Numerical simulation on multi-scale diffusion of CO2 injected in the deep ocean in a practical scenario

The direct injection of CO2 into the deep ocean is one of the ways for the mitigation of the global warming. There is, however, a concern about its environmental impact near the injection point. To minimize its biological impact, it is necessary to make CO2 disperse as fast as possible and it is thought that injection with pipes towed by moving-ships is effective for this purpose. Because the injection ships are planned to move in the site, the order of magnitude of which is 10(2) km, a mesoscale model is required to predict CO2 fate in seawater. At the same time, it is required to predict the concentration precisely near the injection points, which move with the ships in the mesoscale domain. In this study, a multi-scale ocean model was developed to analyze the dispersion of CO2 in the deep ocean: the model consists of a fixed mesoscale domain and 5 small-scale domains nesting in the mesoscale domain. Each small-scale domain involves 6 pipes and moves along with the trajectories of the injection ships. From the results of the present numerical simulation, the developed technique demonstrated its applicability as a tool to optimise the system to dilute CO2 below some criterion of biological impact. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. AM rights reserved.