PhD Studentship - Harnessing Nature’s CO2 Catalyst to Accelerate Marine Carbon Dioxide Removal

Could biology help us engineer a new way of removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere?

Achieving carbon dioxide removal (CDR) at enormous scale is likely to be an important part of tackling climate change. The ocean naturally exchanges CO₂ with the air, but because the alkalinity of that seawater buffers CO₂, the amount of carbon dissolved in the ocean is vastly greater than in the atmosphere. For context, if you took all the CO₂ that humanity has every emitted and stirred it into the ocean, the seawater carbon concentration would only increase by about 2%.

An extremely promising technique, known as Ocean Alkalinity Enhancement, aims to increase the buffering of CO₂ by seawater. This would allow seawater to take up even more atmospheric CO₂, helping us to balance the emissions from activities - such as flying and farming - that we don’t know how to decarbonise, and potentially even begin to reverse climate change.

But there is a fundamental problem.

Transferring atmospheric CO₂ into that seawater is slow. This means that CO₂ uptake happens over tens to hundreds of kilometres downstream of where a carbon removal facility may be, with implications around marine ecosystem impacts, scalability, verification and cost. If this exchange could be dramatically accelerated, it could open the door to a different approach to marine carbon dioxide removal.

This PhD, part of the  CASE4CDR project which is aligned with ARIA’s Resilient Climate and Ecosystems Opportunity Space,  will explore whether  harnessing biology can allow us to overcome this problem.

Carbonic anhydrases catalyse the conversion between carbon dioxide and bicarbonate, speeding up the reaction by up to 10 million times. These enzymes are found in almost all living organisms, and we will work with you to isolate and stabilise them, utilising the same chemistry that operates in your body and in marine organisms to overcome the reaction bottleneck and rapidly convert carbon dioxide and water into ocean bicarbonate. The project will give you the opportunity to learn advanced skills in enzymology, structural work, and protein chemistry to develop these enzymes to meet the environmental challenge. It will also involve small lab-scale tests to quantify the efficacy of atmospheric CO₂ absorption by alkalinity-enhanced seawater using immobilised enzymes.

You will work closely with a parallel PhD researcher working on larger-scale CO₂ exchange and measurement.

From laboratory experiments to the sea

A particularly exciting feature of this PhD is that, with the right safeguards in place, the work is intended to move beyond laboratory proof-of-concept.

Upon meeting key acceptance criteria, you will help translate fundamental measurements and engineering designs into trials using real seawater at the SeaCURE pilot facility situated on the coast near Weymouth.

This will create a unique opportunity to follow an emerging climate technology through multiple stages of development: from calculations and controlled laboratory experiments, through engineering and instrumentation, to operation in a real marine environment.

Carbon dioxide removal cannot succeed on engineering performance alone.

You will join a wider interdisciplinary project examining what would actually be required to deploy a new marine carbon removal technology responsibly. Alongside your core research, you will have opportunities to contribute to work around environmental permitting, regulation, environmental impacts, public and stakeholder engagement, and trials at the Weymouth plant.

Advert information