Why Elon Musk’s XPRIZE is backing this Nova Scotia company’s plan to basically dose the ocean with antacid

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Nova Scotia company has received a million-dollar prize from Elon Musk for its plan to increase the ocean’s ability to absorb carbon dioxide — essentially by dosing it with an antacid.

— a four-year, international competition backed by the Elon Musk Foundation with the aim of speeding up climate solutions. Planetary was one of 15 companies to win XPRIZE’s Milestone Award out of an initial pool of more than 1,000.

Normally, the atmosphere and the ocean strike a balance between the amount of carbon dioxide they hold. As atmospheric carbon dioxide increases, the ocean also absorbs more of the gas. The more CO2 it absorbs, however, the less capacity it has to take on more of the gas. And, in the process, it becomes slightly more acidic.

Most wastewater systems already use some similar form of antacid to manage the pH levels of the water they release. Douglas Wallace, the Canada Research Chair in Ocean Science and Technology at Dalhousie University, is evaluating the effect the Planetary process might have on the ocean.“Over the last 200 years, we’ve been using up the ability of the ocean to neutralize the extra CO2 we’re pumping into it,” he says. “And I think what’s important to recognize is that process is completely uncontrolled, completely unregulated. ...

Those are questions he’s initially posing in Dalhousie’s Aquatron, a 15-metre-in-diameter, 684,000-litre circular tank in which he’s introduced an alkaline substance to see how it affects the water’s uptake of carbon dioxide. MacIntyre, a professor of biological oceanography at Dalhousie University, is interested in whether there’s a possibility that Planetary’s Technologies’ antacid could damage phytoplankton cells, whether it affects their ability to reproduce or to photosynthesize — another way in which the ocean is able to sequester carbon, albeit, one less significantHe said his preliminary research has shown him that, at the concentrations proposed by Planetary Technologies, the antacid will not interfere with...

 

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