Jude Suchyta
Research Mentor: Josh Herzog
Mentor Department: Mechanical Engineering, Engineering
Author(s): Jude Suchyta, Joshua Herzog
Session: Afternoon Session (12:00 PM – 1:00 PM)
Presentation Type:
Abstract
Marine carbon dioxide removal (mCDR) is a potentially powerful climate mitigation strategy that works by storing excess atmospheric carbon dioxide in the ocean. Ocean alkalinity enhancement (OAE) is one such mCDR approach that aims to increase the alkalinity of the ocean to increase its potential to store carbon. However, since the ocean and atmosphere are so large and inhomogeneous, the actual rate at which carbon dioxide can be taken up into the ocean is not well understood. Understanding this rate is critical to both designing new mCDR systems as well as supporting their operation as carbon credits are awarded based on models rather than direct measurement. Here, we explore the chemical kinetics or rate of chemical reaction for the dissolution of solid alkalinity that is often used in OAE to model and better understand some of the microscale chemical and physical processes that control OAE efficiency. Our results show that uptake rate is only weakly dependent on the amount of solid alkalinity. Instead, the chemical reaction rate is controlled by the rate of particle dissolution. This suggests that alkalinity can be engineered to optimize mCDR rates. Future work will aim to apply this modelling approach to analyze realistic OAE systems and take into account the effects of particle size and kinetics.
