Terra Ganey

Carbon dioxide removal (CDR) is a durable and scalable strategy for mitigating anthropogenic climate change and global warming. I use numerical modeling techniques to quantify the net CO2 drawdown attributed to both individual (isolated) and composite (simultaneous) CDR applications. The objective of this work is to provide an analytical framework for predicting the non-linear CO2 effect of climate change mitigation technologies.

Sequestering atmospheric CO2 is a crucial step towards mitigating anthropogenic climate change and achieving net zero emissions targets. Marine carbon dioxide removal (CDR), which leverages the global ocean’s role as the ultimate sink for anthropogenic CO2, is an attractive candidate for efficient and scalable climate intervention. Development and early field testing of various CDR technologies is currently underway, and simultaneous deployment of climate change mitigation techniques seems likely in the near future. However, interactions between different ocean-based climate interventions––and, importantly, their CO2 effects––have not yet been formally evaluated. I use paired analytical and numerical frameworks to investigate the CO2 drawdown attributed to composite CDR interventions in contrast to individual deployments. My work demonstrates that modeled CO2 drawdown for both isolated and composite experiments is predictable in fractional space. In other words, ‘realized’ CDR is the product of individual applications rather than the linear sum of isolated CO2 effects. Using a fractional analytic approach will be a key advantage for predicting the non-linear CO2 effects of climate change mitigation technologies.