The key issue is how to move the hundreds of gigatons of carbon emitted by fossil fuels from the “fast cycle,” where carbon flits from fossil fuels to the air to plant matter, back to the “slow cycle,” where they remain locked away in geological storage for millennia. Read: We’ve never seen a carbon-removal plan like this beforeĪt its core, carbon removal is “a mass-transfer problem,” Marty Odlin, Running Tide’s CEO, told me. While much of Running Tide's science remains unvetted, the researchers seem to be thinking about all the right problems in all the right ways-approaching carbon removal as an organization-level problem rather than a one-off process. Far from having a hippie-dippie-ish enthusiasm about kelp, they spoke like engineers, aware of the immense scale of carbon removal that stands before them. So I was pleasantly surprised when I met the leaders of Running Tide earlier this month. The idea that humanity will remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by growing kelp smacks of the same naivete in the idea that we can solve climate change by growing trees or living in harmony with nature. It has seemed like the perfect natural tool to sop up carbon from the ocean and atmosphere. That kelp could then be harvested, disposed of, or allowed to naturally drift to the bottom of the ocean. Kelp grows as fast as two feet a day, which means it absorbs a huge amount of carbon through photosynthesis. But this is not the only approach: Some firms have tried to store carbon in stone or concrete others have tried to accelerate the rock-weathering process that normally takes thousands of years.Īnd then there’s kelp. The most famous companies, such as Switzerland’s Climeworks or Canada’s Carbon Engineering, perform direct air capture, using common industrial processes to chemically clean carbon from the air.
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Running Tide is one of a series of carbon-removal companies that have burst onto the market over the past few years with the hope of whisking heat-trapping pollution out of the atmosphere and locking it away for centuries. The team worked for Running Tide, a Portland, Maine–based start-up that claims it can remove carbon dioxide from the ocean and atmosphere through the magic of kelp. With any luck, their successors would soon be released into the open ocean, where they would float away, absorb a small amount of carbon from the atmosphere, then sink to the bottom of the seafloor, where their residue would remain for thousands of years. These odd jellyfish had one role in life: to go away and never be seen again. The team called them “buoys,” but they looked more like a packet of uncooked ramen noodles glued to a green party streamer than anything of the navigational or weather-observing variety. Last month, somewhere off the coast of Maine, a small group of researchers and engineers released a series of tiny, floating objects into the water. Sign up for The Weekly Planet, Robinson Meyer’s newsletter about living through climate change, here.