The world is betting hard Carbon capture The term indicates various techniques to prevent carbon pollution during industrial processes, or remove the carbon from the atmosphere, and then close it permanently.
This practice is not free of controversy, as some argue that carbon capture is expensive and unpaid and can act as distraction from carbon emissions actually. But it is a rapidly growing fact: There are at least 628 projects to capture and store carbon in the pipeline around the world, with an annual increase on a 60 % annual basis, according to the latest. a report From the CCs International Institute (Carbon Potting and Store). The market size was slightly more than $ 3.5 billion in 2024, however expected To grow to $ 14.5 billion by 2032, according to Fortune Business Insights.
Perhaps the most ambitious – and more beloved – Carbon capture type includes the removal of carbon dioxide (CO2) directly from the air, although there are a few of these facilities that operate all over the world. Some scientists believe that the best option is to capture carbon from sea water instead of air, because the ocean is the planet Elderly The carbon basin, absorbs 25 % of all emissions of carbon dioxide.
In the United Kingdom, where the government in 2023 Declare Up to 20 billion pounds (26.7 billion dollars) to finance to support carbon capture, one of these projects was tested near the English channel. The name the seaIt aims to know if picking sea carbon is actually working, and if he can be able to compete with his counterpart in the air.
“The reason is that the sea water carries a lot of carbon is that when you put carbon dioxide in the water, 99 % of it becomes other forms of dissolved carbon that does not exchange with the air,” says Paul Halran, a professor of ocean sciences and climate science at the University of Exter, who leads the sea team.
“But this also means that it is very easy to get this carbon out of water.”
Experimental plant
Seacure started building a pilot factory about a year ago, at the Weymouth Sea Life Center on the southern coast of England. It works over the past few months, and is designed to treat 3000 liters of sea water per minute and remove an estimated 100 tons of carbon dioxide per year.
“We wanted to test technology in the real environment with real marine water, to determine the problems that link it,” says Haloran, adding that working in a large public fish pelvis helps because it already contains an infrastructure to extract sea water and then returns it to the ocean.
Carbon, which naturally dissolves in sea water, can be converted into carbon dioxide by increasing the acidity of the water slightly. To make it come out, the water is written on a large surface area with the air blowing over it. “In this process, we can perform more than 90 % of carbon from this water,” says Haloran.
Seacure Pilot – Paul Haluran and the Sea team
Carbon dioxide that is extracted from water is turned on through a purification process that uses carbon activated in the form of charred coconut scales, then ready to store them. In a specific system, it will be fed in geological carbon dioxide storage. Before the water is released, his fever is restored to normal levels, making it ready to absorb more carbon dioxide from the air.
“This water is unloaded and that now has very low carbon concentrations that need to be filled, so you only try to absorb carbon dioxide from anywhere, and it absorbs it from the air,” says Haloran. “There is a simple analogy that we press a sponge and restore it.”
Although more tests are needed to understand the full potential of technology, Halloraan admits that it “does not blow on the direct air of water in terms of energy costs”, and there are other challenges such as having to remove impurities from water before its release, as well as the potential impact on ecosystems. But he adds, that all carbon capture techniques incur high costs in building plants and infrastructure, and the use of sea water is one clear feature: it has a much higher concentration of carbon than the air, “so you should be able to reduce the costs of the capital that the plant’s construction involves.”
Reduced effects
One great concern With any system This embodies carbon from sea water is the effect of water that has been unloaded on marine ecosystems. Gay Hopper, a doctoral researcher at the University of Exeter, who works on this issue on Seacure, says that the low -carbon sea water is launched in small quantities unlikely to have any effect on the marine environment, as it reduces very quickly.
However, this does not mean that seacure is automatically safe. “To understand how the restricted version of Seacure can affect the marine environment, we may have experiments to measure how marine organisms respond to low carbon sea water.” “Initial results indicate that some marine organisms, such as plankton and mussels, may be affected when exposed to low carbon water.”
To alleviate the possible effects, sea water can be “pre -preserved” before launching it in the marine environment, but Hooper warns not to spread the sea system near any sensitive naval habitats.
There is an increasing interest in carbon capture from sea water – also known as direct ocean capture or DOC – and many startups operate in this field. Among them is Captura, a game from the California Institute of Technology that works in a Hawaiian experimental project, based in Amsterdam, which says that his method is more effective than air.
According to the Haszeline bracelet, a professor of carbon capture and storage at the University of Edinburgh, who is not involved in Seacure, although the initiative appears to be more efficient in using energy than experimental tests for current air capture, a full -scale system requires supply of renewable energy and permanent storage than CO2 by pressing liquid and then respecting the suspension.
The next challenge is to expand Seacure and “work longer to prove that he can capture millions of tons of carbon dioxide every year.”
But he believes that there is great potential to restore carbon from the ocean water. “The total carbon in the sea water is about 50 times in the atmosphere, and carbon can be resident in the sea for tens of thousands of years, causing acidity that harms ecosystems of coral reef men.
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