Day 1 - Marine Carbon Dioxide Removal Standing Committee: Meeting 2

much packed into today. Um, and we are recording this meeting. Um, so hello. Uh, my name is Kelly Osquick for those who I haven't met yet. Um, and welcome to the second meeting of the marine carbon dioxide removal standing committee. Um, I'm a senior program officer at the Nationalmies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine um, in DC and serving as the staff lead for this activity. Um, so please note you'll you'll see this meeting was recorded. This is a public meeting. Um, and the recording will be posted on our website in a few days time. Um, next slide. So, we're all joining from different places today all over the world. Um, but I do want to acknowledge the land um, where the National Academy staff are sitting. Um so we acknowledge that we gather on the traditional land of the Nikachtank and Piscatoaway people past and present and honor with gratitude the land itself and the people who have steward it through the generations. We honor and respect the enduring relationship that exists between these peoples and nations and this land and we thank them for the resilience and protecting this land and aspire to uphold our responsibilities to their example. Um next slide please. So before we start we have quick guidance on participating in today's meeting. Um so the nationalmies are committed to the principles of diversity integrity civility and respect in all our activities. Um and we look to you all to be a partner in this commitment by helping us maintain a professional and cordial environment. Um we do not tolerate discrimination and don't expect to have that be an issue anyhow. Um, and I would like to ask you when you talk, uh, when you introduce yourself for the first time, please, um, say your name and affiliation, um, please do mute yourself when you're not talking. Um, and, uh, committee members, please use the raise hand feature to ask questions. Everyone else, please use the slide out link. And we'll put the slide Oh, there it is. Um, staff will put that in the chat and we'll put it in the chat throughout the meeting. Um, next slide. So, here's the link um to Slido. Um we had over 200 people registered for the meeting. Um so, we did want to make sure that you all have the opportunity to share comments and ask questions. Um I will note that we we need to prioritize questions from committee members. Um but we will try to get to a few others and anything you put in the slido um will become part of our meeting materials and will be shared with the committee. Um next slide. So quickly one last thing before we jump into the content. Um in case anyone is not familiar with the nationalmies we are non-governmental nonprofit organizations chartered by the US Congress at the request of President Lincoln. We provide independent objective advice to inform policy with evidence um spark progress and innovation and confront challenging issues that benefit society. You can find all sorts of information on our website um and please do reach out if you have any questions about that. Um, and now on to the good stuff. Um, I'll hand it over to our committee chair, Scott Dhoni, to provide a quick overview of this project. >> Oh, thanks, Kelly. So, I'm Scott Dhoni. I'm a professor at the UN University of Virginia and I'm chairing this particular uh standing committee. Um and so to give you a little bit of background, we did have a report and the cover is shown here on the right hand side that came out in 2223 uh on oceanbased carbon dioxide removal. But a lot has happened in this space both scientifically and from governance perspectives, industrial technological perspectives over the last several years. And so this new standing committee is a three-year project uh to uh advance the the state of knowledge and pull together synthesized knowledge of what's uh happened since we released that original report. The initial sponsor is carbon to sea initiative. Uh and the goal is to provide online updates in terms of updated chapters and new chapters each of which would be peer-reviewed and then available with unique uh digital object identifiers. And our current goal is to have the first update of uh updated material released sometime this spring, this coming spring, so 2026. Next slide, please, Kelly. So, I I'm not going to read the statement of task, but this is available on the committee's website. Uh if you're interested, um I think the the key elements here is uh one task that the academy staff have been working on uh quite successfully over the last several months is creating a digital version of the 2022 report. So that would be available and then that's a a venue for us to provide updated material as we go along. And then in terms of what are the updates that um we've been tasked with with considering uh the first is a state of the science technology and research of marine carbon dioxide removal. The second would be updates on fundamental understanding on research and development needs for specific approaches. And for example uh at this meeting you'll be hearing uh material on ocean alakalinity enhancement which is one of the approaches that we're considering for an update and then also uh the overarching research and development needs for crosscutting issues. These are things like social perception and social science aspects, governance, uh monitoring, reporting and verification. Things that have commonalities across techniques and then of course any additional information that wasn't covered uh in the uh earlier report. Um next slide please. So the committee membership is listed here. the committee members and also the national academy staff. Kelly already introduced herself and Safa is doing a lot of the the the back office help for this meeting and also for the uh for the committee as a whole. Uh you can read more about uh bios of these individuals on the committee posted on the committee website. Next slide please. Oh, thanks Safa. Excellent. uh Sopha just posted uh a link to the the committee uh the committee website. Uh and then here's the calendar. So we had our first uh public meeting in June where we uh had a discussion with the sponsor about the statement statement of task. Uh we started up the committee. Um we developed project strategy and timeline. Uh this is the second meeting in September. Uh so we're going to have parts of this meeting are open. They're for in information gathering. So we'll be listening to and asking questions of experts across this space over the next four days in this virtual meeting as well as having some closed committee meetings uh afterwards. Um and then the other meetings on the planned are to have uh right now they're all closed committee meetings where we'd be working on the products developed from the information we're gathering this week. Uh and then we have a timeline for uh finalizing the draft products, getting peer review done, responding to the peer review with a public release sometime uh late next spring, at which point we'd begin into the second cycle of the committee, which would be to address aspects of the initial report, which we didn't get to cover in this first cycle. Next slide, please, Kelly or Safa. And then um if you want to keep up or help out with this committee, uh the best place to monitor would be the committee website. That's where we'll have, for example, Kelly mentioned that we'll be posting the recordings from these meetings. Um the recordings from meeting meeting one, for example, uh any other announcements about upcoming events. Uh there are also opportunities, of course, to participate in peer review public meetings uh as they they crop up. So, if you have any questions or want to provide feedback, Kelly's put her email there. Uh, and it's also available through the the committee website. So, Kelly, I think that's the last slide from me. Oh, the agenda. Thanks. Um, so the agenda, I had mentioned this is a 4-day virtual meeting. So afternoon time, east coast time and appreciation for people in other time zones who are who are adapting to this east coast time zone for the meeting. Uh so we'll start off today with sessions on the ocean's role in climate mitigation, state of monitoring, reporting and verification for carbon removal and a snapshot of recent advances in the field of marine carbon dioxide removal. Tomorrow we'll be talking about state of marine CDR policy and permitting and also social perceptions. Wednesday we'll be discussing messacosm and field trials and then Thursday we'll be touching on add additional global perspectives on marine carbon dioxide removal. So I want to welcome everyone to this virtual meeting and Kelly I think I'll turn it back over to you for our first speaker. >> Excellent. Thanks Scott. Um so we wanted to kick off this series of meetings with a discussion on the ocean's role in climate mitigation. Um where are we in terms of being able to quantify the ocean carbon sync? Um what is the demand for MCDR and what are the global constraints or what are the requirements and consequences of using MCDR in a climate mitigation strategy. Um so we have uh three folks with us here to to get this started. Um Tim Dere from University of California Santa Barbara. um Andre Clarens from University of Virginia and Nico Bower from Potam Institute for Climate Impact Research. So we'll hear from each of them and then we will open up the discussion um which will be moderated by Scott. So Tim um the floor is yours. >> Okay, thanks Kelly. Thanks Scott. Um >> welcome. >> Yeah, perfect. Thank you Tim. >> Yeah. Um yeah, so I was asked to talk about the um natural ocean carbon sync of the ocean's kind of natural role in mitigating uh climate change. Um so thanks for having me here again. I'm Tim Dere. I'm at UC Santa Barbara. Um so I'm just starting off with this uh schematic showing the exchange um of carbon between the various carbon reservoirs on Earth. Um, this is kind of for a contemporary snapshot of the cycling of carbon. And I guess, uh, we're all gathered here because of mostly because of that arrow right there, um, which is the combustion of fossil fuel CO2, excuse me, fossil fuel carbon, which releases CO2 to the atmosphere. Um so that's currently around 10 gigatons of carbon per year that are extracted out of the geological reservoir fossil fuel reserves uh which is of course highly concentrated carbon uh and then released to the atmosphere um as CO2. I just thought it was interesting to put that in perspective. Um it takes a lot of people and money uh to generate that amount of uh of carbon coming out of that concentrated carbon reservoir and emitting it to the atmosphere. So3 to 4 trillion per year is the revenues of those uh companies that do that. Quite a lot employing 30 million people. Um so us CDR folks have our work cut out for us to uh go the reverse of that. Um so about half of that accumulates in the atmosphere as CO2. Um so roughly five gigatons of carbon per year which is about 2 1/2 uh ppm of CO2 per year. Um and then the remaining 50% is um taken up by natural carbon sync. So we have the terrestrial um biomass which takes up some CO2 and then the ocean also takes up uh CO2 as well. So that's where we're going to go next to that ocean carbon sync. Um so the ocean is the largest reservoir of carbon that kind of actively rapidly on climate relevant time scales exchanges with the atmosphere. So it's very important as as a natural carbon sync. Um so this uh exchange of CO2 between