EDITORIAL: Spotlight on marine CDR as second company ceases operations in 2024

20 Jun 2024

Quantum Commodity Intelligence – The spotlight has fallen on the marine carbon dioxide removal (mCDR) sector in the last week, with another prominent player in the market announcing that it is ceasing operations.

The announcement on social media by Maine-based Running Tide that it is starting the process of shutting down its operations because of financing issues, comes a few months after another US company, Oceanid MRV, said it was winding up its business for similar reasons.

The Running Tide announcement came in the same month as a report that, while acknowledging the potential of oceans to sequester and store carbon dioxide (CO2), raised a host of issues with mCDR – including technical, environmental, political, legal and regulatory challenges. The report also said more research is needed to gain a better understanding of how the ocean sequesters carbon.

Unknowns

The chapter in the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission's 'State of the Ocean Report 2024' focused on mCDR argued that currently there are "major unknowns" on how removal approaches will interact with the carbon cycle in the ocean and whether they will create "feedbacks" that lead to unintended consequences.

"For all the proposed wide range of mCDR techniques, their potential to enhance the ocean carbon sink is largely unknown and based on model simulations," said the chapter, which was authored by Chris Vivian from the Joint Group of Expert on the Scientific Aspects of Marine Environmental Protection in the UK, Miranda Böttcher from the German Institute for International and Security Affairs and Utrecht University in the Netherlands and Philip Boyd from the University of Tasmania.

The "unknowns are superimposed upon uncertainties on constraining the magnitude of the present day ocean carbon sink that is influenced by internal forcing such as El Niño", the report said.

"These findings demonstrate that without improved understanding of how the ocean sequesters carbon, it will be difficult to establish a baseline, or at the very least a benchmark with which to assess the efficacy of a range of mCDR methods," it said.

Marine CDR techniques take advantage of the ocean's natural carbon removal processes, taking place across large surfaces or volumes of the ocean over comparatively long periods of time.

Running Tide's approach to carbon capture and removal involved deploying floating buoys containing limestone and algae, which are sunk into the deep ocean.

The limestone compound is said to boost the ocean's alkalinity and the algae (biomass) grows and captures more carbon. Once the buoys are close to the ocean floor, gravity and water pressure hold the biomass in place to store the carbon in the ocean.

Last year, Running Tide successfully removed 25,416 tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere, and delivered 21,778 CDRs credits to over 25 buyers, including Shopify, Microsoft, and Stripe. However, the cost of doing this – the project was located in the North Atlantic, south and west of Iceland's exclusive economic zone – at least in the short term seems to have 'beaten' the company, which had been a vocal proponent of mCDR.

'No support'

Oceanid MRV, which had been previously known as Coastal Carbon Solutions, said that it had had a "fantastic network of partners and CDR projects" but had also "never received the support, from any quarter, that we would need to continue". The company had applied for US government funding through a number of channels, but this clearly did not prove fruitful.

Seasoned carbon market watchers will know that mCDR is not as 'new' as it may seem. I remember entrepreneurs trying to bring a technique known as 'ocean iron fertilisation' under the Kyoto Protocol's Clean Development Mechanism, almost 20 years ago.

For organisations trying to take this forward in the 2020s, the key would seem to be substantial financial support and a lot of patience. But, in a world of increasingly tightening budgets, will the money be forthcoming or will investors look for cheaper and easier options?