It was a throwaway line but on Bush Telegraph the other day Professor Jorg Imberger, Chair of the Center for Water Research at the University of Western Australia and that state’s Scientist of the Year, in talking about demands from the Government for farmers to cut fertiliser use by 20 percent in the Swan Canning catchment that feeds Perth, mentioned that he had done some calculations indicating that if we got the nutrient balance of the world’s lakes right we could sequester enough carbon to solve the planet’s CO2 emissions problem.
It’s an amazing claim. The program is worth a listen.* It will not give you his calculations, but it might build a bit of confidence that he knows what he’s talking about.
On the sequestration angle he’s suggesting that there is a false idea that clean and clear is green when it comes to water. Hence, he says, in the EU they are legislating to clean up all the algae but by overdoing it they will “triple greenhouse emissions”. Not sure exactly what that means, but he says the trick is in finding the balance.
He says that algae is good tucker for fish as long as the river or lake is not “obese.” In Lake Como they have a project where they are pushing nutrient outflows deeper and further north. This will:
1. Clean up the lake in front of Como
2. Increase fish in the north
3. Increase carbon sequestration
4. Increase biodiversity
But the pollies generally in Europe are heading in the wrong direction.
His immediate concern in WA is the proposal to reduce nutrient flow from farms by 20% which is a considerable impost on farmers. He sees what he calls the Real Time Management System as perhaps obviating this necessity, with the added bonus that public servants could run the system in the interests of stakeholders without the intervention of politicians. Ironically a democratisation of the system requires elected officials to take their hands off the nuts and bolts and stick to policy.
Sounds good to me. Government by the people in conjunction with technologists. I’m sure this approach could bring its own problems of embedded bias, but it would be a change from wrong-headed ideology imposed through political pressure.
As background he explains that ever since settlers started clearing the land in the 1820s resulting in the silting up of the billabongs, the river has been managed reactively with every solution causing new problems. His Real Time Management System has the following features:
1. Objectives are set
2. Sensors are installed monitoring levels, flows water quality etc throughout the system
3. The system being managed is then modelled in a computer system
4. Stakeholders can access the model and play ‘what if’ scenarios
5. Through monitoring what the stakeholders want action scenarios can be derived and implemented.
That’s what I made of what he said. Some of the early work was done in the Sydney Catchment Authority and the system is being implemented in Melbourne and elsewhere in the world.
By googling I found that the real name is ARMS (Aquatic Realtime Management System). Follow the link for more information. Organisations which can benefit from using ARMS are identified as follows:
* Water and Sewage Utilities
* River Basin Management Authorities
* Port and Harbour Authorities
* Hydropower Operators
* Homeland Security
* Environmental Authorities
Submitted for your information and consideration.
* The Bush Telegraph site is a bit of a beast. If you follow the link, click on the “listen to or download this story” button at the bottom. Then click on “listen” or “download” next to the item River management in WA listed under Thursday 28 May 2009. Once you had to listen to the whole program and fast forward.
Fascinating stuff. I am somewhat irrationally convinced that algae is still largely ignored as a potential problem solver in many different situations. Unfortunately when we think algae, we tend to think, blue-green, so I think it suffers from a bit of an image problem.
Hmmm. Speculating without all the facts of course, but the big concern with aqueous sequestration is how long the carbon dioxide stays there. That’s the big issue with the ocean seeding approaches.
patrickg, I’ve heard of it as a source of biofuel. But I suspect that you’d have to make lakes what he calls ‘obese” to make much difference, though, and that wouldn’t be good for biodiversity.
Robert, yes, but worth keeping an eye on as more information comes to hand.
Robert,
As you, speculating without all the facts, but I think that this is the process where all of that carbon got locked up in the first place. Algae (and other plant matter) ingesting the carbon, dying and dropping into sediment and then that sediment getting locked up in rocks.
I don’t know if it would happen fast enough to reduce atmospheric carbon enough, but using the natural processes in this way at least makes some sense.
Don’t forget the salps, the fastest reproducing multi-celled animal on the planet , doubling their numbers several times a day, they turn the algae and bio-fixed carbon dioxide into faeces which drops to the ocean floor. They also take carbon to the floor with them when they die after a life cycle as short as only a couple of weeks.
So we need to first maximise the carbon fixation of the algae, say by engineering their (micromonas/prochlorococcus) rubisco’s to more like those of hot sulfur springs red algae, (Galdieria spp.), a his/gln substitution, (“The mutant Rubiscos show.. 55% improvement in Km(CO2) compared to the (green algae) wild type.”), turbocharge the co2(atm)->o2(atm)+ c(bio-fixed) throughput further by tweaking the HLA3-mediated CO2 concentrating mechanism (ccm), and then just let the salps go about their shitty carbon biosequestration work.
Fertilizer production is a significant source of emissions so any reduction is a plus. Carbon from dead organics can be sequestered for a long time if it is covered by sediment from growing deltas, infilling lakes etc. Not sure about how permeneant anything else would be.
Andrew, I think the last time a whole bunch of CO2 got locked up in algae, it created the stuff that our oil is made from and, incidentally, caused one of the great dyings. If it happened again, we’d probably be one of the species that died out.
Anyone with greater knowledge in this area, feel free to contradict me.