the ocean and atmosphere occurs as CO2 enters the atmosphere or evades the or enters the ocean or evades the ocean um by gas exchange and it's roughly 90 gatons carbon per year that's cycled through that um that gas exchange uh component there. Uh once in the ocean the CO2 is converted to DIC. So that's the sum of all the inorganic carbon species um that are in the ocean including CO2. Um and then another important component of that natural carbon cycle is the cycling through the organic carbon. Um so by photosynthesis and respiration um roughly about 50 gigatons carbon per year cycles through that um organic carbon pool um which is quite a small pool um but has an important climate effect as we'll see through the biological pump. All right. Um so uh kind of zooming in onto that uh that first box that I talked about there, the airc uh exchange of CO2. Um uh this can kind of be conceptualized and has been conceptualized as the sum of different components. Um so the uh this equation kind of lays that out. Um on the left we have the airc CO2 flux which I just said is around 90 gigatons carbon per year in kind of the gross fluxes. Um and then on the right is those three different components. Um so uh I'll start at the far right of the screen. Um there's a natural component which is just due to um you know the carbon that was in the ocean pre-industrially before humans started emitting lots of CO2 to the atmosphere. Um and then there is a component that's due to this increase in CO2 in the atmosphere due to human activities. Um that's the anthropogenic CO2. Uh and then there's a component that's also due to um just climate variability for example you know El Nino things like that or climate changes um that are driving uh carbon in or out of the ocean. Uh so it's helpful to conceptualize it in this way. Um again the the kind of gross flux is contemporary around 90 um billion tons carbon per year. Um and about 60 of that is those natural pre-industrial fluxes. Uh the net flux is much smaller. So the oceans currently net flux is around two roughly maybe two and a half um gigatons carbon per year. Natural uh there was actually an elux of carbon from the ocean to the atmosphere. Um so what's the ocean carbon sink? It's those two in the middle there. Um which are basically much smaller than either of the two on the end. Um so that's the ocean carbon sync. Um that's the net um kind of human perturbation to the the global carbon um the air CO2 flux. So the anthropogenic CO2 and the climate driven fluxes. uh if you're reading the global carbon budget at any point that would be called S ocean and the global carbon budget ocean sink. Uh it's interesting to think about um how we like determine each of these things. So the only one that's directly observable is the C to air flux. In theory, one could could observe that. In practice, globally speaking, we can't observe it over the whole entire globe. Um so we have to use models. um or kind of like observation gap filling products to estimate this flux. Um any of the other terms on the right hand side are just estimated by models. Um so most all the stuff that I'm going to show you um is going to come from models. Um if you think about where CDR fits in there, I think it would just be another term on the right hand side which is plus a flux from CDR. Um so that's going to be something that also models are going to be needed of course to estimate. Um so these two um maps here are the um the two main components of that uh excuse me the top one is just the contemporary air CO2 flux. So that's a total CO2 flux. The bottom one is that natural pre-industrial flux. So again that's just from a model. We you know these are both from models. Um so model estimates um so you I mean the first order they look very very similar. Um so the kind of net flux that's happening is you know in large part just driven by that pre-industrial baseline um that we had before humans started perturbing the carbon cycle. Um and so these exchanges are driven by um uh exchanges of heat between the the ocean and uh atmosphere. Um biological carbon cycling and also the ocean circulation and overturning. I just put rough energy numbers on those things um just for comparison. It's fun to compare um to like um global energy consumption by humans. Um so these are you know clearly a lot of work that the ocean is doing um to exchange this carbon uh with the atmosphere. Um uh yes uh anything else to say about this one? Oh uh sorry the um the red here the positive numbers are going to be um uh outgassing of carbon from the ocean to the atmosphere whereas blue is going to be an uptake of carbon um from the atmosphere to the ocean. Uh again as I mentioned before at the natural like kind of uh pre-industrial steady state um scientists estimate that the ocean was actually losing carbon to the atmosphere um by a degassing of carbon that came from the land into the ocean by rivers. Um and not enough carbon was buried in sediment. So some carbon was lost to the atmosphere. Um so uh kind of a aside I guess is this this biological pump which is very important for that natural carbon cycle um to maintain those fluxes that you just saw there and also to help the ocean to absorb carbon from the atmosphere. Um, so the biological carbon pump refers to the export of carbon from the surface ocean as organic carbon into the deeper layers where it's then remmineralized and that um carbon would then be exposed back to the atmosphere as the water's up well to the surface again. Um so there's uh three main kind of pathways of this carbon pump. uh one is just the gravitational sinking of uh particles uh organic carbon particles that are produced in the surface. Um so these could be just aggregates of phytolankton that stick together and sink down. Um they could be um the feces and carcasses of uh little animals like zoplankton or bigger animals like fish. Um so that's roughly we think uh around half um of the 10 total of 10 uh billion tons of carbon that's exported by the biological pump. Um and it contributes to a sequestration of of roughly let's say a thousand billion tons of carbon uh down there in the deeper ocean. um these sequestration times I'm showing here, this is like how long that carbon is held in the deeper ocean before it's then brought back up to the surface um where it can exchange with the atmosphere. Um so this is relevant of course to CDR um strategies that kind of seek to enhance these fluxes of carbon from the surface to the deeper ocean, these biological fluxes. Uh the mixing pump is just the mixing of of organic carbon from the surface to the interior. Um that stuff doesn't get mixed as deep. So it doesn't have as high a sequestration time and so it doesn't contribute to as much of a buildup as um as the gravitational pump pathway for example. Um and the export is is not as large as the gravitational pump. Uh and then interesting one that we probably know the least about is the migrant pump. Um so this is uh driven by migrations of animals, zoplankton or fish. Um and they're feeding in the surface and then they're moving that carbon down to the deeper layers. Um and they're excreting that carbon in deeper layers and contributing to carbon sequestration as well. Um so those depending how deep they go um could have quite a long sequestration time. the carbon that's excreted by those um organisms. Uh and to top it all off um there's actually another effect which is air seed disequilibrium. It actually enhances this sequestration um by roughly 35 to 70% depending on whom you ask about that. Um I guess the the interesting thing I'll mention about this uh figure here. This is a um paper from uh Dave Seagull recent review paper um is the right hand panel there shows the sequestration um by these different pathways as a function of depth. Um so you see that um the sequestration can happen anywhere in the ocean. It could happen towards the surface. It could happen in the deeper ocean. Um and in fact according to the model estimates at least roughly half of the sequestration happens um in what we would consider not necessarily the deep ocean like the middle ocean above 1,000 m. Uh and then roughly half of that sequestration happens uh below um 1,000 m. Um so it's not only happening in the deep ocean, it's happening um all throughout the ocean. Of course, the sequestation time uh which is the middle panel increases as you get deeper in the ocean. Uh so that is uh important. Um this is the anthropogenic carbon component. Um so this is uh showing a net uptake everywhere um by the ocean. Um so this is just driven by the increase in atmospheric CO2. Um, and over time, since the industrial era began, the ocean has absorbed about 200 gigatons of carbon, roughly now 3 gigatons per year. Um, uh, and that's about a.5% increase in the DIC um, uh, inventory of the ocean because there's just so much natural DIC there in the ocean. Um importantly, um the biological pump is not important for this uptake. Um it's not uh it it's uh just simply doesn't contribute to the anthropogenic carbon uptake. It contributes um to the natural carbon fluxes, but not so much the anthropogenic. Um and then the very last component of the ocean carbon sync is these climate driven fluxes. Um so these actually have very small values on the long term. Um but they do contribute to kind of shorter year-to-year variations in the carbon um sync. Um so uh this is um a figure showing over the past 30 40 years of air CO2 fluxes. Um the red is the anthropogenic CO2. So it's there's a lot of carbon going in from the anthropogenic CO2 and it's kind of steadily increasing over time. Um the green is these climate driven fluxes. Um they're roughly around zero, but they do vary year to year. When we have an El Nino, for example, um you know, that can affect the ocean carbon sink. Um however, to me, they're like kind of surprisingly small. Um when you think about El Nino events releasing the energy equivalent of millions of hydrogen bombs per Noah, um it doesn't, you know, it doesn't have a huge impact on the global atmospheric CO2. Uh which I do think also relates to what we're up against for um for making CDR work. Um yeah, I'll just uh end with that slide there showing those different carbon component uh sync components. Uh and then maybe to this uh table uh we will eventually have uh to add a CDR term um if uh we're able to um get that industry going um uh and then you know produce estimates for how much um carbon the ocean is taking up through CDR activities. So thanks for listening. Take any questions. >> Yeah, thank you Tim. Um I do want to uh roll through the next two talks and then kind of have a a discussion with everyone. Um so everyone if you can hold your questions um I just want to make sure we don't run out of time. Um so next we have Andreas Clarence from University of Virginia. Um and he's going to talk about or start our talk about um integrated assessment models. >> Thanks Kelly. Um let me share my screen here and I want to thank everybody for being here and Kelly for having me. Um yeah uh this is work what I'm going to present on today is a little bit of an introduction to integrated assessment models and how they contribute to a broader discussion about MCDR and CDR in general. Um this is a lot of the results that I'm going to present are are results that were um generated this summer by a PhD student in our lab uh Parissa who's on the call as well um when she had a um fellowship to go to um YASA the uh