How the next big thing in carbon removal sank without a trace
Odlin confirms that for all of Iceland’s oceanic stock of woodchips, it was impossible for Running Tide to monitor the woodchips for more than three hours after they were released, and says, “We can’t measure the noise signals in the ocean on alkalinity.”
dead zone
Despite credit sales to Stripe, Shopify, Microsoft and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the financial pressure on Running Tide continued as the flow of capital from Silicon Valley dried up. According to a former employee, Odlin will begin meetings in the spring of 2024 with the announcement that the company has just a few weeks of funding left before it is forced to shut down. In June of that year, Odelin conceded defeat.
In a LinkedIn post on June 14, 2024, Odelin wrote that “there is simply no need to support large-scale carbon removal.” The company ceased its global operations that month. Almost all employees in Iceland and the United States were suddenly let go. An employee was giving a presentation about Running Tide at an algae conference when he was told the news.
“People were happy with our credits. We were filling our contracts. We were selling additional contracts. It wasn’t enough,” Odelin says. Running Tide had sold $30 million in credits and said it had commitments for tens of millions more, but Odlin estimated the company needed somewhere between $100 million and $150 million in sales. This was the rental we were designed for.”
The legacy the company will leave behind after dumping the wood chips is unclear. It’s simply not clear what effect the sinking of biomass will have on the ocean, and deep-sea scientists and experts told WIRED they remain hesitant to pursue such marine geoengineering until more is understood about the deep sea.
Dumping biomass in the ocean can create “dead zones,” areas where aquatic life is starved of oxygen, says Samantha Joy, a professor in the Department of Marine Sciences at the University of Georgia who has worked on the Mississippi Delta’s dead zones as well as the 2010 Horizon oil cleanup.
Deep-sea environments — some of which offer life-saving drugs or insights into how the early Earth formed — could also be permanently damaged, Joy adds. A recent carbon flux report by the Convex Seascape Survey, an international research collaboration, shows that when the seafloor is disturbed, it can actually stop sediments’ ability to absorb carbon. Joy also notes that without proper research, increasing ocean alkalinity could increase ocean acidity if it pulls too much carbon into the sea that is then not distributed in its deep waters—exactly the opposite of what refined wood chips were trying to achieve.
