Climate experiment to dump minerals in Cornish sea to absorb carbon
By Paul Homewood
h/t Graham Worthington
From The Times:
A Canadian company plans to dump hundreds of tonnes of a mineral off the Cornish coast to slow climate change, despite calls by environmentalists to halt the trial.
The pioneering scheme by Planetary Technologies is designed to remove CO2 from the atmosphere by increasing the alkalinity of the water. The UN climate science panel said last year that removing billions of tonnes of CO2 from the air would be vital for the world to meet the Paris agreement’s goals.
Planetary Technologies will release between 200 and 300 tonnes of magnesium hydroxide in its mineral form, brucite, in St Ives Bay over three months this spring.
Magnesium hydroxide is probably better known as the compound Milk of Magnesia, used as a laxative. Senior company figures are attending public meetings in Hayle and Truro to assuage concerns about the project.
The approach is called ocean alkalinity enhancement, and uses an alkaline mineral to shift the pH value of the sea. Making the water more alkaline speeds up the natural way oceans lock CO2 away by neutralising dissolved CO2 and turning it into a salt.
The method has the bonus of reversing ocean acidification, a threat to marine life that has been caused by cars, power stations and factories releasing CO2.
“We’re trying to restore the ocean and restore the climate for generations,” said Peter Chargin, vice president of commercialisation and community relations at Planetary Technologies. “We’re transforming CO2 in the air into salt in the ocean. We think this can be a big arrow in the quiver of solutions for climate change,” he added.
The Nova Scotia-headquartered firm studied locations around the world for the test. It chose Cornwall’s waters because they are shallow, which is important for CO2 removal because the alkalinity-enhanced water needs to be in contact with the air for a long time. The water is also very well-mixed, or turbulent, which should help the process.
The experiment, which will operate under a licence issued by the regulator for England, the Environment Agency, marks a significant scaling up of previous tests.
Planetary Technologies released about four tonnes in the area last year, at a rate that Chargin calls “hysterically small”. While the increase to 200-300 tonnes over 90 days marks a big increase, Chargin said it was still relatively small, a “drop in the bucket”.
Brucite is the mineral form of magnesium hydroxide
Sue Sayer, director of the Cornwall Seal Research Trust, said she welcomed companies exploring such approaches but felt the release should be blocked until further research had been conducted.
She said: “I am all for the project in that we need to find some innovative solutions to climate change, and find them quickly. It’s a very exciting project, potentially.
“My main thoughts are that we need to make sure there are no unintended effects. My feeling is there isn’t sufficient data on this introduction [of the mineral] and therefore no release should be done until the data is available. It’s not me trying to do the nimby thing, St Ives Bay is a really vital bay for the Cornish economy and the environment.”
Sayer said it was not obvious what the negative side effects might be, but that she was concerned about possible impacts on the marine food web affecting mammals such as grey seals.
Ruth Williams, marine conservation manager at the Cornwall Wildlife Trust, said the company’s approach was innovative and she welcomed its engagement with locals.
However, she said: “Whilst we support their ambition of trying to find a way to help tackle our current climate emergency, and agree that in principle the chemistry should work, we are very aware that there is potential for unintended consequences with new ideas such as this, and there has been very little environmental research done to mitigate concerns to date that we are aware of.”
Chargin said he hoped the public meetings would put people’s fears to rest. “We feel compelled to act, because the environment is at risk from ocean acidification and climate change. Cornwall is a great place to do it,” he said.
The company is also running trials in Canada and hopes to increase the concentration and duration of its brucite releases in future projects.
This is absolutely crazy. Maybe somebody would like to do the sums, but I would imagine the amount of CO2 sequestered in this way would be infinitesimal.
But as Sue Sayer points out, there could be unintended effects from messing around with the natural eco-systems.
One last question – who is paying for this nonsense?
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
Where imbeciles rule, -’tis folly to be wise! No-one sane could possibly come up with anything more RIDICULOUS. Surely they should have announced this insanity on April the first.
But, but, but , this will probably do wonders for the sale of hats and umbrellas in the area if it acts as a laxative for all of the seagulls .
So it might help the local economy .
Same as banning the anaesthetic yesterday, waste of time, it as at best green virtue signalling and most likely a scam, money coming from government or bill gates. Is vince dale involved?
I suspect the company concerned is planning to sell carbon credits for each ton of CO2 their models show have been removed by their sea dumping. It’ll have to be based on models because there is no way of actually measuring the reduction in atmospheric CO2 because it is present in such tiny amounts anyway. Seems like its a guaranteed way to make money while claiming to “save the planet”. What a scam! This needs to be stopped.