international institute for applied systems analysis in Austria. Um and so um the team that has been doing CDR work at UVA um includes Scott, your fearless leader here. um and Jay Ferman, who I believe was actually the uh first choice for giving this presentation at PNNL, former PhD student in our lab. And Jay couldn't make it today, so I'm the pinch hitter, but that's okay. I'll do my best. Um and so, uh these are some of the folks, not the entire um roster of folks that have worked on CDR um modeling in integrated models in our in our group over the past five or six years, but these are the ones that are working on it now and supporting Pissa and some of her work. And so um and these are are some of our funders. Um so uh what are integrated models? I recognize that the majority of the folks on the call today are coming more from the um environmental science oceanography side of of things. Um integrated models are fundamentally economic models. And so this is uh this is the appendix to uh Bill Nordous's work at Yale. Bill won the uh this is work he did in the early 1990s that won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2018. But this was basically an effort to try and model the whole world economy as it relates to energy and climate um and sort of initiate this whole field of integrated assessment models. And so this is a highly stylized simplified integrated model. Um, and today we use more uh we use we use what are called technologyrich integrated models. And so they're still fundamentally economic models. And I will say I am not an economist. I'm an engineer. But my role in these collaborations is to represent emerging technology as an engineer thinking about the systems implications of these technologies. Um and so the models work essentially by uh in different ways but essentially by having sort of reduced form versions of hydraologic models, land use models, um energy system models and they sort of wrap it all together. And then there isn't unfortunately like a really fun Sim City, but that's kind of what we're getting at here. There isn't like a fun video game in the middle of this, but at the end we do get these projections of what is likely to happen on a decade time scale in terms of different technology deployment. And you can model, you know, you can imagine all of the different things that come along with trying to model such a complex large system over such long time scales. You've got, you know, many sensitivities. you've got to take into account um you know how new technologies get adopted, how we learn about them, how they get cheaper over time etc. And so the results from these types of models are useful in different contexts. So the most obvious one is sort of in IPCC international discussions around where we're glowing going with the climate system and what contributions from different countries are and what different policies are that might support achieving goals like limiting warming to two degrees. Um but these types of models are also useful at the national stage. So I spent some time along with Scott um uh in the white house in office of science technology policy during the previous administration. Trisha was there who I think is on the call as well. Um and so um I we were in different parts of the white house. I was working on industrial policy. Scott was working in climate. Um the uh the reason that these types of models were discussed in in in that setting is that um whenever CDR came up, the question was a lot less technological in nature and often more more economic in nature. Like what are the markets going to look like that are going to support scaling CDR um at the levels that we would need in order to sort of matter on a on a for the climate at the scale the climate's going to notice. And so understanding how this type of technology might stack up against all the other things we can do in the mitigation space um is is a really important question and one of the things that IM can offer when you when you think about understanding when and at what level uh these types of technologies might be deployed. So lot going on in this graphic but let me just let me just say that what this is is an effort to take a few of the big integrated models because it is a um it is a pretty diverse ecosystem in the integrated modeling space. Um there are a number of models when when the IPCC gathers they they use ensemble modeling. So they take results from a number of different integrated models that come from around the world. This is a slide that Parissa made where she tried to look at a bunch of the different European integrated models and then GCAM which is the one that we use in our lab. Um and she tried to represent um essentially which forms of CDR are currently um included in these different models. And so what you have sort of here uh is is the different classes of CDR and then whether or not they are sort of in process in terms of being represented in these integrated models or whether they already exist. And so the work that we've done over the past five or six years with our colleagues at um PNNL that produce GCAM is we've included things like direct air capture into GCAM so that we can understand what the economics of that might look like and how um getting down the cost curve in DAC might might lead to its deployment at scale over the coming decades. Um if you look across these other models you can see many of these are from the EU as you can as you can see different parts of the EU. Um, I put a star above some of them because some of these models are actually primarily energy system models. And so, um, you know, there's a there the the integrated modeling community does sort of overlap a little bit with energy systems models. And energy systems models might not have some of the sort of Earth systems dynamics as fully represented as a complete integrated model. And so, I just wanted to flag that distinction for folks that might not be familiar with the space as much. But um the if you look across the ocean uh based CDR, you see that um it's not really that well represented in any of the integrated models. There are a few of the teams that are are working on trying to capture it in in their model. Um and uh I will I will point out that um Parissa's uh internship that she had this summer or her fellowship that she had which was a really cool experience um for her uh she worked with message which is one of the EU's primary uh integrated models and so different results from GCAM and the one thing I will say to sort of frame why these models might get to different places or or or get to different results is that um they're they're structured in in different ways. And so um uh Gam is a market equilibrium integrated model meaning that it it balances supply and demand. Message is a optimization model. And so you give it a constraint. In all of these integrated models you give it a constraint. And so for example in G cam one that we often use is what would it look like to get to net zero by mid-century. Um in message you you would say what does it look like to get you could say what would it look like to get to two degrees warming limiting that. And so this is like an overarching constraint on the model, but the underlying mechanics of how the model achieves that goal varies. And so it's important to just um be sensitive to the fact that that these models sort of work. The what's under the hood is is different even though they are all fundamentally economic models. So I didn't have one of these for for GCAM for sorry for a message, but I had one for Gcam. This is from Jay Edmonds who was the um uh who who was the the sort of founder of Gcam or initiated a lot of the early work and still is at PNNL driving a lot of this work. But I think that the main thing to point out is that these are these are pretty big models and they have so they have a lot that they need to capture. I mentioned that it it sort of intrinsic to the model is capturing some of these earth system um you know reduced form obviously simplistic representations of hydrarology of ocean systems of of agriculture and land use um and then energy systems and then you you you give it some exogenous assumptions um you give it some data and it outputs a variety of different things. So it can tell you what the carbon price is. It can tell you um you know uh the the the scale. What we usually look for is the level at which different technologies are being deployed both um in terms of of um positive emissions and then also in terms of negative emissions. So when it comes to marine CDR um this is a graphic that I borrowed from a review paper that Scott and um Jay put out earlier this summer. um you know we have already represented to the furthest to the right here which is um you know direct C uh CO2 stripping essentially so pulling CO2 from surface waters out uh coupling it with desalination or dedicated plants um and that's in this paper here to the right um the uh the total amount of carbon that can be removed using these approaches is quite low mostly because it's expensive in this in this configuration And so at least our first pass at including this ocean form of CDR in GCAM doesn't get like enormous amounts of deployment. Um what Prisa's project for the summer was was to represent ocean alkalinity enhancement in message first and now we're working on getting it included and represented correctly in GCAM. But this is um the technology that you all are going to talk quite a bit about. And so it's the idea that you can um add alkalinity to surface waters and in that way influence the um uh carbon cycling in the way that Tim talked about a little a while ago. So if you think about the um big picture and what G uh what any of these integrated models would need to know in order to represent the technology, you need to know about sort of life full life cycle representation of what deploying that technology might look like. And then also um you would need to know what the what the sort of life cycle costing of that would be. And so if you think about the whole supply chain, so in in Paris's work, she modeled enhanced rock weathering and ocean alkalinity enhancement together because the supply chain sort of looks um uh they sort of parallel each other, but the basic idea is you're going to have to mine some rocks, you're going to have to process that rock um and then you're going to have to either apply it on soil or you're going to have to apply it in the ocean. And that the um uh and so sort of representing all of this, collecting the literature and and having the life cycle uh representation was sort of the first step. The second is understanding the ocean system. And so um she represented the ocean as this patchwork based on um uh the Xiao paper uh here. Um and the way in which she whittleled this down further was to say okay well you know economically um this is going to be done and politically I guess um the focus should be on the exclusive economic zone. So near coastal regions where if you're going to be mining this stuff on land and you're going to be taking it out into the ocean, the most economical option is going to be to to focus on these like relatively nearshore um uh patches of ocean in which to do this. Um and so uh that was that was where where she focused her modeling. And so the results look like this. So um the first thing to point out is that you get um very little deployment of these technologies. And I should mention that um DAX is direct air capture