Can Green Hydrogen Production Help Bring Oceanic Dead Zones Back to Life?

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https://hakaimagazine.com/news/can-green-hydrogen-production-help-bring-oceanic-dead-zones-back-to-life/

By Brian Owens, Hakai Magazine. 

Excerpt: Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau had met with Olaf Scholz, the German chancellor, in nearby Stephenville, Newfoundland...in August 2022, the two leaders locked in Canada’s commitment to supply Germany with hydrogen gas. ...Stephenville...is the site of the proposed World Energy GH2 project, a facility that will use wind power to produce hydrogen gas ...reducing Germany’s reliance on Russian oil. ...[Douglas] Wallace, an oceanographer at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, was tracking how dissolved oxygen moves from the Atlantic Ocean through the gulf into the St. Lawrence River, and how the dearth of oxygen in some places can lead to the development of low-oxygen dead zones. ...So when he heard that Canada was set to ramp up hydrogen production—achieved by electrically splitting water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen—he wondered: could all of that spare oxygen help bring the dead zone back to life? ...As the world warms, the oceans are losing their oxygen. Since the 1950s, they’ve already lost about two percent—a figure that could hit four percent by the end of this century. ...Too little oxygen in the water can reduce the diversity of marine life as animals either leave the area or die. In the Gulf of St. Lawrence—where the size of the dead zone has grown nearly sevenfold since 2003 to encompass roughly 9,000 square kilometers—dropping oxygen levels are already affecting many commercially important and at-risk species, such as cod, halibut, and northern shrimp, Wallace says. ...Maybe, thought Wallace, he could take the oxygen created during hydrogen production and somehow pump it into the gulf. His calculations suggest that it could work....

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