Once the seawater is back in equilibrium with the atmosphere, a process that should take less than one year (Zeebe and Wolf-Gladrow, 2008), it is chemically indistinguishable from the seawater that came in.
I thought this was a reasonably quick process, but a year? How do you buffer a years supply of sea water? You either need a massive massive plant, or this does not take in that much
The water just dilutes back into the rest of the ocean, lowering its average carbon content a minuscule amount. It’ll take a year or less for it to reabsorb as much atmospheric CO2 as was removed and for any carbon compounds altered by the pH changes to revert. It’ll likely hit peak CO2 before that point. This isn’t a big deal unless it’s done at massive scale in concentrated areas.
An “easy” way to handle this is to return the water to the deep ocean, where it’s less impactful to ocean life and has a much larger area in which to dilute.
Also, wow:
I thought this was a reasonably quick process, but a year? How do you buffer a years supply of sea water? You either need a massive massive plant, or this does not take in that much
The water just dilutes back into the rest of the ocean, lowering its average carbon content a minuscule amount. It’ll take a year or less for it to reabsorb as much atmospheric CO2 as was removed and for any carbon compounds altered by the pH changes to revert. It’ll likely hit peak CO2 before that point. This isn’t a big deal unless it’s done at massive scale in concentrated areas.
An “easy” way to handle this is to return the water to the deep ocean, where it’s less impactful to ocean life and has a much larger area in which to dilute.