and BEX is bio energy with carbon capture and storage. And so in most of the integrated models, these two technologies are the ones that are the most mature. And so you get the most of these technologies being deployed. And so you see that here as well. So if you look at the purple and the green, this is most of what the model picks um for deployment. um in in these message results you see very little deployment of CDR of any kind. Again, I mean the scale here is pretty big. So uh even you know one or two gigatons would be I think uh I think Tim Tim did a good job of describing like the scale of what we're talking about here. And so when you think about how much how much economic activity it requires to put a certain number of gigatons of carbon into the atmosphere in a positive way today that for me that's a useful way to frame what it would look like to do that in the negative, right? like think about all of the oil and gas industry, all the fossil fuel industry globally. Now, we're talking about doing that but in reverse. And so that helps put the scale of of some of these activities um in context. But um so if you look across these um the uh the the the the majority of these of this uh deployment of MCDR occurs in the second half of the century. Um and by the way I will say um because it matters for the result the constraint that P put on the model was two year uh sorry two degrees warming by the end of the century with net zero emissions by 2070. So that's what these result that's what that's what um led to or these these results um and so um the the um uh model picks some enhanced walk enhanced rock weathering and some oceanbased um alkalinity enhancement but but it's very um uh it's loaded towards the end of the century. So um and and the model can represent improvements in price, improvements in efficiency. Um uh the model is very sensitive to essentially the um latency period. So how long if you add alkalinity to the ocean, how long before you start to see a flux or a change in carbon um removal taking place, that has a big effect on how much the model picks the that particular technology. And so you can see that here. If you assume immediate removal, in other words, you add alkalinity and carbon is removed from the ocean or from the atmosphere immediately, you get absolutely wild amounts of deployment. So just really really really big. Um if you have uh if you take a more realistic gradual removal approach where there is a multi-year um uh lag between when the alkalinity is added and the signal is is observed um you get more modest deployment of these technologies but nothing in which we have large amounts of deployment before um before the middle of the century. in terms of where in the world um this is one of the things that integrated models allow you to do. There's many things they let you do, but one of them is look at where in the world these tech these these this is going to be deployed. And what we see is um that a lot of it gets deployed in the global south. And this was true when we first started modeling direct air capture and bio energy with carbon capture. A lot of that has to do with just cheaper land, cheaper labor. And so the model tends to pick it um uh tends to pick deployment there. Um and so you know these are all I just want to reiterate very preliminary results and so we're we're sort of trying to unpack why it is that you do get this this distribution of of deployment in in say subsaharan Africa for example a lot in in Asia um and so but it it's a useful it's a useful tool I mean the models are coarse and so um the global land use system is divided into 12 regions in message and Gcam it's a little bit higher it's 30ome regions But still, it's a very coarse representation. And so beginning to think about sort of the political realities and the economic realities associated with what this result really means is is a helpful starting point to begin to to to think about where we might do this and where we might not. So that's as quick of a job as I could as I could give for introducing integrated models to this group and um yeah, excited for the conversation a little bit. Thanks so much. >> Yeah, thank you. Thank you so much. Um and continuing this conversation will be Nico and then we will take some questions. Nico, do you want to share your screen? Hello. Hello. So this is uh Nikico from Germany from the Potam Institute for Climate Impact Research. So uh um our model has been already a little introduced. I can give you then uh some more insights. Um so I hope I will do it in 10 minutes. So this is uh how we included marine com removal into the integrated assessment model um or rempie. This is work supported uh by the European Union optimism rescue project and also the German uh science f um uh uh support of retake. Um so we I'm given a relatively straight uh down to the um matter uh uh uh introduction. So um this is what we already basically saw. So uh we mine and grind um the um uh material a uh um calcium carbonate. Uh we could also go for silicut millate or hydrate carbonate minerals but here we uh basically look for um uh calcium uh carbonate. So this is basically then the first thing um mining, grinding, calcination. This is basically what uh cement production looks like. Um we have emissions and CO2 uh sequestration that is necessary because the CO2 during the um production process should also be removed and uh put underground. So this is something to be considered uh that improves the eco uh um uh uh balance of the uh process. Um then we put when we put the stuff into the ocean, this is a very uh um costly process also. Um we have to take into account that there should not be precipitation. uh that happens if the uh calcium carbonate concentrations get too high and then you can have just the opposite effect. So this is a real risk also of the uh process. Um this uh depends on the discharge uh rates. Uh and then one of the big question is yeah what is the ocean lying efficiency? So um how much CO2 does the ocean actually take up and this has a lot to do with the uh hydroxide chemistry in the oceans and uh is one of the big uncertainties. So if we want to uh capture this process we can first go for a tech technoeconomic analysis. Technoeconomic analysis looks for the cost per a single unit. Yeah. Uh so not the large scale stuff that comes later. Uh now we go down to the units and we have parameters like the electricity production uh emissions and here we assume that the electricity sector is already completely decarbonized. So there already a systems transformation has uh fully taken place. uh we have heat emissions um and then it depends on how much uh the CCS uh um is applied in the calcier uh for natural gas in this case. So 3 or 59 kilogram per gig um we have fuel emissions then al this is for the ship basically um then it also depends is this decarbonized or not. Yeah, these are all the problems that life cycle analysis people have. Um then um we have also uh um the energy requirements um for the process. Uh so how much heat, how much electricity, how much diesel, how much money does it cost to build the uh facilities, how much is the operational cost, what is the energy cost? Um and what are the material costs? Uh we also have to hire a ship and uh go onto the ocean and this uh all takes a lot of money. Um and you have only um ships available for a certain amount of time. Um we have then a concentration limit for the discharge and uh things like this. When we put all that together in a very very simple kind of business economics model then we get it uh the cost per ton of calcium uh um so in here it's Cao um added uh and this depends then on the discharge rate and whether you use natural gas or electricity for the calcifier. Electricity is a technology that produces the heat for the calcifier. Uh but um you have then very very uh high concentration CO2 and uh you see so scale matters. Yeah. And uh many of the um uh components the cost components are however uh not responsive to scale. But uh here the O andM the distribution and the diesel cost they they really depend on the scale of the operation. When we look at the uncertainty so uh ranking up the parameters uh with the uncertainty of plus minus 15% we see that this alkalinity efficiency so how much CO2 is really taken up by uh adding the alkalinity uh dominates here. So and this is uh really important. Um so um the shift ship speed the discharge area. So typical uh uh engineering type of operational uh parameters are really important. Yeah. So we can output all that into an integrated assessment model. And so uh from the previous presentation so this is the diceel like part. Yeah. where we have the macroeconomy and here we have the energy system. And now we plug in this new technology. You need investments. Uh you need resources to build up to ramp up this uh entire uh uh operation. You also need energy. Um you need the materials that go in. And we um uh put this into this system model and it emulates already uh all these assumptions that the LCA people have. Yeah. Um this kind of uh what is the electricity uh production mix uh and the CO2 emissions what are the CO2 emissions u of the diesel and so on. This is included online and it has then also an influence on the costs and the profitability. There's also uh constraints like uh CCS constraints. Yeah. Um um the CCS from uh the calcifier uh competes with other um uh opportunities. So um we feed this then also with all different kinds of assumptions that you may know from the shared socioeconomic pathways like population, economic development and uh so on and we combine it with climate policies. Here I will go for com budgets in a second. Uh with and without overshoot. Yeah. um we have the same cumulative emissions by 2,100 uh in one case with the smallest possible overshoot and in one um variant uh where we allow the system so to pay say to or the society to flexibly choose the optimal amount of uh overshooting. Um the results look like this. So here you have the annual and net emissions. Here you have the cumulative emissions. So for the 1.5 degree target, you have either this um uh path or this path with a full overshoot. But they hit at the in 2,100 at the very same uh uh level. you see that temperatures follow suit uh completely in line with uh the uh recent um uh u findings um with earth system models. I mean there's some also some uncertainty but overall uh the median so to say uh commands that um the the cumulative emissions and the temperatures are super super uh uh tightly correlated. So here we have now the mixes for the different scenarios. Um and like on the previous uh presentation uh we see that yes OE comes in only late. We also have to make a constraint on the total of OEE and this is because it is ve in a very very tight neck to neck race with DAC costwise. So if you make uh uh if you if you unconstrain OA it can take over DAC completely. Then you make a little change to cost parameters and then flips just the other way around. Yeah. And this is that that these two options are kind of really really really close competitors. Yeah. Um what we also do is then to downscale uh the results so that uh earth system models can take this up. Um this looks like this where we also have the exclusive economic zones but what we did not really do uh a good job so far is uh to bring in more heterogeneity. So what are the sweet spots? What are the places where you may uh rather not uh go for it? Um what I