have massive amounts of clean power, something similar to the cement process (CaCO3 -> CaO) is possible because limestone is cheap.
The problem is the energy requirements are insane. One of the estimations in the talk that remediates only 10% of our yearly CO2 emissions requires 700 TWh (2.52E18 J). Unless we start building \several hundred new GW-scale nuclear[1] power plants (and started a decade ago), I doubt we will be able to do much to address ocean acidification.
[1] I know solar has improved a lot recently. Unless it's possible to generate >1TW of continuous power (24x7), nuclear is probably the only option.