Once again we are going to sacrifice the environment as a potential appeasement to the god of Global Warming and Climate Change.
Madness.
Spoiling land and coastal waters and disfiguring the built environment is not enough?
We have truly become a pagan, brainless, society in the 21st century.
Yup. Has anybody worked out how much despoliation and CO2 is released during the mining of this stuff, not to mention the transportation aspect.
“Whom the gods seek to destroy …”
This has to be just about the craziest idea ever.
1. It probably (read ‘almost certainly’) won’t work;
2. In the unlikely event that it does nobody has the faintest idea what the outcome is likely to be, given that the initial premise is flawed.
They’ll actually be no real way to find out if it works because it will be impossible to measure the tiny, if any, reduction in atmospheric CO2. I guess the company will instead rely on models that will be “adjusted” to show it has worked
If that seems crazy, how about 106,000 km. of CO2 pipelines in the US by 2050 as shown here?
Sorry, that’s the CO2 disaster article. The map…
OK, so I was thinking small 🤡
I hope I’m not downwind when it springs a leak. What’s that notorious lake in Africa again?
I think your ending question says it all Paul. Planetary Technologies must be sniffing out the money from somewhere. In any othe language this reads like polluting the ocean.
Fiddling with nature, eh?………what could possibly go wrong?
In the US, at their Senate Budget Committee Meeting (15th Feb 2023) Senator Kennedy asked Dr Oltz-Eakin the question, ‘What would it cost for the US to reach net zero’. He estimated the cost to be, approximately, 50 trillion US dollars. Senator Kennedy then asked Dr Oltz-Eakin another question, ‘If the US spends 50 trillion dollars on climate solutions, how much would it reduce the earth’s temperature’. The answer was, ‘I don’t know’. The question was put to Dr. Rob Letterman – another climate expert – and his answer was, also, ‘I don’t know’.
Dumping these chemicals into the sea is, no doubt, one of the solutions Dr Oltz-Eakin and Letterman would welcome. When you add Bill Gates’ idea of ‘salting’ the clouds to minimise the strength of the suns rays it all smacks of destroying the planet, rather than saving it.
I have at, long last, just skim-read the article. Faulty climate science found so far: Magnesium Hydroxide has low solubility in water and it is not a laxative but rather imbibed by humans for indigestion.
There may be more faulty science; has anyone bothered to consider let alone asked the wildlife in the sea off Cornwall whether they would like this done to them?
A laxative at high enough doses apparently, also antiperspirant so the seals will be sweet smelling and dyspepsia free.
Since almost all the CO2 “dissolved” in water is, in fact, not truly dissolved at all but simply spread out as an undissociated and unreactive gas (99.7% is in this form in pure water, to be precise*) it follows that changing the pH is unlikely to have much effect on absorption. And of course the Oceans are absurdly more vast than any puny human can even begin to comprehend – and already full of Magnesium, in any case.
* The number is a little different in salt water.
More climate change panic n onsense. My question: what is the carbon footprint of mining the brucite and shipping it to its dumping ground on the sea bed?
And, how much fossil fuel will be used in the conventional vehicles needed to add it to the sea? And if it works to do it to the world’s oceans? There is no one pH for the oceans. alkalinity varies widely and by seasons. Maybe there is a fix for “stupid”?
“Maybe there is a fix for “stupid”?”
The old farmer’s way?
A man bought a mule from a farmer. The farmer said the mule would do whatever he was told. Later, the buyer called in the farmer to complain, and said “No good! He won’t do what I say!”
The old farmer took a piece of 2 x 4 and whacked the mule in the head; and explained, “You’ve got to get his attention first!”
Maybe invite the “senior company figures” to take a swim in the resulting mess?
The same EA that makes life hell for anyone trying to do something useful like build a wharf (treated timber) or dredge Faversham Creek (silt on the oysters at Whitstable) or dredge Stonebridge Pond (‘toxic’ residue of the gunpowder works; charcoal, sulphur and saltpeter). Ocean ‘acidification’ is another scam (ph about 7.8 by 2100).
http://www.globalclimatescam.com/junk-science/ocean-acidification-scam/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35934837/
Did I read this correctly–These nuts want to poison the oceans to fight the climate bogeyman? Do the uncountable varieties of sea life get any say in this? How about we put this to a vote before the Climate doomsday brigade creates a problem out of a non-problem. There is no man made warming–it’s called weather. Four decades of totally incorrect “predictions” is enough already. Get another hobby and leave the world alone.
billy, where do you think most commercial Magnesium Hydroxide is sourced from? Yep you probably guessed it right….it is extracted from seawater! you could not make this madness up.
