Frequently Asked Questions

The vast size of the ocean already stores 140 Trillion tons of CO2 (equivalent) can easily accommodate another trillion tons.The cold temperatures and inert depths enable stable long duration storage of biomass containing captured CO2. 

Ocean deserts are ideal for this sequestration method. A lit zone of 100 meters thickness and 1 km square can sequester 4000-9000 tonnes in one week. Since the available ocean desert area is about 44 million sq km, this area will sequester 200 gigatonnes in a single pass. 3-4 passes are possible in the same location.

At most, 2 gigajoules, which could be reduced by 10 times to 200 megajoules through pulsing optimization, number of hours light needs to be ON, the quality of light and other parameters which will need to be optimized in the field.

We estimate the cost of energy to be $7 per ton for energy cost in an optimized system.  Infrastructure, organization etc will add to this. Using automated systems and large scale operations will reduce the total costs.

1000 years minimum.

CO2 drawdown into the deep ocean is slow. So, the deeper we work, the longer it takes for drawdown to happen.  We have to confirm this with models and field studies, but the timescale for drawdown is likely measured in months or years.

Less than 100mW of electrical power for 3-6 days.

Verification of atmospheric drawdown will need to be done in the ocean in an experimental setting using enclosed spaces such as a long tube reaching from the surface to the deep sea with CO2 sensors at the top of the tube. Once CO2 drawdown is verified, the data will be used to model the drawdown over large areas. In the open ocean, we will deploy remote monitoring and physical data collection techniques. 

The simplest system is a vessel at the surface holding batteries powering lasers which feed pulsed light into a large net of optical fibers that bring the light to the depths. A bundle of optical fibers is lowered to about 200-500 meters depth, and spread out to light up the dark water.  The size is arbitrarily large, and could be in the scale of kilometers.

We must operate well below the sunlit zone, which is about 200 meters deep in most locations. Less than 1% of sunlight penetrates to this depth. We want to avoid contact with ecosystems, so we need to go deeper than most animals live. This puts our target zone of operations in the 200-1000 meters depth, called the mesopelagic zone.

Plants need very little oxygen, they actually produce more oxygen from H20. There is a uniform 28 grams of carbon (100 grams CO2 equivalent) per cubic meter of seawater, and this represents the maximum amount of CO2 that could be sequestered from one cubic meter of seawater. Only a few enclosed locations like the Black Sea have no oxygen to support animal life. 

Dark parts of the oceans below the reach of sunlight have a stable chemical composition, including nutrients. It is the presence of sunlight that depletes nutrients- by enabling growth of plants to use up the surface nutrients (in land as well as ocean). As sunlight decreases in depths, nutrients increase. This is the reason the highest productivity ocean areas are upwelling zones where the deeper water moves to the surface, bringing nutrients to the surface.

Yes, it exhausts most of the nutrients as well as most of the carbon at the lit location.  This is why we limit operations to the ocean deserts or gyres, where plants and other life are missing anyway.

Since we are planning to turn off the lights after phytoplankton grows, and move to a different location, animals will have sufficient time to recover from any changes caused by the light. Furthermore, there is dramatically less ocean life in the dark ocean than there is at the lit surface, so the changes from light will not have a significant effect on the biota. Finally, we plan to operate in gyres, where there is very little existing biota.

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Many details are in this link: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1E70NRx4O1SQiMTd87vhGLwD6HidBv2fW/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=108049935942722229143&rtpof=true&sd=true