A nonprofit formed by Mike Schroepfer, Meta’s former chief technology officer, is spinning out a new organization dedicated to accelerating research into ocean alkalinity enhancement—one potential means of leveraging the seas to suck up and store away even more carbon dioxide.
Additional Ventures, co-founded by Schroepfer, and a group of other foundations have committed $50 million over five years to the nonprofit research program, dubbed the Carbon to Sea Initiative. The goals of the effort include evaluating potential approaches; eventually conducting small scale field trials in the ocean; advancing policies that could streamline permitting of those experiments and provide more public funding for research; and developing the technology necessary to carry out and assess these interventions if they prove to work well and safely.
The seas already act as a powerful buffer against the worst dangers of climate change, drawing down about a quarter of human-driven carbon dioxide emissions and absorbing the vast majority of global warming. Carbon dioxide dissolves naturally into seawater where the air and ocean meet. But scientists and startups are exploring whether these global commons can do even more to ease climate change, as a growing body of research finds nations now need to both slash emissions and pull vast amounts of additional greenhouse gas out of the atmosphere to keep warming in check.
Ocean alkalinity enhancement refers to various ways of adding alkaline substances, like olivine, basalt or lime, into seawater. These basic materials bind with dissolved inorganic carbon dioxide in the water to form bicarbonates and carbonates, ions that can persist for tens of thousands of years in the ocean. As those CO2-depleted waters reach the surface, they can pull down additional carbon dioxide from the air to return to a state of equilibrium.
The ground up materials could be added directly to ocean waters from vessels, placed along the coastline or used within onshore devices that help trigger reactions with seawater.
Carbon to Sea is effectively an expansion of the Ocean Alkalinity Enhancement R&D Program, which Additional Ventures launched in late 2021 with the Astera Institute, Ocean Visions, the Grantham Environmental Trust and others. Early last year, the organizations began accepting applications for research grants for “at least $10 million,” that could be put to use over the next five years. The program has committed $23 million to the research field so far.
Schroepfer, who will serve as a board chair of Carbon to Sea, said that he decided to support the ocean alkalinity enhancement field because he consistently heard that it was a promising approach to carbon removal that needed to be closely studied, but “nobody was stepping up to do the actual funding of the work.”
“The way you get started is by doing,” he says. “And by moving in particular the science forward and making sure that the people who can answer these fundamental questions have the resources and time to answer them thoroughly.”
Antonius Gagern, previously the program director for ocean carbon dioxide removal at Additional Ventures, will lead the new organization.
“In looking at the different ways that the ocean is already using natural carbon pumps to sequester CO2 permanently, ocean alkalinity enhancement has emerged as, for us, the most promising one for a number of reasons,” Gagern says.
It’s “extremely scalable,” “very permanent” and it “doesn’t mess with” biological systems in the ways that other ocean-based approaches may, he adds.
‘A substantial climatic impact’
Other observers also consider ocean alkalinity enhancement a promising approach, in part, because it’s one of the major ways that the planet already pulls down carbon dioxide over very slow timescales: Rainwater dissolves basic rocks, producing calcium and other alkaline compounds that eventually flow into the oceans through rivers and streams.
These processes naturally sequester hundreds of millions of tons of carbon dioxide per year, by some estimates. And the planet has more than enough of the reactive materials required to bond with all the carbon dioxide humans have emitted throughout history.
There are potentially some additional benefits as well. Alkaline substances could also reduce ocean acidification locally, and may provide nutrients beneficial to certain marine organisms.
Andreas Oschlies, a climate modeler at the Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research in Kiel, Germany, agrees that it’s one of the few carbon removal approaches that could “really deliver at scale and have a substantial climatic impact.”
“The minerals are not limiting and the reservoir, the ocean, is not limiting,” he says.
(Oschlies hasn’t received research grants from the Additional Ventures consortium, but is a senior advisor to a project that has.)
He’s quick to stress, however, that there are significant challenges in scaling it up, and that far more research is needed to understand the most effective approaches and secondary impacts of such interventions.
Notably, it would require mining, grinding and moving around massive amounts of alkaline materials, all of which entails a lot of energy and environmental impacts.
“It’s a huge operation, of course, similar to fossil fuels or coal mining,” he says. “So these are all side-effects we have to take into account.”
There are additional challenges and uncertainties as well.
Several recent lab experiments found these approaches didn’t work as well or easily as expected. Indeed, in some instances the addition of such substances reduced alkalinity as well as the uptake of carbon dioxide. This raises the possibility that these methods may only work in limited areas or circumstances, or could be more costly or complex to conduct than hoped.
Some of the minerals could add heavy metals into delicate marine ecosystems. They could also alter the light conditions and biogeochemistry of the waters, in ways that might harm or help various organisms.
Finally, the fact that carbon removal happens as a second step in the process makes it challenging to accurately monitor and measure how much CO2 the process really removes, particularly with approaches that occur in the turbulent, variable open oceans. That, in turn, could make it difficult to incentivize and monetize such efforts through carbon markets.
CarbonPlan, a San Francisco nonprofit that evaluates the scientific integrity of carbon removal approaches and projects, ranks ocean alkalinity enhancement on the low-end of its “verification confidence levels,” which evaluate the degree to which long-term carbon removal and storage “can be accurately quantified” with existing tools and approaches.
‘Getting the science right’
These challenges are precisely why it’s crucial to fund a coordinated research program into ocean alkalinity research, Gagern says. One of Carbon to Sea’s top priorities will include “getting the science right,” he says, by supporting studies designed to assess what approaches work most effectively and safely, and under what conditions.
He said that improving systems for monitoring, reporting and verification of the carbon actually removed through these processes will also be a “major, major focus,” including the development, testing and refinement of sensors and models. Finally, Carbon to Sea will also prioritize “community building” in the nascent field, striving to draw in more researchers across disciplines and encourage collaborations through conferences, workshops and fellowships.
The funding will likely go to a mix of both research groups and startups emerging in the space.
A variety of companies are already exploring a handful of approaches. Project Vesta has been studying the potential for spreading fine olivine along beaches. A UCLA spinout, Equatic, is pairing alkaline materials and electricity to strip carbon dioxide from seawater and produce a clean form of hydrogen in the process. Ebb Carbon says it’s using electricity and membranes to produce an alkaline solution from the wastewater generated by desalination plants and industrial sites, which it can then return to the ocean.
In addition, alkaline substances don’t necessarily have to make it to the oceans for carbon removal to occur. There’s also growing research and commercial interest in a broader category known as enhanced weathering. One startup, Lithos, is encouraging farmers to add crushed basalt rock to their fields, to increase crop yields and sequester carbon. Meanwhile, a University of California, Berkeley spin-out, Travertine, is developing ways of using mining waste to suck down and store away CO2.
Other funders of Carbon to Sea include the Builders Initiative, Catalyst for Impact, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Kissick Family Foundation, OceanKind and Thistledown Foundation.
Additional Ventures provides funding to accelerate research and development across three major areas: climate change, biomedical research and community and democracy. Schroepfer also recently established a climate-focused venture capital investment firm, Gigascale Capital.
He says it’s crucial to kickstart ocean alkalinity research now because it can take years to build momentum behind a substantial, multifaceted scientific program and do the community engagement necessary to move the field forward.
“We should have started a long time ago, but here we are,” he says. “We’re starting now, so that if we need this as a technique, and it is promising, in the future years, we’ve laid the groundwork for it to be a possible tool for humanity.”
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