There is no such thing as “ocean acidification”. I always stop reading articles when I get to those words.
The UK Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs is The Rt Hon Thérèse Coffey MP who graduated from University College London in 1993 with a BSc in Chemistry. I am writing to her to stop this insanity in terms which she will definitely understand given her education. I strongly urge everyone else to do the same in the strongest possible terms.
Lunacy like this must stop now.
“…which she will definitely understand…”
She will try hard not to!
She will not see your letter. Woke civil servants attached to her office will read incoming mail, categorise it as objecting to an approved green activity, and respond with a boiler-plate letter explaining how we have to fight back against man-made climate change….
“Woke civil servants attached to her office will read incoming mail.”…and almost certainly not understand anything past the first sentence. But Thérèse Coffey should be able to.
Do so, and make sure you copy it to your MP as well.
Much better would be to address it to your MP first, with a copy to the Hon T Coffey MP so that her woke civil servant gets a heads up that her reply would be to your MP, who will then copy that to you. Mind you, that will not guarantee an answer other than to reaffirm the government’s self-indulgent policy to decarbonise us. Worked a treat with my MP, though he could not possibly make any personal comment on the issues I raised with him, or on the reply from the responsible Minister that merely was an expression of thanks at the end of the reply for raising the question (the bulk of the two page response was civil service affirmation of the UK’s direction of travel and bore nothing whatsoever to matters I raised).
Perhaps this Canadian company would like to try their stupid idea in Canadian coastal waters first?
Unintended consequences loom large.
For starters:
Brucite, a natural raw material used worldwide, can be contaminated by asbestos: https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2022EGUGA..24..793S/abstract
Should do wonders for the tourist trade while they are handling the stuff.
Just silly, why not use caustic soda
This almost feels like a prank, or practical joke.
“When first they dumped brucite in St Ives Bay, I said nothing, because I wasn’t Cornish.”
They give no figures for the pH of the the waters off St Ives, nor the variations in pH on a daily, weekly or seasonal basis. Nor do the give any indication of the scale of the modification of the pH caused by the addition of Brucite.
You would think that they would give some indication of the quantity of sea water to be treated and the effect of tides in moving both water and Brucite around the bay and out to sea.
In all it gives the impression of a “lets chuck some Brucite into the sea and see what happens.”
On first glance not a very well set up experiment.
I think what happens is they get paid.
As far as experiment, I’d like to know what they have already found in the laboratory before throwing $#!+ in the ocean. I.e., what do they expect to learn that they couldn’t learn in the lab?
As Paul said, where’s the money coming from?
This old cynic wonders whether the company has lots of this stuff, maybe as a waste- or by-product, and is hoping to find a lucrative disposal route.
According to their website, they collect mine tailings from around the world and use renewable energy for the ensuing process. If they can’t get enough tailings then the big producers are China and Russia so the supply would be safe enough.
https://www.planetarytech.com/technology/
The company has funding from Musk. In fact ultimately Musk owns it I think.To make any meaningful difference to the Ph of any ocean would require an unimaginable amount of this stuff. It’s a typical Musk outside the box activity which probably boosts his ego by having nobody else think of it and then being able to bring it to this stage.
“To make any meaningful difference”
The problem – the threat – from geoengineering is the scale is so great that when Man discovers he has made a mistake, he’ll be powerless to fix it.
” The problem – the threat – from geoengineering is the scale is so great that when Man discovers he has made a mistake, he’ll be powerless to fix it.”
The risk assessment should state how the process can be reversed, just in case it does go wrong. The UK Health and Safety Executive should be all over this.
Ruth Williams, marine conservation manager at the Cornwall Wildlife Trust, said: “Whilst we support their ambition of trying to find a way to help tackle our current climate emergency…” Yeah, right. Of course you do. What emergency, Ruth? How can anyone working in conservation not see the absence of emergency in front of their eyes?
If she challenged it she would probably lose her job for heresy.
“It is difficult to get a man [or woman] to understand something, when his [her] salary depends on his [her] not understanding it.” – Upton Sinclair.
“It is difficult to get a man [or woman] to understand something, when his [her] salary depends on his [her] not understanding it.” – Upton Sinclair
Never was a truer word spoken
I assume the St Ives tourism board will make much of their ‘green credentials’ by blazing this headline across their holiday-publicity brochures – ‘Welcome to sunny St Ives, where you can bathe in seas of beneficial magnesium hydroxide!’. No, I suspect not!
