Subject: Viridian Note 00049:  Submerging Carbon

Key concepts:  Algae, carbon sequestration, genetic 
engineering, mega-projects

Attention Conservation Notice:  It's a mad, world-altering 
scheme that sounds seductively rational on a sentence-by-
sentence basis.

Links: www.bespoke.org/viridian 
(the long-awaited bespoke.org
digital art gallery is now open)

Entries in the Viridian Teapot Design Contest:
I just got off the plane and don't have time to post 
them yet.  Because I'm getting back on a plane tomorrow 
morning.  Due to the Pope-Emperor's crushing travel
requirements, this contest's deadline will have to be extended.

From: Jim_Hurst@kyrus.com^*  (Jim Hurst) 

Greetings.

Some very interesting discussion going on.  To date, the 
Viridian proposals I've seen discussed are reacting to a 
greenhouse world.  This is fine, but it's only half the 
story.  Viridians should design large scale proposals to 
*reverse* greenhouse processes.

    Industrial culture has dispersed many billions of tons 
of C02, along with various other insulating gases, into 
the atmosphere.  This poses questions:  how can we get 
this stuff out of the atmosphere?  And, once out, what do 
we do with the solid waste?

    Carbon dioxide is ridiculously stable from a chemical 
engineering standpoint, but it possesses the interesting 
property of being a critical ingredient to the process of 
photosynthesis.  This means that we already have a wide 
spectrum of available bioreactors that can be used to 
scrub carbon from the atmosphere.  We possess centuries of 
expertise fine tuning these bioreactors, namely plants, 
thru agriculture.

    But carbon sequestion is not your typical agriculture 
problem.  Agriculture, in  a free market society, uses 
valuable real estate and other inputs to produce things 
people want to buy.  It's not clear who's willing to pay 
for carbon sequestration, particularly on the massive 
scale required.

     More troubling yet, how can we dispose of sequestered 
carbon in units of say, 6 billion tons? (If a ton is 
packed in a cubic meter, then we require six cubic 
kilometers of dump space == not exactly something for the 
local mini-storage).

    After checking into a few likely storage sites (Nevada 
will take anything for a price), and pricing out the costs 
of transport and installation, it seems to me that the 
most cost-effective solution is the ocean floor.  Now, 
this poses certain political problems, but nice clean 
carbon, nicely packaged, over small parts of the deeper 
ocean floor, is not a doomsday scenario.

    Due to transport costs, six billion tons of carbon 
destined for the ocean floor should be sunk on-site.  
Therefore, the best existing sequestering organisms are 
ocean algae.  But existing algae don't meet Viridian 
goals.  Natural algae recycle nearly all the carbon they 
use, rather than neatly sinking it.  

     Viridian bioengineering must meet this challenge by 
designing algae that sequester carbon, perhaps along with 
certain amounts of silicates or other extracted heavier 
elements.  As the engineered algae matures, it gets 
heavier, but maintains buoyancy as kelp does, through 
flotation cells.  When it's mature, the flotation cells 
rupture, and our ocean floor carbon delivery vehicle sinks 
like a stone.

    The Viridian CarbonSink Algae (tm) has some daunting 
technical requirements.  

    First, its reproductive ability must be controllable, 
since otherwise it might run amok in the hydrosphere.  

    Second, it will probably have to be artificially 
fertilized, since we're likely to grow it in barren parts 
of the ocean.  (It's not politically feasible to plant it 
in sea areas already heavily used for shipping and 
fishing.)  

   Third, this organism has to be engineered for tissue 
that contains considerable carbon, sinks on schedule, and 
is geologically stable under ocean floor conditions.  

    Fourth, it has to be aggressive enough to compete 
favorably with more traditional algae, inside its human 
designated and maintained zones.

   The ocean is a large place.  Contemplating the 
ecological horror of floods and hurricanes makes it easy 
to accept CarbonSink zones as environmental sacrifice 
areas.  Large areas of the ocean are already biological 
deserts due to lack of available nutrients, so the 
CarbonSink zones needn't be environmentally malign.  A 
certain leakage into the food chain could be used for 
commercial aquaculture, which might be quite a plus in a 
world subject to drought in grain belts.

Cheers,  Jim Hurst

(((bruces remarks:  I do enjoy this sort of thing; there's 
nothing quite like a mathematically-literate counsel of 
despair.  The aspect I find hardest to swallow is the 
unmentioned Wellsian World Council of genetically-literate 
engineers who can somehow seize large areas of the oceans 
and turn them bright green with dying, rotting, sinking, 
gene-warped goop.  Surely it would be simpler and easier 
to divide this pressing task among six billion people. 
Let's just arrange for every man, woman, and child on the 
planet to accumulate and publicly display one ton of 
carbon.  I'm thinking, maybe carbon lawn-art: birdbaths, 
sprinklers, that kind of thing.)))

Jim Hurst (Jim_Hurst@kyrus.com^*)