should say here about the timing uh in these scenarios, oh one thing I I I forgot to mention if there is no overshoot you would not go for the OA nor the DAC uh variant. Yeah. Uh it is only so to say you allow for full overshoot and um have these uh very very high uh peak and decline temperature uh pathways. Um many open questions remain. So factors that uh would suggest early deployment and one of the most important one that come to my mind is equity. So that the more wealthy nations have to reduce their emissions more early, more quickly and must rely on all different kinds of technologies. Yeah. like OA included. If you have a common a a uniform common price and every uh country more or less goes with the same uh or adds the same CO2 emission reduction technologies and the car removal technologies one after the other. uh uh it kicks in only late but it may change if we have very very strong differentiation of the policies represented by the carbon crisis here. Um the industrial scale app is um very challenging. So can we ramp up quickline production extending the carrier fleet and so on quick enough? Uh everything related to monitoring, reporting and verification. I mean uh nobody is probably surprised that uh the open ocean is one of the places where you can best cheat. Uh how to solve this very important problem. Um then the physical limitations the precipitation uh geocological concentrations of the activities governance issues and marine ecosystems like acidification. Now we come back to this little photo that I showed you in the beginning. So this is in northern Italy. the Lago de Orta. It's a very very nice place and whenever you are in Italy, go to this lake. This is so beautiful. Um, incredible. And there's two things that are good to know about Lagora. The one thing is that these little uh equipments uh come from this lake. Um, so this espresso machines that probably you guys in the US also know, they're extremely popular all over Europe. And also this lake as beautiful as it is used to be a environmental uh desert because it was is in the heartland of industrial um uh indust uh uh of industry in northern Italy and it was heavily heavily heavily polluted. So in 1985 845 the pH value was at a minimum level of 3.9. I mean that is really acidic. And in the years 89 to 90 uh they added um more than 10,000 tons of pure calcium carbonate. Yeah. Basically rock and sprayed it over the uh the lakes surface. um and mixed it and the you can see now here for shallow and deeper waters of the lake the relatively quick recovery. Yeah, there's also a study um an entire um special issue on it. And what this tells us there is also natural analoges. We already put a lot of stuff uh into lakes uh and um also into marine ecosystems for nature protection and restoring natural systems and uh um there's various examples also from Scandinavia. Uh but probably you guys over in the US also did stuff like that. And when you're now putting up a research program, I guess it would be also interesting to know more about these kind of uh activities. Okay, thanks. Uh now open for discussion. >> Thank you so much um Nico uh Tim and Andre. Um we're going to extend this session um until uh for another 10 minutes. So that's 1 1 p.m. Eastern time. Um just to allow for a couple questions. Um, and I think that still gives us plenty of time for our MRV, but we will steal a few minutes of the break if we need to. We're not going to cut anybody short. Um, so questions or Scott, sorry, you were going to moderate. >> Yeah, thanks Kelly. I think I I I think Lisa and Galen um had questions. Lisa, do you want to go first? I can read Lisa's um because it's also another person's um related to another question here too. So it's for Tim. You mentioned the biological pump does not contribute to uptake of anthropogenic sea only the natural cycling. What are the implications for MCDR methods that seek to enhance the biological pump? Um yeah, thanks for the question. I I think there's not any implications. Um basically, um so the it's more or less assumed, I guess, in in models that the biological pump is not sensitive to, you know, enhancing atmospheric CO2 and so it hasn't really, you know, been affected by human activities. more of an assumption than a finding. Um, but as far as MCDR goes, that would be like a whole separate thing. So, I think, you know, one would tack onto that equation another FN uh MCDR. Um, and you know, you could very well increase the uptake of uh carbon by the ocean by enhancing the biological pump. um whether that's considered anthropogenic carbon or natural carbon is is kind of uh more or less irrelevant I think for for MCDR but yeah thanks for the question >> sorry I I was muted but so just to clarify um so that just means that the elevated levels of CO2 in the atmosphere that we've seen since pre-industrial times haven't altered the bio biological uptake of carbon is that >> that's Yeah, exactly. Yeah, there's there's no evidence that they have. Um, so that's the assumption that, you know, most people work with. Yeah, >> thank you. >> Yeah, >> it's okay. >> Um, Gayen, did you want to go next and then Helen? >> Sure. I want to ask uh to the people who run the integrated assessment models and I think Nico addressed this a little bit, but how are the really serious questions of monitoring, reporting and verification, including additionality and um environmental impacts, how are those accounted for in these integrated assessment models? Uh is it just basically assume that those things get worked out or is there some provision for those issues in the model in the modeling that you're doing? Andreas, you want to go first or should I go? >> Go for it, Nico, since you mentioned it. >> Okay. So, basically, I mean, what you can do is to assume everything is solved and use a mean value. Yeah. Or median value. You can also use safety margin. uh or these are the so to say straightforward uh approaches. The other things are you go for much much more um sophisticated approach. One is uh you make a insurance um um scheme uh where companies or some entity whatever the entity is has to pay a insurance fee and needs to uh show to the public uh and proof. The burden of proof problem is always an issue as you may know to show what um what happened and did it work out. Is the result really uh uh um uh realized that uh was promised in a model in a integrated assessment model. Uh you can uh also use um so integrated assessment models are often uh um accused of being uh perfect foresight. Yeah. And you can also switch off and make the model a little blind. Yeah. and that the model also makes mistakes and you can ask the question okay how strong what are what are the consequences of such mistakes and you can differentiate between the different technologies. So in uh ocean alkalonization I mean this take up efficiency this is a really really tricky thing. Yeah. And if you would do a mistake and you later find out hey I did a mistake damned I have to correct my initial decision in order to maintain the 1.5 degree target now I have to strengthen the policy. Yeah. And how the question then is how difficult is that? How much uh are then the costs and the additional efforts that you have to put uh into it. If that is r very very very very high then you may say oh probably it's better to be a little more careful on the start and not overdo it. Uh uh we have done a study on the permanency of forests and aforestation uh that has been uh published last year or beginning of this year. Um and there we did it the the same logic basically a hedging strategy um for forests we can do the same for oceans or ocean alkalinity enhancement and then the question is okay the different options how do they perform in these kind of metrics yeah okay thanks >> I guess my question really is that's great to hear how it can be done are is what we're seeing in terms of results making taking making those cho choices, adding that hedging, doing that, or is that something still to be done? >> Still to be done. >> It's really early days. I mean, and I think not to not to repeat anything Nico said because I think he answered the question super well, but I would only add that um in the CDR space, there are those forms of CDR that end with geological carbon storage, which is like very cut and dry how we think about uh permanence, and then there are all the ways that don't end in CCS, and then those are different. And so everything that Nico mentioned, you have to like think about it over here, right? Um and so with with the exception of the the form of oceanbased um you know carbon stripping that I mentioned before that does include CCS. So I think that um yeah differentiating parsing those and recognizing its early days in the integrated community representing these these processes and so um I think it's a it's a really good flag though. Uh Helen, do you want to go next? >> Yeah, sure. Thank you for very nice and interesting uh presentations. Um, regarding the the um integrated assessment modeling, uh, how well would you say that ocean alkalin enhancement is represented at the moment considering uh, you know, from where I'm sitting there's a lot of uncertainty uh, around it. Um and then how reliable are the outcomes from the integration assessment models compared to other outcomes from from the same model? Um and you know so how well are they represented and how useful is the the regionalization uh within the IMS when it comes to modeling things like ocean alkalin enhancement for message has like um 11 regions for instance and and uh just if you would like to comment on yes so ocean alkalinity enhancement is now implemented to some extent. What would your preferred next step be? Would it to improve the representation ocean enhancement or include all the forms of marine CDR? Thank you. >> Uh thanks for your question. I I can take this one first and then Nico hand it over to you. But so I mean I think that you know first of all we're trying to model things over multiple decades time scales and so it's important to like um just think about what that means right I mean the the the products of these simulations are not to say this is going to be the answer we're going to have this many gigatons of this form of CDR in this place at this time because that's very hard to do it's really more about understanding what are the underlying sensitivities, what are the relationships that are driving the model to deploy at what time in which places and using which technologies and how does that compared to other things. And so it's really to me anyway the results are more about understanding the system rather than saying this is the answer and this is the correct answer. It is also really early days like I said in my previous answer with a lot of these oceanbased approaches and so um you know uh five years ago the models didn't even really include direct air capture or some of these really very simple I mean from a modeling standpoint comparatively much simpler processes to represent you know what I mean like and so um I think that as as we we go into a world and and and I think also you So we are we are learning we are learning about the world's appetite for deploying carbon capture and storage at scale for example right and that is adjusting sort of our understanding of which technologies might really be viable and if you don't use certain technologies you might have to use other technologies um so I think that all of this is a is a work in