Would it not be a good idea to first have a scientific basis for doing this? For example, where is the statistically significant empirical data which supports any claim against CO2 and CO2 returned to the Carbon Cycle by the pitifully insignificant actions of man? Where is the data which supports the claim that CO2 returned to the carbon cycle by the actions of man during the last 100 years can be shown in any measurable way to be responsible for any or all of the current welcome warming, the FOURTH such warming in recent human history which began two hundred years ago. Where is the data? It does not exist! Science can only exist where there is statistically significant empirical data produced by a falsifiable methodology. So if there is no data then there can be no claimed scientific basis for what any of these lunatics say or do and it is all either following a political agenda, religion or both. There can also be no claimed effect. Is it just a coincidence that the green slime focusses on claimed effects? I would suggest that is pure deflection to stop people asking the blindingly obvious question. This IS the Emperors Clothes!
The fraud of history committed in full view during the Enlightenment and how many cowards and morons just go along with it.
Thought so!
From the company’s website:
“While commodity products like hydroxides (alkalinity) are already available on the market, the carbon footprint of these would negate much of the intended carbon removals. Therefore, Planetary started from scratch to find waste minerals (mine tailings) from around the world to use as a feedstock for purification in our electrochemical cells.
We start by carefully extracting key parts of the mine tailings including recovering battery metals (like nickel and cobalt) and silica (sand) and then take the remaining purified metal salt solution into a special electrolyzer. There, using clean, renewable electricity, the salt and water are split to make hydrogen (a clean, emissions-free fuel), and a pure alkaline hydroxide.
It’s from this point that we transport the bulk alkaline materials to our ocean outfalls site where the alkalinity is introduced to the surface ocean that then draws in CO2, sequestering it as already abundant bicarbonate and carbonate ions in seawater.”
Reading between the lines, they plan to scavenge mine tailings for valuable metals etc which will leave them with a load of hydroxide slurry which they want to promote as Gaviscon for the planet.
“There, using clean, renewable electricity…”. I take it from this that they are either off grid and have their own source of “clean, renewable electricity” or are telling porkies; because it’s physically impossible to filter the source of electricity from a grid electricity.
Agree, Mike, with your reading of what lies between the lines.
““We’re trying to restore the ocean and restore the climate for generations,” said Peter Chargin”
If ever there was a need to define what a God complex is…
And if it is a laxative it will give a whole new meaning to the phrase, ‘swimming in sh1t’, that the Cornwall surfers go on about when it comes to raw sewage.
Confirms that the whole idea is a heap of Turkish Delight.
Stupidity in the extreme. For carbon read carbon dioxide. The good gas that does no harm at the miniscule man made atmospheric levels
Life on earth is endangered by chronic reduction of atmospheric CO2. We aren’t far from dangerously low levels. The increase in CO2 to 420 ppm is the single greatest thing to have happened in the time of Man.
Ocean organisms form calcites from CO2. When they die, they sink to the ocean bottom, sequestering the CO2 in limestone until the next plate subduction, maybe 2 billion years out.
‘Making the water more alkaline speeds up the natural way oceans lock CO2 away by neutralising dissolved CO2 and turning it into a salt.’
Doesn’t ring true. The natural way is organisms.
Whatever. My point is that increasing the sequestering of CO2 in the oceans is the WORST POSSIBLE THING WE COULD DO.
Left unchecked, these f*&^ers really could destroy the planet.
I like your comments
A Nova Scotia Company you say? So they d’know where they can dump their nonsense, don’t they? My house look over St Ives Bay and my friends fish there for a living, so I wish them furriners well and may their next turd be a hedgehog.
Consider that line pinched! 😄
Grand Banks might be another possible site for the experiment?
6-7 X 6-7 X 6-7 metres of water , according to my mental arithmetic, should weigh around 200 to 300 tons. I suspect that St Ives bay shifts a bit more(!!) than that twice a day in and out, something called the tides, I believe, so this is not even a drop of p1ss in a bucket, not that it would anyway have the proverbial snowball’s chance. What is going on in the World with idiocy such as this? Mad is nowhere near the correct word.
As indicated above, they are just looking for some mug who doesn’t mind them dumping industrial waste containing a high proportion of magnesium salts off their coastline.
There’s a letter to the Times there, Ray. Bet it wouldn’t get published.
Response to Say Sanders further up the post. Don’t know how it ended up here…
These false memes never go away.
The oceans are not acidic and can never become so because of their huge buffering capacity.
