The burning of fossil fuels since the start of the Industrial Revolution has lead to increased CO2 emissions. pCO2 have reached levels higher than ever seen in the past 2 million years. In addition to reducing emissions through policy initiative and transitioning to renewable energy sources, implementing technologies for carbon dioxide removal (CDR) has received growing attention.
In Summer 2024 I joined Dr. Shuang Zhang’s CArbon Cycle and Earth Environment (CACEE) Lab at Texas A&M University as a part of an REU with the Department of Oceanography. Here, I worked with Dr. Zhang and PhD student Shihan Li to look at how different methods of CDR impact the ocean and atmosphere. Understanding how ocean and atmospheric tracers are impacted by CDR is an important contribution towards building a framework for monitoring, reporting, and verification (MRV) of CDR projects.
Our medium for studying this is the interactive Long-term Ocean-atmosphere-Sediment CArbon cycle Reservoir (iLOSCAR) model, developed here at Texas A&M University. We used iLOSCAR to run simulations of more than 500 years to see how ocean/atmosphere tracers such as pCO~2~, temperature, pH, and saturation states of aragonite and calcite, are changing when we introduce fluxes attributed to CDR. iLOSCAR has an inverse and forward component, and features a web-based UI that makes running the simulations simpler.
More work on iLOSCAR can be found here.