progress and I think it's really early days and so I think that that's why the work of this committee is so important to help um inform uh how how some of these broader systems dynamics might might play out. Nico, >> yeah, thank you very much, Andre. Um, yeah, I have not much to add to your answer. I I want to emphasize timing. We both showed that this is not all to be done by tomorrow. We have time and for a scientific program it is not very very important to understand how much time. Yeah. And uh you should be careful we or not not expect too much from us. Now what you however should get is hey uh before 2040 there is not much going on there in real world deployment. Um in our model it's even 2050. Um so it's also a question how long can we wait? Yeah, I mentioned early conditions for early deployment. Under what conditions it might be necessary to deploy it early and this is then um when it comes to the equity and the so to say the richer countries need to go ahead first but by how much? And then the question is okay if we are too uncertain about this whole ocean alkalinity enhancement uh what do we sacrifice if we simply keep our fingers away from it and refrain from it and say okay we solved the problem in a different way do more research find out more and maybe do it later. Yeah, thank you very much. >> So, um, >> Lisa, I see your Oh, yeah. >> Oh, go ahead, Kelly. >> I was just going to say, Lisa, I see your hand up, but I I think we need to move on to the next se session. Scott, were you gonna say the same? >> Yeah, I think just to give the the other speakers, thank you, Tim, uh, Nico, and and Andre's um, virtual round of applause. And I I I think we do need to get to the the next set of speakers. So, thank you. >> Thank you. I don't know. Is there a way to like write down answers to those questions people put in the slidoh? Is that interactive? >> Uh you should be able to respond to the questions. >> Oh, okay. I'll try to do that. >> Um thank you. Thanks everyone and and Lisa and others. if you have other questions um we can compile them when we meet in close session and then send an email to this group and I'm sure they will kindly uh answer us that way. Um so that's a way to keep um keep the conversation going and answer any questions additional questions that came up. Okay. So um I'm sorry to the next folks for for going a little over um but I think we have enough time um uh for this session. So, so next, um, we want to get an overview of where things stand with monitoring, reporting, and verification or MRV. Um, specifically, quantifications of carbon removal through open ocean CDR approaches. Um, we'll hear from four different speakers um, who come at this challenge from different angles. So, first we have Matt Long, CEO and co-founder of SeaWorthy. um he'll start us off followed by Grace Andrews the executive director of Hourglass Climate and then Frock Crack uh the science lead at Frontier Climate and Stripe and then Ying Hei uh carbon removal scientist at Isometric. Um so we're really excited to hear from you all. Um thank you for your patience. U Matt, do you want to kick it off? >> Thanks. I think you should be able to see my slides and >> Yes. >> Okay. Great. Thanks, Kelly. Um, thanks for inviting me to speak. I really appreciate the opportunity. Um, and uh, also happy to contribute to the important work that this um, committee is taking on. Um, let me just say a few words about where I'm coming from. So, um, I am CEO of CE Seaworthy. SeaWorthy is a nonprofit research organization. were um uh basically established in in the context of trying to accelerate um the science necessary to conduct um highquality and scientifically credible MRV. Our focus is on um building modeling tools, but we're approaching um this uh this task with um some value propositions and and guiding um principles to ensure that we are um uh tracking sort of ethical ethical approaches in this space. Um I'd like to before I get started acknowledge um our funders. We are funded primarily by philanthropic donors and I've listed the the donors at the top there. And we also have funding from the federal government through the ARPA program at Department of Energy and Noah through the National Oceanographic Partnership Program as well as using DOE and NSF supported um computing resources. And then we also collaborate with um many people in the commercial and civil society space. Um SeaWorthy is oriented around delivering to the community three products. The first is sea star which is a modeling system that um is focused on the CDR quantification problem. We're also publishing um open data sets to support um various things technoeconomic analysis among others. Andreas featured one of our data sets earlier um this morning. And then we are building the sea star ocean network which is a growing um constellation of regional oceanographic domains that um support quantification applications around the world. Um I'll just highlight again this ocean CDR atlas with the QR code if folks want to um to to to track this these data. Okay. So um to sort of frame this talk I'd like to just put forward a few um a few notes here. So first CDR is a climate intervention. Um what makes a climate intervention effective? Well in the case of CR we have to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. And then we'd like to establish high integrity frameworks for quantification. So the first principle there is that um we need to ensure that MRV is based on accurate transparent methods of quantification. Um there needs there's a requirement for transparency and that um social license is really a gating criteria for um enabling these technologies to move forward and then in that space as well as the idea that ecosystem impacts are in principle quantifiable and can be deemed acceptable equity and then actually economic and and economic constraint economic and resource constraints on on implementation. What do we mean by accurate and transparent quantification? Well, I think it's important for us to recognize that oceanbased CDR is perturbing the environment at large. It's making it's manipulating the global commons. And so the the burden of proof is high. Um there there is in principle a requirement that the causal impact of our interventions are in principle knowable. But given the nature of these systems, we have to acknowledge that truth is really a product of the social process wrapping the science. And in that space, we must rely on the tenants of transparency and peer review because they're only their only access point for for establishing consensus around realitydriven framing. Um standards provide a really important uh approach to cottifying consensus and make the um space operable. And in particular then we can leverage market mechanisms which promote uh efficiency and innovation um and if equipped with appropriate standards can actually uh address um or develop positive outcomes. However, because we are operating in a space where the science the very science underpinning CR quantification is still evolving we must acknowledge that standards have to track um evolving science. I think it's important to acknowledge that in the context of the climate crisis, we have some degree of urgency to establish effective mechanisms for CDR deployment. So, we're building the plane as as we fly it. And we can lump challenges into a space of of the open science questions and the research that's needed to to be done. But I would also urge the committee to be thinking about what sorts of institutions need to come into being or or or adapt so as to effectively manage the science. Um there's a requirement for large-scale investment and collective ownership. We used to rely on the government for that. Hopefully we will be able to do so uh moving forward. But there are other models for collective investment like public utilities models um that and and and the the underlying principle there is that there will need to be centralized infrastructure um that is basically supported on the basis of collective investment. Um, and then we want to open opportunities for private sector investment, establish effective market structures, and engage civil society mechanisms for regulation. Okay, that was just the preamble. So, I'm going to start moving fast through some of the um MRV considerations because I think a lot of this is is well established in the community. So, first, there are one of the challenges with ocean MRV is their large spatial scales. I'm just showing you the the um the evolution of a PCCO2 plume emanating from a deployment site in a model off the coast of California. We are working with unfavorable signal to noise ratios, signals that are razor thin margins on large background with high variability and we have a requirement to quantify both the factual and counterfactual to enable quant um quantification of additionality. There's a fundamental challenge in this space in that the processes we're thinking that require quantification in the context of MRV span a range of spatio and temporal scales. This is a nice figure that um isometric and and and put together and Jing will speak to this this later. Um our ways of knowing about the world um involve a combination of of assets. We need to be able to synthesize direct observations of the system, couple those with mechanistic models and then increasingly rely on data and AI. I think I'm highlighting this because again truth is a social phenomenon. Our ability to construct a picture of reality is contingent as much on the receptacle for that information in society as our scientific perspectives um within the realm of the academy. Um I'd like to just go through sort of a flowchart of what happens when you perturb the ocean with a pulse of alkalinity. So add alkalinity to the ocean that generates a CO2 deficit based on the carbonate chemistry. It introduces the potential for biogechemical feedbacks that might for instance ex uh trigger runaway precipitation that reduces the amount of alkalinity. Ultimately that perturbed water mass is dispersed in the oceanic flow and absorbs carbon from the atmosphere um via gas exchange and that uh carbon addition to the ocean is stored in ultimately predominantly in the bicarbonate form. So I've listed a few questions here that might arise as we're focused on sort of where the alkalinity is being put in the near field dynamics and the questions in this space will be answered with a combination of uh observations and models. In the far field um we uh we we again we transition more from the observations to rely more on on on models. And I've listed several of the questions that we might seek to answer with an MRV system here. And then ultimately um we need to understand the fate of bicarbonate and the DAC cycling mechanisms that constrain that fate. Um in the last part of the talk I'd like to speak a little bit to sort of return to the sort of institutional framing and think about how the science that we're doing needs to couple with the mechanisms by which society is seeking to implement CDR. So first of all the market presents an important framework. It offers the opportunity to entrain private capital to developing innovation innovative technologies. And so I do not think we can ignore the market. In fact, I think we need to um do our best to um uh leverage the potential here. There's really sort of three nominal frameworks for market. The voluntary carbon market which is characterized by bespoke transactions between