That would keep the carbon dioxide locked up for an unknown length of time before it dissolved. The potential of the ocean to absorb the gas is immense. I think it s a very dangerous idea, said Dan Lashof, a senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an advocacy group. The environmental risks associated with large-scale ocean disposal have not been assessed really at all. Lashof said he doesn t reject the general idea of carbon sequestration, but ocean disposal is probably the last place I d look for it to be successful.
Carbon dioxide changes the pH of seawater, making it more acidic.
Experimentation in Hawaii Next year, an international team of researchers plans to dangle a steel pipeline an inch or two in diameter from a barge off the Kona coast of Hawaii. They want to see what happens when they dribble liquid carbon dioxide into the ocean about a half-mile deep. Scientists will look for an effect on ocean life, but the experiment will probably be too brief and small-scale to cause any disturbance, said Howard Herzog of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one of the project s planners. But that would take several centuries to 1,000 years. By then, the world will almost certainly have left fossil fuels and their carbon dioxide emissions behind.