Oysters for Carbon Capture?

Yesterday I heard an environmental enthusiast on the radio explaining that clams and oysters sequester carbon, so we should feel very good about raising and eating them!

Well, let’s pretend we don’t understand that their carbon doesn’t remain sequestered unless we collect all the carbon subsequently emitted (in one form or another) by those who eat them. And let’s pretend the entire 1 oz mass of each oyster’s flesh represents sequestered carbon removed from the air. So I looked up the number of oysters per square meter in a thriving oyster bed: about 100. That’s around 3 kg per square meter in the time it takes an oyster to mature (about a year).

Now let’s look up a typical natural gas power plant’s carbon emissions: about 0.388 kg per kWh, or 3 kg per 7.74 kWh, meaning one square meter’s worth of oyster bed sequesters enough carbon in a year to compensate for 7.74 kWh of energy produced by a gas power plant, which typically generates about 3 MW, or 26,280,000 kWh in that same year.

So, to balance the emissions from one typical gas power plant would take about 3.4 million square meters or 1.3 square miles (over 800 acres) of prime oyster beds. The USA has just under a thousand gas power plants, so it would take over a thousand square miles (nearly a million acres) of prime oyster beds to make up for just the natural gas burning power plants.

File this under “Every Little Bit Helps” but not under “Solutions to Climate Change”. Then pass the oysters.