individuals. compliance market which um has not come into being in this country but but is operating in the EU. And then finally under article six of um the Paris climate agreement offers the opportunity for countries to trade credits carbon credits and this has some really interesting implications for oceanbased CDR which does not actually occur within national boundaries. Um you may have heard of problematic features of the market and there's been essentially a market crash in the of the carbon market in the past few years um due predominantly to uh articles for example in the Guardian and the New Yorker under under uncovering sort of species credits. Um I think that there's momentum to establish a more robust new market with a focus on integrity and durable removals. I think it's really important to think about the potential context other context in which CDR may operate. One of them is is economic development and here's a study by the roodium group that quantifies the potential job creation of marine-based CDR. Um we also need to be thinking about international development goals and the degree to which um market mechanisms and CDR might promote the sustain UN sustainable development goals. Um in the context of marketbased accounting we we need to really understand what the frameworks are that we need to support in the context of MRV. We can imagine that if we're operating on the left side here in a tonbased accounting framework, there's a requirement for relatively high precision in our MRV in the sense that we are attributing tons to a particular project. However, if we can sort of evolve the the technology to toward a pay for practice model, we might think about developing MRV solutions that are really at the aggregate scale under the presumption that we've we've sort of vetted particular technologies um in terms of their basic the basic science underpinning their efficacy. Um I think it's important to think about how we need to structure collective scale investment. And so I'd just like to walk very briefly through an example here. So if we imagine we're using a computational system for quantification, we have some mechanistic um model as shown at the right. We're simulating the RC flux. We're using that to generate an estimate of net carbon removal. Um this is sort of the infrastructure we're working on building at at SeaWorthy. We have this computational model. It's wrapped by an orchestration layer that addresses ease of use and avail accessibility to the commercial sector and then an integrity layer that tracks um uh make makes the whole calculation auditable and and reproducible. Um we can sort of break down each of these elements in terms of where investment is required. And I'd like to just really highlight in the context here that we will need sustained investments in things like backboning backbone observing um uh networks and largecale community modeling codes. And those are um investment obligations for which the value proposition of an incremental um investment h is something of a diffuse proposition and really requires us to get to scale before we can operate effectively in that space. On the lower half of the diagram, however, are opportunities where p the private sector um can make substantial inroads and this is where public private partnerships are are are critical in the context of enabling this um this operation to move forward. I think we need to think about how to map knowledge gaps in terms of their impact on the ultimate outcome we care about which is the assessment of net carbon removal or on our ability to make definitive uh assessments of ecosystem impacts and really focus our research dollars on on the priorities that are critical in that space. Um we're as scientists we're used to thinking about this in terms of the the uncertainty budget and we can imagine various approaches to um quantifying uncertainty andor making investments in technology to reduce uncertainty. I think we should also be thinking about how basic technologies might present challenges that fall along an engineering to science spectrum and then throw in as well the the challenges related to ensuring that society is brought along for the ride and and and can confer social license to operations as well as what are the market mechanisms that need to come into being to make sure that that system aggregates to positive impact. Um here's a diagram that shows the type of structure that we might envision operating on where we uh where some collective establishes um consensus on the current best available science that enables suppliers in the market space to begin operation and sell credits. um we have to build mechanisms so that we're continuing to learn from those early deployments and then interfacing with the market um to ensure that we are aggregating to trustworthy high integrity removals at scale and that accounting is done in the appropriate frameworks. Okay, that's all I had. Thank you. >> Sorry, there's the mute button. Thanks so much, Matt. Um uh we again we are going to hold the questions um till the end so that we are at least sure to get through everything. Um so next up is Grace Andrews. Okay. Thank you so much um for having me. Um I uh Okay. So I'm Grace Andrews. I'm the founder and executive director of a nonprofit called Hourglass. Um, by way of introduction, Hourglass, uh, we are a nonprofit research organization that is working specifically on ocean alkalinity enhancement and within that sort of a subcategory of mineralbased ocean alkalinity enhancement. And our goal as an organization is to um really advance the responsible development of this industry in terms of understanding the safety and efficacy of these strategies and to disseminate our work for the public benefit to ensure that um all stakeholders have access to the knowledge around safety and efficacy so we can all make informed decisions about if when and how any of these strategies should move forward. uh we think about and work on OA from really two types of perspectives tool building and field trials um and I'll share over the course of this talk a little bit of our work from both of these categories. So um to just get started um I'm going to because hourglass's focus is mineral based OE I thought I'll focus my talk on that. Um quick definition of what mineral-based OE means. Um these are technologies that use the dissolution of natural or synthetic rocks and minerals to generate alkalin in the ocean and drive a net increase in atmospheric CO2 storage in seawater. So our work at Hourglass, we uh work a lot um doing independent monitoring of field trials conducted by uh a company called Vesta. So I'll be sharing some information and um knowledge that we've learned from from our own work. But I want to highlight that the scope for MRV that I'm going to talk about today extends much beyond that. So any type of mineral-based OEE um can be deployed in a variety of ways. So you can place minerals directly into the ocean. Um that's the sort of work Vesta does. Um other companies uh such as Planetary Technologies um uh disperse minerals through uh pipe infrastructure. So wastewater treatment plates and wastewater treatment um pipes and such. Um there are other companies out there dispersing minerals via um additions to river systems um uh ocean lying. There are a whole category of technologies out here that are all basically doing the same thing adding alkaline minerals uh for the purposes of dissolution and alkalinity generation. So um please keep in mind that uh although I'll be talking and sharing about um results from the vest project, the intention here is is actually much broader. So this is my incredibly simple diagram of how I think about CDR quantific CDR quantification for these projects. Um we have sort of supply chain and emissions. Um obviously that's a big part of MRV and uh net CDR quantification. Uh I've said supply chain here it is for these technologies most emissions do come from this live supply chain but you also have emissions from monitoring your projects and such like that. Um uh and then balancing our emissions of course we have carbon removal. And here I've broken down carbon removal uh into a framing that Matt introduced both near field and farfield. And I've broken this apart because as Matt highlighted um for these types of projects, the place the space and time where we generate alkalinity is distinct from the space and time where we actually generate carbon removal. So alkalinity is generated in the near field at your project site and then as that alkalinity disperses into the greater uh ocean that's actually where you have the removal. So there is um I think it's a helpful way to think about how we actually quantify um uh uh gross CDR from these projects. So there are lots of wonderful people out there working on this part of farfield modeling. um seaorthy is one of them. Hourglass's focus is really thinking about the project nearfield. Um and when we think about project nearfield for these mineral-based approaches, we have to yet think about it really as two compartments within that. So when you're adding minerals to the ocean again by a pipe, boat, whatever, um you have uh a water column that's being impacted. So the minerals go in um and in some cases you have minerals actually settling on the seafloor and so you have a seafloor compartment. We think about these differently because they have really really different biogeeochemical um cycles and the MRV for both of these compartments look very different. So I'm going to focus as I said on this section and dive a little bit into uh what this looks like. So water column um what I want to highlight here is that for these approaches when you have a water column perturbation sometimes you have alkalinity that um the alkalinity is really just added directly to the water column and that can be you can imagine a pipe where you've dissolved some component of your minerals in the pipe and actually by the time it comes out the pipe you really are adding like alkalinity directly to the ocean. So you have a dissolved load constituents and then sometimes of course you actually have a solid phase ending up in in water. Um this is a project uh from a vestile style approach where they added um olivine minerals uh into nearshore waters. And so some things that are sort of um ubiquitous across the board however is one of the really nice things about these approaches is you can measure a real-time counterfactual. Basically, you can just look outside your plume, your plume of dissolved, you know, alkalinity or your mineral plume or both. Um, and so here you have a little monitoring vessel sitting outside of the plume and you can use a monitoring vessel or an AUV, zigzag your way through the plume um, and actually get sort of baseline or counterfactual in real time alongside your measurement signal. So, that's a really really strong and helpful component of how to rigorously do MRB for these approaches. um at this point and I want to highlight you know when I think about where we are today versus the last time the national academyy's report was issued one of the biggest differences in the state of the science here is that before these were all conceptual there basically weren't any field trials and it was a big question of like can you measure anything any parameters what parameters on what time scale on what spatial scale and where we are today is there have been a number of field trials that have actually been implemented and