Scientists Activate Facility to Suck Carbon Directly Out of the Ocean

Yahoo

19-04-2025

To combat climate change, a team of scientists are sucking CO2 out of the ocean.
The project, dubbed SeaCURE, began operating a small-scale trial this year on England's south coast, the BBC reports. It hangs its hopes on a simple premise: that the ocean is the world's largest carbon sink, absorbing nearly a third of all CO2 emitted into the atmosphere.
A flurry of projects have explored capturing carbon directly from the atmosphere. SeaCURE explores an alternative route. Instead of capturing carbon from the air, it proposes removing it from the ocean, freeing up the deep blue to absorb even more of the CO2 that civilization is pumping out.
"Seawater has got loads of carbon in it compared to the air, about 150 times more," Paul Halloran, a professor in ocean and climate science at the University of Exeter who leads the SeaCURE project, told the BBC. "But it has got different challenges, the energy requirements to generate the products that we require to do this from seawater are huge."
In a nutshell, SeaCURE sucks up seawater, processes it to extract the CO2, buries it underground, and then releases the carbon-free water back into the ocean. Removing the carbon is accomplished by treating the seawater to make it more acidic, which frees up the carbon it harbors to release itself as a gas. This process is done inside a large tank nicknamed a "stripper."
"When you open a fizzy drink it froths, that's the CO2 coming out," Tom Bell from Plymouth Marine Laboratory told the BBC. "What we're doing by spreading the seawater on a large surface area. It's a bit like pouring a drink on the floor and allowing the CO2 to come out of the seawater really quickly."
Still in its infancy, the project will remove no more than 100 metric tons of carbon per year. But SeaCURE believes that if the technology is applied at a massive scale and powered by renewable energy, it could remove 14 billion tons of CO2 a year if one percent of the ocean's surface water was processed, per the BBC.
That may sound too good to be true. We've certainly heard amazing promises of nature handling the work for us before, like the rush to plant as many trees as possible. More broadly, experts remain divided about carbon capture's usefulness, and there's a very real danger of its promises being hijacked to distract from climate change's systemic causes.
That said, some leading climate scientists think that we shouldn't write anything off just yet.
"Carbon removal is necessary. If you want to reach net zero emissions and net zero emissions is needed to halt further warming," Oliver Geden, a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, told the BBC. "Capturing directly from seawater is one of the options. Directly capturing it from the air is another one. There are basically 15 to 20 options, and in the end the question of what to use, of course, will depend on the cost."
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