“It’s a little expensive for a 200 megawatt plant. We’ll do a bit better than break even,” he said.
Spirnak said his company has raised “the equivalent of US$20-30 million from financial groups and private investors” and signed a power-purchase agreement with Californian utility PG&E, whose Web site shows a request for approval for power generated in this way from California’s Public Utilities Commission.
In case the world can’t contain its carbon emissions, among geoengineering fixes, Dan Whaley, founder and chief executive of California-based Climos, hopes tiny plankton that live on the ocean surface can be used to absorb carbon dioxide as they grow.
“These are not silver bullet solutions, but things that might take the edge off,” he said. “What is the risk of doing nothing? We think it’s so extraordinary it’s apocalyptic. These geoengineering projects, the research into this, is an exercise to reduce future risk.”
Global plankton deployment across 40 percent of the world’s oceans for 50 to 100 years could remove 1 billion to 8 billion tonnes of carbon emissions per year from the air, he said. That compares with annual manmade emissions now of about 32 billion tonnes.
Whaley, who says he has raised US$3.5 million from investors, plans to roll out the scheme over five or 10 years on a very small scale, “to increase our ability to model the environment.”
But he acknowledges a risk. Experts have pointed out that the plankton that die will sink several kilometers to the ocean’s depths, a rotting mass that may create oxygen-starved, dead zones on the floor of the oceans — a toxic prospect.
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