| Project Detail |
The University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) will investigate the efficacy and impact of removing up to 0.1 Gt CO2/yr from the atmosphere and surface oceans through cultivating and sinking fast-growing macroalgae. The UCSB team has previously determined using sophisticated oceanographic models that sunken biomass will sequester the fixed carbon for more than 100 years on the ocean floor if certain conditions are met. The scale of the cultivation needed to sequester 0.1 Gt CO2/yr is similar to the size of the biofuel feedstock farms proposed by ARPA-E’s MARINER program, suggesting that with technological advancement, macroalgae cultivation and sequestration may be an economically viable CDR strategy. The team will quantify the long-term biogeochemical and ecological outcomes of large-scale macroalgae cultivation, assess the sequestration time scales of macroalgal carbon, estimate its environmental impacts on the ocean interior and seafloor, and identify the most effective method to convey the biomass to the ocean floor.
Potential Impact:
The technology will provide the understanding to leverage large offshore macroalgal aquaculture as a potential CO2 reduction strategy and comprehend its biogeochemical fates, sequestration permanence, and ecological impacts. This proposed CDR method will: |
