[chinathrow]

I've been thinking about a similar system to drop weights into the ocean for a while, like with attached pressurized air tanks to inflate balloons for resurfacing. Not an engineer, so I haven't been able to calculate if any of this would work, at all.

[klabb3]

That’s an interesting idea, but pressurizing air needs a lot of energy, and it needs to be pressurized more the deeper you’re going (because of well.. pressure). Not to mention the air volume at depth is much smaller, so you need a lot of air to start lifting, and once it’s buoyant and starts rising, you have a bunch of extra air volume that’s “wasted”.

[shellfishgene]

How would you recover energy from that?