[Roritharr]

Isn't this also heavily destructive to our ecosystem because they use the carbon trapped in the water and release it into our atmosphere? Didn't we want more trapped carbon than less?

I don't get why everyone finds this great since it takes a very long time for carbon in the atmosphere to get trapped in seawater.

[zmmz]

It's not that simple:

CO2 in atmosphere -> CO2 in water -> Ocean acidification[1] -> Change in ocean ecosystem

The oceans absorb OC2 from the atmosphere, which you could argue is good, but it is not without consequences. Putting CO2 in the water moves the problem from having it in the atmosphere elsewhere, but it's still a problem. In some ways then, this can be seen as a good thing, because it is undoing the effects that increased CO2 in the atmosphere has on the oceans. Obviously though, I doubt that its effects would be at all noticeable.

The wiki article already linked has a chapter called 'Possible Impact'.

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_acidification

[Roritharr]

I'm not for putting more carbon into the oceans... just against taking the currently stored carbon out.

[sophacles]

You only really have 2 choices here[1] (provided this gas-to-liquid thing pans out):

1. Take carbon out of the ground, where it is not active in any carbon system. Put it in the air, and ultimately the ocean. This releases more carbon into the whole system, and causes problems we all know about. It eventually goes to the water as the parent mentioned, with the acidification problem (s)he brought up. Adding ever more carbon to the system only adds to the total carbon load.

2. Take carbon out of the water, reduce acidification, albeit by transferring it to the air. This doesn't actually put new carbon in the system tho, so it has benefit.

However, the carbon put in the air with #2 is the same as traditional jet fuels from sources in the ground, so those effects cancel out as a consideration in our choice range.

Sure in a perfect world, we would find a way to start actively reducing the amount of carbon in circulation, however, to get there we have to find ways to stop adding new carbon to the system. This helps with that.

[1] I know there are lots of options we could consider, but I highly doubt any option that effectively translates to "have the military be less effective" will fly politically, so I am assuming that short-term achievable options have to have no negative effect from the military POV at minimum.

[regularfry]

There is already too much. Any we can take out is a good thing.

[xefer]

But it's taking carbon out of the ocean and releasing it into the atmosphere. The issue becomes, how long does it take for the released atmospheric CO2 to be reabeorbed back into he ocean? Does it do more harm in the atmosphere or in the ocean?

[DennisP]

Right now we're taking carbon out of the ground and putting it in the atmosphere.

The ocean presently has a lot of extra carbon, which it absorbed from the atmosphere. So this is an indirect way of taking carbon out of the atmosphere and then putting it back...a closed loop. If we did this for all our hydrocarbon fuel we'd be carbon-neutral.