Of course ocean iron fertilisation research should be funded

That a government is not doing what we consider sensible does not surprise us in the slightest:

Back at Woods Hole, a few buildings over from Subhas, Ken Buesseler, a professor emeritus of marine radiochemistry, has experienced the US science funding cliff first-hand. He has spent three decades studying iron fertilisation – which adds iron to the ocean to encourage plankton growth, thereby sequestering carbon. That is, until his US Department of Energy (DoE) grant was stopped halfway through last year with, he says, only about half of the $5m promised being paid out.

Researchers were to hear about a new phase of funding last winter, but “none of those came through”, says Buesseler. “There is no pipeline in DoE for carbon management any more.”

We are the people who insist government mostly doesn’t do the sensible things and also most of what government does do is not sensible.

In this particular case this is a bad idea:

Buesseler also leads an ambitious project called Ex-OIS, which is in the early stages of seeking permission to study iron fertilisation across more than 400 miles offshore of Alaska’s coast. It would be the first venture ever to have gone through national and international regulatory processes.

But with little to no funding opportunities in the US, it is hard to imagine it attracting the $30m needed to launch the experiment in 2028.

“I feel like we are just kicking the can,” says Buesseler, who believes that these geoengineering techniques need to be used in conjunction with fossil fuel reduction.

That should be funded - by someone, somewhere - and should have been so a long time ago. $30 million is a rounding error, a trivial detail, in the charitable, foundation, billionaires buying social prominence, budgets out there. Someone should indeed get on with funding something that could make a significant and useful difference to the world.

We’ve been making this point for at least 15 years now about iron fertilisation of the oceans. We know - absolutely - that certain areas of the ocean are nutrient deficient. It’s usually iron that’s missing. Add iron - the most useful form is ferrous sulphate, an industrial waste which people will pay you to cart away - and that creates an algal bloom, thus an increase in the lifeload more generally of that patch of water. Some of which, when it dies, sinks to the bottom and becomes rock. Carrying the embedded carbon with it. This is how chalk was/is made, it being CaCO3 and all that.

So, it works. The bit unknown is how well it works. Exactly how much does get sequestrated well away from where it might warm things up? A very recent estimate:

The researchers estimate that 60 years of iron addition could remove between 0.14 and 0.70 billion tonnes of CO₂ per year from the atmosphere,

That’s not far from the 1 billion tonnes we were using as that guesstimate 15 years back. Note that this is not a complete solution by any means. But that is more than the UK’s total emissions in a year. It would also be wildly cheaper than whatever Ms. Fanbulleh is likely to inflict upon us. The requirement would be for a few thousand tonnes of that - free, or even negative price - ferrous sulphate a year plus a small freighter and a sailor with a shovel to get it over the side. Well, OK, 3,000 tonnes a year would mean moving 10 tonnes a working day so perhaps two sailors with shovels. Conversations with the last people to even try to test this in an academic manner told us the costs would be in the 50 US cents to $1 range per tonne of CO2 permanently - OK, geological ages - sequestered. As best anyone knows right now this is a workable and wildly cheap partial solution.

We, we as a society, really should find out. We haven’t been because as those same conversations told us the political impetus inside climate change research is not to find cheap and useful technological solutions. In one more cynical moment - more realist perhaps - than normal even for us one of us said:

This actually becomes my litmus test. If you’re willing to discuss how we go about further testing on iron fertilization, then I’m willing to believe you’re being serious about the dangers of and solutions to climate change. If you’re not, you won’t consider it or insist that we cannot do it for some reason or other, then I’ll conclude you’re not actually being serious about it all as a problem at all. My suspicion will be that you’re using climate change as a crowbar to change society in your desired direction, not regarding it as a problem to be solved at all.

We do not, at all, insist that government - any government - should fund this. It is the sort of thing government should fund, a public good, new knowledge. It also doesn’t matter which government, it’s a public good. But it’s far more important that it get done than it is to worry over who funds it. There are vast pots of funding out there from private sources. It’s even possible to muse that Greenpeace could afford to do this on its own. Not that they would for that’s one organisation we’re really sure doesn’t pass that cynical test above. But varied rich people have set aside money to aid in solving climate change. Some of them billionaires who might even have a spare yacht we could put the sailors on.

So, who’s up for really trying to have a - even partial - solution to climate change on the cheap? Fund research into ocean iron fertilisation, pronto.

Tim Worstall