camelot-forum.co.uk

Imagine a huge seaweed farm the size of Croatia floating in the South Atlantic between Africa and South America.
Spinning in a natural ocean eddy, it sucks a billion tonnes of carbon out of the atmosphere every year and sinks it to the ocean floor out of harm's way.
Far-fetched? Maybe. But a British businessman plans to have this up and running by 2026.
/snip/
Seafields' financial backers hope sargassum will float money their way too. They plan to sell credits for captured carbon on the world's carbon markets. These credits allow businesses like airlines that cannot easily cut their emissions, to buy up carbon reductions made elsewhere.

Carbon market critics complain the onward rush to monetise CO2 capture has led to backers overselling technologies that eventually fall short of their stated aims. Which begs the question: will Seafields' promising plan in the laboratory actually work when released into the wild?
Dr Nem Vaughan, associate professor in climate change at the University of East Anglia says: "I'm a boring scientist, [I'd want] more data, more research, before I'd wholeheartedly say that you're going to get that kind of gigatonne-scale removal happening."
/snip/
She says there are less technologically challenging ways of giving nature a nudge, such as growing more trees and hedgerows and protecting habitats such as peatlands that naturally hold carbon. But, first and foremost, she says: "We need to not stick it [CO2] up there. Just leave the fossil fuels in the ground, team. It's an awful lot easier to just leave it in the ground than it is to try and capture it once it's out."

John Auckland concedes some elements of the process aren't yet proven, but believes it's worth the gamble.
"I see far more risky things on a daily basis that investors are willing to put their money into," he says.