Longest trial so far of supplement derived from red seaweed produced 28% less of the greenhouse gas – much lower than previous studies

One of the world’s longest commercial trials of a seaweed supplement that the global meat industry hopes could slash methane from beef cattle has recorded much lower reductions in the potent greenhouse gas than previous studies.

Putting the supplement into the diets of 40 wagyu cattle in an Australian feedlot for 300 days cut the methane they produced by 28%. The supplement was derived from the red seaweed species Asparagopsis, which has been widely promoted as being able to cut methane by more than 80%, with some experiments suggesting reductions as high as 96%. Globally, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization estimates, methane from burping cattle - known as enteric emissions - releases about 2.1bn tonnes of CO2-equivalent a year, compared with the 37.5bn tonnes of CO2 from burning fossil fuels.

Because methane is about 80 times more potent than CO2 at warming the planet over a 20-year period, cutting methane is seen as a way to slow global heating faster.

The trial report noted that other experiments over shorter timeframes using the same open-air measurement technique had recorded higher methane reductions.

The latest trial was financially backed by the country’s biggest beef producer, the Australian Agricultural Company, which helped run the trial and provided the animals.

  • Wiggles@aussie.zoneEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    Thanks for the responses, its interesting stuff and seems like a sensible way of trying to reduce emissions and actually capture carbon from the atmosphere.

    It makes me think of research that shows that it would make more sense to try and capture carbon from the ocean rather than the atmosphere, as the concentrations are much higher than in the ocean. If we can do this using the natural process of photosynthesis via kelp farms and bio char it could be a very sustainable process.

    "THE ocean is the single biggest carbon storage device on Earth,” said Chengxiang ‘CX’ Xiang, CTO and co-founder of direct ocean capture (DOC) company Captura. About 30% of anthropogenic CO2 emissions are absorbed by the ocean, where it is 150 times more concentrated volumetrically than in the air.

    He said one of the challenges of removing CO2 directly from air is the “really, really, really low” concentration, prompting the need to build large machinery to filter a lot of air. “Leveraging the ocean to do CO2 drawdown for us as we remove CO2 from the ocean water is a unique process that is inherently scalable.”

    This is the source I got that quote from: https://www.thechemicalengineer.com/features/co2-capture-putting-the-sea-into-ccs/

    It goes on to talk about how they are working to create tech to capture the carbon, but utilising natural process to achieve the same outcome would be considerably better, though we may need to employ all reasonable methods to decarbonise as quickly as possible.

    • Treevan 🇦🇺@aussie.zoneOPEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      Interesting reply!

      Yeah, it’s just one tiny fraction of a piece of the puzzle (and I dont really hold much hope for us engineering out of this one). We are going to have to do absolutely everything but we can’t even stop land clearing or topsoil erosion.

      Kelp farming could end up using exotic species just to increase survivability in the water, all our systems aren’t going to adapt fast enough to the changes coming. If we had our time again, nice train lanes from kelp farming ports to cycle lost nutrients back onto the land maybe could have created some sort of utopia of rich terrestrial systems with abundant marine resources close to shore.

      Back to the article, 28% is something, topped up with some biochar, topped up with bacterial implants or something similar would have been nice. Really, the only answer is those things with about 0.5% of the cows. I can see cows being regenerative in some ways to manage some grasslands back into forested systems. The problem is a lot of our grass species aren’t even native, they are selected for production which means management is key.