Wouldn't it be great to send this chalk to schools and tell students the story of how something as seemingly insignificant as an urchin has the ability to impact the whole world?
But it is too early to get overly excited. This definitely doesn't mean that you should buy a V8 sports-car and fire up the old coal-range at your house. Yet.
The technology could be a game-changer for large emitters (such as the foreign-owned Tiwai Aluminium Smelter in Bluff, which regularly belches over 600,000 tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere each year) but in its current state, this system cannot be fitted onto a car exhaust and will definitely not stop the 10 million-odd cows we have from passing wind.
So might this mean that coal and gas-fired power could supply electric cars? Could this technology make Huntly - the current blemish on our predominantly renewable electricity supply - a legitimate facility environmentally?
The scientists were clever enough to patent their technology and I wouldn't be surprised to see the names Lidja Siller and Gaurav Bhaduri appear in Forbes in 5-10 years time but only time will tell whether this technology will become an affordable reality (or a priority) down here in little old New Zealand.
If so, perhaps next time you scoff at people eating kina, or find yourself sitting in a hot bath removing spines from your foot after a surf, you won't see the little spiky balls as such a nuisance.