The+Deep+Oceans+and+Carbon+Storage

Your topic deals with the deep oceans as a potential storage area for CO2, both natural and possibly human "dumped" CO2. Richie D. Jacqui Bell Nick Doyon Brittany Beaudry Grade- Organization 4 /5 Looks decent, but still has a bunch of not connected paragraphs. Climate change explanation 5 /10 See mesage below Oceanography explanation 7 /15 See message below Diagram/connection to text 8 /10 Most of them are connected to the text. Overall- 24/40 -You need to be VERY careful of your cutting and pasting on information without citing the source. You still have quite a bit of your information taken directly from websites without any credit given!.

Scientists are going to start dumping carbon dioxide into the ocean to see if it would be a safe way to stop global warming. "Such injections of the gas could be made by deep-sea drill ships, and monitored to see how it dispersed and affected marine life." says Wallace Broecker, of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at New York's Columbia University. Supposedly deep sea sediments can provide nearly an unlimited and permanent reservoir for CO2. Because CO2 is dense it will not rise off the bottom of the ocean.

Carbon dioxide is a colorless, odorless gas that is a minor element of Earth's atmosphere. It is produced when fossil fuels burn, in fermentation, when animals exhale, and in photosynthesis. Its existence in the atmosphere keeps some of Earth's energy from returning to space, and an excess of carbon dioxide helps produce the greenhouse effect, the rise in temperature the Earth experiences because some atmospheric gases (water vapor, carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide and methane, for example) trap energy from the sun. Coal-burning power plants are the largest U.S. source of carbon dioxide pollution - they produce 2.5 billion tons every year. Automobiles, the second largest source, create nearly 1.5 billion tons of CO 2 annually. In CO2 storage, the captured gases can be dissolved in deep oceans; converted to rock-like solid materials; absorbed by grasses, trees, soils and algae; or injected into geologic formations like; sandstone or limestone aquifers, old oil and gas fields, and coal beds that cannot be mined.

Scientists at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory suggest that undersea basalt formations 8,000 feet below the ocean on the Pacific Northwest coast could absorb up to 120 years worth of U.S. CO2 emissions. CO 2 can also be stored in deep salt water-saturated rock formations. These exist worldwide and have the potential to store large amounts of CO 2. However the geology and effect of the CO 2 on these aquifers is not yet understood and more research is needed.

The Sleipner Project in Norway's North Sea is the world's first commercial carbon dioxide capture and storage project. Started in 1996, it sequesters about one million metric tons of carbon dioxide each year.

__While Greenpeace accepts the inevitability that CO2 will be captured and stored, it strongly opposes storage in the deep sea. As it is clear that virtually all the CO2 released to the atmosphere as a result of fossil fuel burning will ultimately find its way to the deep sea, its objection is focused on the "point pollution" created by purposeful injections of CO2. The fear is that such an activity will put at risk benthic biota - the community of creatures and plants in the deep sea - living in the vicinity of the injection sites. First, in order to ensure that the injected CO2 has adequate time to mix throughout the deep sea, injection should be at depths greater than 3,500 meters - that is, the depth below which "liquid" CO2 becomes more dense than sea water.__

Cut and pasted from http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/jun/18/carboncaptureandstorage

Carbon dioxide emisions have increased more than 25% sence the industrial revolution. Most of this is due to the fact that burning of oil, coal and natural gas supply about 80 percent of the world's energy needs. Oceans cover over 70% of the earth's surface witth an average depth of 3,800 m. Due to the fact that carbon dioxide is subtle in water exchanges of CO2 between the atmosphere and surface water of the ocean untill equilibrium is reached. If the amount of CO2 it the atmosphere increases, the ocean will gradually take up more CO2. Because of this oceans have absorbed about 500 GtCO2 (140GtC) of the total 1,300 GtCO2 (350 GtC) of anthropogenic emissions that have been released into the air over the past 200 years. Thats almost half the amount that has been released. The oceans are currently takeing up CO2 at the rate of about 7 GtCO2 yr-1 (2 GtC yr-1). Scientists think that undersea basalt 8,000 feet below the surface of the ocean could absorb up to 120 years worth of CO2 emissions. while the total CO2 storage capacity within the 200-mile economic zone of the U.S. coastline is even bigger, the U.S. coastline is capable of storing thousands of years of current U.S. CO2 emissions. Injecting CO2 into deep-sea sediments < 3,000-m water depth and a few hundred meters of sediment provides permanent geologic storage. At the high pressures and low temperatures common in deep-sea sediments, CO2 stays in its liquid phase and can be denser than the overlying fluid, causing the injected CO2 to be gravitationally stable. The only other potential sites besides the deep ocean for CO2 storage include spent oil fields, saline aquifiers, and layerd basalts. However the CO2 has a slight chance of escapeing these reservoirs if they are not seald properly. Another option for CO2 storage would be injecting CO2 directly into the deep ocean, where most of it will dissolve as bicarbonate. Deep-ocean injection can be looked at as just accelerating the natural oceanic uptake of CO2, which would occur over many centuries anyway. But there is no telling what effects speeding up the oceans CO2 intake process by that much could have on the oceans. Unfortunately, because of ocean currents and local supersaturation, a large fraction of the injected CO2 will be released to the atmosphere after a few hundred years anyway so it wouldn't be 100% perminent. Research was found for deep sea CO2 storage from as late as 1999 so this has definitely been in the works for a long time, so it should be interesting and exciting to see how this all turns out.



__Experiments conducted by Peter Brewer, of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, not only confirm that this is the case but also demonstrate that the CO2 injected rapidly reacts with sea water to form a solid clathrate, which is more dense than both liquid CO2 and sea water. Hence, the injected CO2 would end up on the sea floor as a slush. This would gradually dissolve, releasing the CO2 to the surrounding sea water, where it would react with the dissolved carbonate and borate ions to become chemically bound in the form of bicarbonate ion. As the concentration of carbonate and borate ions is small, the neutralisation would take place gradually as the CO2-rich sea water mixed into the surroundings.__

__We know enough to say with confidence that deep ocean disposal of CO2 is certainly feasible, but unless small-scale pilot experiments are conducted, information necessary to assess the impact on the macro abyssal biota will remain obscure. The injections could be made from ships equipped for deep sea drilling, and if the CO2 was tagged with radiocarbon, its dispersal away from the sea floor clathrate pile could be sensitively monitored. Studies of the costs associated with ocean disposal would also be conducted. The CO2 would have to be sent through pipelines from its collection point to a port, where it would be loaded on tankers that would carry it to a floating ocean station, from which it would be piped to the abyss. It would be injected into a water column of the ocean or at the sea floor the dissolved CO2 would then become part of the global carbon cycle.

All cut and pasted from __ http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/jun/18/carboncaptureandstorage

So in conclusion, CO2 has become a big issue and addition to greenhouse gasses, and we need to find a safe and effective way to get rid of it before it gets so bad that theres nothing we can do. Many organizations and scientists have taken data and made observations about this. No one is really to sure what effects it has on the marine life around the storage areas of the CO2. But once they find out if it doesn't effect the animals, plants, and organisms this will be the most effective and best way to get rid of CO2 gasses in our atmosphere. This picture shows some of the main meathods that could be used. However this project is still in the research phase so none of these have been demonstrated.