The next wave in carbon offset?
SF entrepreneur wants to re-oxygenate ocean
Santa Fe entrepreneur Philip Kithil of Atmocean, Inc. believes he’s found a way to put a dent in global warming — and turn the idea into a business venture.
Next week, Kithil and crew will transport a prototype of a deceptively simple device for a test on California’s Morro Bay that he believes can help “re-oxygenate” the world’s oceans.
His “oxygenator,” running on the power of sea waves with no electricity, is intended to attack the warming of the upper ocean waters by “upwelling” cooler water that is nutrient rich from about 200 meters below the surface to stimulate the growth of tiny phytoplankton — an essential part of ocean food chain that generates much of the Earth’s oxygen.
Phytoplankton prefers cooler waters and is being depleted by warming oceans.
The same device would “downwell” the surface water along with global-warming carbon dioxide, sequestering it 400 meters down and keeping it out of contact with the atmosphere for some period of time. That’s not a permanent solution, but it could help buy some time.
“We are estimating that one device could sequester 500 tons of CO2,” said Kithil.
That’s tiny compared to the 53 billion tons generated last year, but Kihil has a plan. He believes the oxygenator can be marketed to huge corporations as an “offset”
for their own generation of CO2.
“That’s the business we hope to create,” he said.
Kithil has lived in Santa Fe since 1972. His ventures in the past include developing automotive safety technology, whose intellectual property he sold. Since 2005, he and partners have been working on ocean-related projects, sometimes with the support of players like Sandia National Laboratories.
Other ideas didn’t come to fruition. Developing electrical power from ocean waves turned out not to be feasible in a business sense — too expensive compared to the declining costs of solar and wind power.
But it’s all been part of the “learning curve” toward development of the oxygenator for his Atmocean company, said Kithil.
The device is essentially a cylindershaped buoy — the prototype is about eight feet long — with flappers inside. The flappers open as the ocean waves rise and close as the waves fall.
That’s pretty much it. The flapper action brings water up through nylon tubes or pushes it down.
His business plan is to persuade big corporations on the idea of offsetting their CO2 emissions by paying to deploy the free-floating oxygenators, which could go for something like $20,000 per unit.