You might pop a Tums after a night of pizza and wings, and Will Burt thinks oceans could benefit from the same strategy.
Burt is the chief oceans scientist with Nova Scotia-based Planetary Technologies, a company that’s looking at ways to pump antacids into the sea to increase its alkalinity — and neutralize all the carbon it stores from the atmosphere in the process.
“The ocean and the atmosphere are more or less in equilibrium with each other when it comes to carbon dioxide gas,” Burt explains.
“It can move freely between the ocean and the atmosphere, and does often. When you add alkalinity, or an antacid, to the ocean, that antacid does exactly what it’s meant to do, which is neutralize acid.”
In this case, the acid being neutralized is carbonic acid: the chemical created when carbon dioxide moves into the water.
That’s why, Burt says, the world’s oceans are 30 per cent more acidic than pre-Industrial Revolution levels — before humans began pumping excess CO2 into the atmosphere.
The neutralized chemical is called bicarbonate, Burt says, which already abounds in the ocean. Because there’s then less carbonic acid in the sea, it creates a kind of vacuum, pulling more CO2 out of the air.
“This can be done in a beaker very easily,” he said. “The general concept is fairly simple, and the potential of it … is enormous.”
Planetary Technologies plans to use existing wastewater treatment facilities to pump magnesium hydroxide into the ocean. (Martin Trainor/CBC)
Burt, who spoke Tuesday at the Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society congress in St. John’s, wants to eventually use wastewater treatment plants to carry out the deacidification process, by adding large amounts of magnesium hydroxide — already an ingredient in wastewater treatment — to the pipelines feeding water back into the sea.
“This thing that we’re doing is accelerating a natural cycle,” he said. “Erosion of rocks on land by slightly acidic rainwater moves alkaline material, dissolved rock, into the ocean. That’s how the ocean basically regulates the climate.
“That’s going to happen over millions of years and reduce and remove all this excess CO2, but we just don’t have anywhere near that much time. So