Click to access acid_seas.pdf
“IPCC AR4 WGI stated that the mean pH of surface waters ranges between 7.9 and 8.3 in the open ocean, so the oceans remain alkaline. It is dishonest to present to a lay audience that any perceived reduction in alkalinity means the oceans are turning to acid.”
More modelling:
“The long standing claim that “ocean acidity” has increased by 30% since before the industrial revolution was calculated from the estimated uptake of anthropogenic carbon dioxide between 1750 and 1994, which shows a decrease in alkalinity of 0.1 pH unit, well within the range quoted by IPCC.”
Typical econonsense
This experiment is designed to reduce the massive CO2 with which we are ‘poluting’ the atmosphere by our miniscule 1%. Surely dumping it off China or India or even the USA would give a better result? Presumably British fish will be given a vote on whether they want their space poluted?
Once again, the climate dunces have it exactly backwards. We are at near starvation levels of CO2 in the atmosphere because most of our carbon is locked up in marine sediments. We need to be liberating that carbon, not putting even more carbon in jail where it does nothing (CO2 is PLANT FOOD).
Upvote!
Although a small amount is mined as brucite, on an industrial scale, magnesium hydroxide (Mg(OH)2) is produced by treating seawater with lime i.e. calcium hydroxide ((Ca(OH)2)). A volume of 600 tons of seawater gives about one ton of magnesium hydroxide. It is used industrially to neutralize acidic wastewaters. But the environmental cost of producing it from seawater or mining it and then transporting it to be dumped off Cornwall must be huge.
This came up on WUWT recently. Look at the concentration of magnesium and calcium ions dissolved in the oceans. They are about 8-10 times higher than the concentration of CO2 (15%) and HCO3 (85%). So you are not limited in alkaline earth metals at all.
Limestone is very abundant in the earth’s crust. That is likely where a good portion of the CO2 went that used to be in the atmosphere went. The alkaline earth bicarbonates are not stable in warm water. They are prone to precipitate out in warm shallow seas. If you want to remove CO2 from the atmosphere, create more opportunities for the alkaline earth mineral carbonates to precipitate out in the warm waters of the tropics and allow ocean circulation to carry it there.
In other words, if you want to sequester CO2 in the oceans, you don’t need more magnesium or calcium ions, you need more heat is shallow areas of the oceans where the precipitation won’t re-dissolve in the cold, deep depths of the ocean.
Yet another “hoping something will turn up to help our Energy Security” here from the UK Government announced today. https://www.gov.uk/government/news/fusion-software-could-help-bolster-energy-grid?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=govuk-notifications-topic&utm_source=720dc40f-eabf-456a-903d-1ddfacd2eb1e&utm_content=daily
ll I can say is « Beware unintended consequences ». Nobody is clever enough to know the unknown unknowns!
I have a modest proposal for a process for minimising the damage due to clinate-change hurricanes.
I am looking for a grant to fund 50 people to be put up in a luxury Florida hotel during the hurricane season. Every morning they will go out to the beach and spit into the wind. If this first trial is successful (measured by low hurricane damage in Florida) we will repeat it with a total of 300 people…
“In a future where a failed climate change experiment has killed all life except for the survivors who boarded the Snowpiercer………”
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1706620/
Science fiction????
Why? Do they want to stop the greening do more people will die of famine? Once again the triumph of dogma over science.
That’s religions for you
“This is absolutely crazy. Maybe somebody would like to do the sums, but I would imagine ….”
Not a lot of people know that John McCarthy, who coined the term “artificial intelligence” is equally famous for observing:
“He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.”
https://vvattsupwiththat.blogspot.com/2023/02/its-still-underwater-volcanoes-all-way.html
This is one of the dumbest ideas I have ever come across. Brucite is virtually insoluble in water, and is likely to not be much different in sea water. These goons need a lesson in water chemistry. At a pH of 7.5-8.5 all of the CO2 will be present as bicarbonate and the magesium hydroxide will not react with the bicarbonate to any significant extent. The carbon dioxide in the air will be in an equilibrium with the carbon dioxide ( as bicarbonate) in the sea water. If you dn not deplete the bicarbonate you will not be able to absorb any appreciable carbon dioxide form the air. All I can see happening is the brucite decending to the bottom of Davy Jones locker where it will sit.
As someone said you need to follow the money. This is blatant waste disposal and my guess is that there are some unpleasent leftovers amidst the waste( as there usually is). This stuff belongs from where is originates.
Isn’t there regulation against dumping chemicals in to the sea?
That probably explains why you can’t buy Milk of Magnesia anywhere!
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