The Daily Technocrat

Diatom – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

It looks as if diatoms might be the missing piece of the puzzle in my idea for an anti-global-warming machine (that also makes electricity).

Here’s the deal. Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere sucks. Plants turn this into oxygen, but we’re killing all of the plants, so we’re in trouble. But 2/3 of the earth is water, and there is a little helper that might be able to help out a lot. According to recent research, it looks like diatoms can eat liquid carbon dioxide and put out oxygen with the help of sunlight and a nutrient-rich environment.

The only problem is that the carbon dioxide we want to get rid of is in the air, and diatoms are in the water. Bring in a large tank of water. If we were to pump carbon dioxide down to the bottom of a tank of water, the pressure at a certain depth would compress the gas into a liquid.

But it won’t help to have a coal-burning electric plant powering the pump, so we can use solar and/or wind power. Recent advances in tidal power are starting to look good too!

Now that the carbon dioxide (we might not need to separate it from the rest of the air, just pump the whole thing down there) is down there, we need to get sunlight and nutrients down there as well.

Nutrients are near the surface of the water, on the ‘top layer’, where the sunlight is. A simple water pump takes care of that. So now we have a layer of liquid CO2 on the bottom of our tank, with circulating water refreshing the nutrients on the bottom.

Getting a lot of sunlight to the bottom could be done with clear walls/windows, if the tank is above ground, or if this system is in the open ocean, a mirror array could focus intense sunlight to the bottom of the array either via fiber optic or just a dry pipe going to the bottom. Once there, the sunlight would be re-distributed through some windows that would have an anti-algae nanotech coating. The sunlight would be split down to normal levels, or maybe x2 brightness, instead of the transport-level 10x or 20x that would fry micro-organisms.

At this point, the diatoms would hopefully start munching on the CO2 pool and give off oxygen. The tank would have to be designed so that CO2 doesn’t over-flow out of the ‘pressurized zone’, and the pump stops pumping when the tank is full.

When the tank can’ take any more CO2, the CO2 pump stops pumping, while the water circulation pump continues. The wind turbine/solar panels/tidal generator could continue making electricity that could be sold. This is especially true at night, where the diatoms wouldn’t be active.

Perhaps this excess energy would be wanted at night when everyone’s electric car is charging?

This is all wishful thinking, but as far as I know, it is possible.

Ocean energy link:
Link