Carbon Capture and Storage - Technologies and Risk Management

Esteves, Victor Paulo Peçanha; Morgado, Cláudia do Rosário Vaz

doi:10.5772/36879

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…However, even with cleanup of concentrated N and P via expanded industrial treatment, agriculture unavoidably produces global nonpoint N and P pollution from application of fertilizer and manure that infiltrates nearby surface and subsurface waters, with septic systems and cesspools contributing additional N and P in much of the world ( Cairncross, 2003 ; Ribaudo et al., 2001 ). Beyond cleanup of excess N and P, CO 2 -specific solutions that compress or chemically fix this pollutant from industrial facilities have poor economics and depend on storage in sites of uncertain stability ( Cuéllar-Franca and Azapagic, 2015 ; Esteves and Morgado, 2012 ). Fortifying the oceans with limiting micronutrients such as iron could remove large quantities of macronutrients ( Boyd et al., 2000 ; Buesseler et al., 2008 ; Naqvi and Smetacek, 2011 ) by stimulating large plankton blooms that then sink, but the long-term impacts of this approach are poorly understood, and the loss of potentially valuable biomass weakens the economics.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Expanded algal cultivation can reverse key planetary boundary transgressions

Calahan

Osenbaugh

Adey

2018

Heliyon

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Humanity is degrading multiple ecosystem services, potentially irreversibly. Two of the most important human impacts are excess agricultural nutrient loading in our fresh and estuarine waters and excess carbon dioxide in our oceans and atmosphere. Large-scale global intervention is required to slow, halt, and eventually reverse these stresses. Cultivating attached polyculture algae within controlled open-field photobioreactors is a practical technique for exploiting the ubiquity and high primary productivity of algae to capture and recycle the pollutants driving humanity into unsafe regimes of biogeochemical cycling, ocean acidification, and global warming. Expanded globally and appropriately distributed, algal cultivation is capable of removing excess nutrients from global environments, while additionally sequestering appreciable excess carbon. While obviously a major capital and operational investment, such a project is comparable in magnitude to the construction and maintenance of the global road transportation network. Beyond direct amelioration of critical threats, expanded algal cultivation would produce a major new commodity flow of biomass, potentially useful either as a valuable organic commodity itself, or used to reduce the scale of the problem by improving soils, slowing or reversing the loss of arable land. A 100 year project to expand algal cultivation to completely recycle excess global agricultural N and P would, when fully operational, require gross global expenses no greater than $2.3 × 1012 yr−1, (3.0% of the 2016 global domestic product) and less than 1.9 × 107 ha (4.7 × 107 ac), 0.38% of the land area used globally to grow food. The biomass generated embodies renewable energy equivalent to 2.8% of global primary energy production.

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