“Early progress from the first focused research organizations has strengthened Marblestone’s conviction that they’re filling a gap.

[C]Worthy is the FRO building tools to ensure safe, ocean-based carbon dioxide removal. It recently released an interactive map of alkaline activity to improve our understanding of one method for sequestering carbon known as ocean alkalinity enhancement.”

‘"Large volume for contact is one of the reasons why the ocean presents scalable approaches to carbon dioxide removal," says Matthew Long, an Adjunct Scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) in the U.S. Long is the Co-founder and CEO of [C]Worthy, a non-profit that researches marine CDR solutions.’

“Even if these solutions do work long term, most companies are operating on too small of a scale to influence the climate. Expanding to meet current climate goals will take massive amounts of resources, energy and money.”

“People hear chemistry and they don’t like that,” says David Ho, a geochemist and professor of oceanography at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.

“The verification step has to be non-profit, and it has to be separate from your money-making scheme,” says Ho, who co-founded [C]Worthy, a nonprofit that makes open-source software to quantify the efficacy and side effects of marine carbon removal. “As ocean biogeochemists, if we have the inclination and we have the skills, then it behooves us to work on it.”

“These projects are also challenging to do in an academic setting because they require a larger group of people than you have in a single academic lab…So, what they proposed was to create non-profit science startups.”

‘CDR can be thought of like “a time machine,” David Ho, an oceanographer at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, wrote last year in Nature. Stripping some of the CO2 out of the atmosphere would be like returning to an earlier time with lower concentrations.

"'This project represents the first time an alkalinity release will be conducted along with the dual tracer technique and allows us the opportunity to determine the movement of CO2 between the ocean and atmosphere and track the evolution of an ocean alkalinity enhancement…”

‘The problem is, ocean uptake is relatively slow, compared to our rate of emission,' Long told Salon in a phone interview.

'The requirements for ramping up carbon removal are so dramatically challenging that it’s really an all hands on deck moment for the scientific community.’

“University of Hawaii oceanographer David Ho argues that the massive ramp-up in renewable energy needed to power ocean-based CDR on the scale Equatic advocates for would be better deployed to curtail fossil fuel use.”

“Eventually, MRV will be accomplished through tech-heavy geophysical modeling, he told us. But first, those models need to be informed by the observations from early ocean CDR testing, and the companies developing technologies that would enable better measurements need more financial support.”

"Getting MRV right is crucial to ensuring that these technologies have a positive climate impact. But it’s one of ocean CDR’s largest knowledge gaps.”

“We simply don’t know whether some of these proposed interventions will actually work on large scales, or what negative effects they could have on complex and interconnected ecosystems.”

"It's the long-term sea surface temperature trend that should alarm us," says climate scientist David Ho.