Earth Equity News

Shell Oil Experimenting with Adding Lime to Oceans. Mongabay.com, July 21, 2008. "Shell Oil is funding a project that seeks to test the potential of adding lime to seawater... to fight global warming... reports Chemistry & Industry magazine. Adding lime (calcium hydroxide) to seawater increases its alkalinity, thereby increasing the ocean's capacity to absorb CO2... The process could also help counter... acidification, which biologists say is increasingly a threat to marine life, including coral reefs and plankton. While the concept has been discussed for years, it has been... too expensive to [carry] out on a [large enough] scale... Now Tim Kruger, a management consultant at Corven, a London-based firm, [thinks that by]... locating [such projects] in regions that are rich with limestone and have substantial energy resources that are too remote to exploit for commercial purposes, [the problem of scale can be overcome]. "There are many such places -- for example, Australia's Nullarbor Plain would be a prime location for this process...' said Kruger. Although the process generates CO2 emissions, on paper it sequesters twice as much of the warming gas than it produces. Kruger says the process is therefore 'carbon negative'. 'This process has the potential to reverse the accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere. It would be possible to reduce CO2 to pre-industrial levels,' he explained. Shell is funding an economic feasibility study of the concept, which is detailed at Cquestrate... Earlier this year, Planktos, a California-based firm, attempted to conduct a large-scale iron-fertilization experiment in the equatorial Pacific. It... failed to attract sufficient funding to conduct its experiments."