what we can say for sure is that actually you can get measurable insitu signals of things like alkalinity and for some minerals other trace elements as tracers for them. So um we can do this via sensors and there's been a lot of work on alkalinity sensors or you can use your traditional bottle samples. But either way, one thing that's a major major advancement is we actually know from multiple field trials that you can actually just measure you can measure alkalinity at your project site for uh solid phase. Um probably unsurprisingly if you're looking at this photo of the Vesta trial um you can actually also measure solid phase in situ and so we can look at both of these and get discrete measurements um at these near in the near field again sensors and bottle samples sort of redundant approaches um as I said there are a lot of different techniques that you can do this um uh and and I want to highlight actually that when you're thinking about plume monitoring I'm focused on mineralbased OE right now. But this idea of being able to track a plume is also the same if you're thinking about um the recent Woods Holefield trial, right? Um uh there it was very similar approach of how do we sort of zigzag our way through through our plume and really monitor that and the the counterfactual in real time. Um highlighting some of the um distin the differences between the different types of approaches. If you have a pipe deployment, you're collecting these measurements basically continuously. If your if your pipe is moving, then you're collecting measurements. Um, for a discrete or both boat based mineral uh deployments, these measurements are really actually closer to like your monitoring period is hours to days. So, it's a very short short period. Um, and after that, we really start in the framework of measure model moving into the modeling side of things. So the transport of solid phases in the water column and the transformation as those solid phases dissolve to the dissolved phase through space and time. These are things that can be modeled via coupled particle transport models and mineral dissolution models um strengthened by again field data validation. So that's kind of an overview of how we can at the high level think about um MRV for the water column um perturbations. I thought I'd also spend just two seconds. A picture is worth a thousand words. This is some of our preliminary data again from the Vesta field trial just demonstrating actually how very measurable this stuff is. So this is some turbidity data from this exact deployment um at different depths in the water column and again we have sort of pre and post getting that real time baseline um again very measurable. And then over here we have nickel. nickel is a trace element in olivine and so we can get insitu water column measurements actually tracking olivine dissolution. Um and so this is really compelling particularly given as Matt said we live in a world where modeling is going to be a part of these getting um multiple types of data um uh to parameterize and and then validate models is is critical. Um, moving right along, um, that's thinking about a water column pertabbation. And then of course with, as I said, with some of these minerals, um, you will end up having minerals settling on the seafloor. And MRV, as I said, looks very different there. So this box sort of ticks on when your mineral dissolution time scale is greater than your particle settling time scale. Um and basically that means if your mineral dissolution time scale is on the order of days to years. Um so uh an olivine mineral this is uh pertinent but also again like the early planetary field trial using brusite this is also relevant. Um and so it's not um for not not relevant for all mineralbased approaches but certainly for um a meaningful subset of them. What does this look like? Well, again we have the benefit of real-time counterfactuals and that um because the minerals are um limited in their spatial extent, you can monitor control sites um sort of further down your coastline or wherever you may be and get that real-time counterfactual as well. So again, a real strength to this part of the MRV process. And what can we measure here? Again, this was a huge question a few years ago. Can you if you have minerals sitting on the seafloor gradually dissolving can you get a resolvable signal there? Will it be basically just diluted um beyond the point of measurability? Uh and and what we know now is that the answer is very much yes. You can get measurable very measurable signals. Um and this is a massive achievement. So alkalinity what we know now is this can be measured directly on the seafloor using standard oceanographic equipment benthic flux chambers or through discrete pore water samples. Um and again this has been demonstrated now at multiple field trials. Uh and then on the of course on the solid phase you can also measure that um pretty quite quite easily actually. Um again traditional approach is bimistry um discrete sample collection and and people are working on really novel proxies to try and make MRV like easier and cheaper um and more suitable for a commercial implementation. And so here we have the three-dimensional bithimemetry of again that best of field trial. Um and then uh again the like all things uh the transport of the solid phase and again the transformation to the dissolve phase as those minerals dissolve. Um, one of the limitations here is that these are again these are sort of dis well largely discrete samples. And so how do you take spot measurements through space and time and extrapolate them to larger spatial and temporal scales? This is where we again rely on models. And so here we think about um coupling sediment transport models with what are called sediment reaction transport models. Again a major strength here is these can be validated with data. um field data. And so um I'd say the modeling component here and I'll spend a little more time on that is really where I see the greatest need for um uh significant uh future research. But just to highlight um how measurable again these signals are. These are our real data from uh the vested field trial. These are poor water profiles. Again we have that like nickel tracer commonly found in olivine at our olivine site compared to a control. And you see, you know, again, the equivalent changes to the carbonate system. You see these really significant changes in pH. You see decreases in PCCO2. And I'll have some other data, carbonate system data later. Um, so we can measure these things um pretty I wouldn't say it's um simple to collect these measurements um but they can be done rigorously because the signal to noise ratio is actually not nearly as bad as we maybe thought it was going to be. um you can measure minology um very well XRD um and again this is um this is a huge advance relative to where we were and then we can also measure those over significantly large longer time scales than I think I certainly thought we'd be able to do years ago. So this is the data at 3 weeks and then 7 months later we're still getting you know pH changes in the sediment pore water of you know 2.3 pH units which is um quite substantial. So what we know now is these signals we can measure them and they persist from weeks to even years time scales. Um, but eventually, no matter what mineral you're working with, eventually you'll reach a time scale where the signals will fall below our measurement capability, our detection limits. And again, that's where models um tick on tick on. And so to highlight some of the modeling approaches that are needed to really round out rigorous RV here, this is an example of a sediment transport model. So again, you build a project, minerals end up on the seafloor, you do some beimemetry and some spot sampling of discrete samples, but how do you understand really how that um expands over the larger spatial scales of a coastline? So here we use Del 3D, Del 3D uh as a sediment transport model um to to model the um movement of in this case again the olivine over the time scale of about a year. And and what's nice about these is, you know, Delta 3D is there's something like 15,000 publications out there. You know, this is like not something we invented. What's novel here is that we're taking really wellestablished um models and then that have basically been um tailored around minerals like quartz and asking questions about how do the parimeterizations within them change when you're looking at minerals like olivine. And so there is some work there. Um but in general, we're using really well established frameworks. And then as I said the sort of last piece here is thinking about how do we fill the spatial and temporal um gaps in the data for um the actual dissolution side of things. So we can model where minerals go. How do we model over larger spatial and temporal scales the um chemical perturbation? So this is where we use reaction transport models. So this is a model that you know we're showing how um a sediment profile is evolving again over a year. um reaction print transport models again are dime a dozen. They're a lot out there. They're used in oceanography. They're also used in enhanced rock weathering on land. Um but what's novel and what we're personally doing at Hourglass is taking existing reaction transport models and making them sort of bespoke to MCDR. So although these models are out there and they're sort of as I said dime a dozen, they don't typically have things like you know alkaline minerals in them, right? That's unique to MCDR. So, we're adding those kinds of new minerals in there and the associated chemical reactions. And then the other big thing is we're making them more suitable for coastal environments because that is where most of these projects are currently currently going currently deployed and likely to be deployed in the future. So, and coastal environments have their own sort of complex uh biogeeochemical processes and hydrodnamics that you just don't find out um in the deep sea where a lot of these models were originally originally built for. So um this is how you sort of take field data and the sort of models you need to tie it all together again simply for that for that near field piece and just to exemplify you know the progress we've made already. This is again um the um solid lines here are real field data from uh the Vesta project site for a bunch of carbonate parameters and the dash lines overline over overlaying are the model um predictions based on the model we're building radio. So um we're doing pretty well but of course you know it's actually one model is not sufficient. There's we're going to need to do interm model comparisons and validate across a number of field trials to really get us to the place where you could use this for rigorous carbon quantification. Last thing I want to just highlight um I'd be remiss if I didn't say this. Um MRV we typically think about it with terms with regards to carbon quantification. hourglass is a really really really big uh uh proponent of um the concept of EMRV and making sure that we're thinking about environmental impact quantification in our MRV approaches as well. Um this is something we're also working on. We have recently um built what we're calling the framework for ecotoxological modeling of MCDR which is itself um a quantification framework for environmental impacts in the near field of mineral-based OE approaches as well as um a wider swath of MCDR technologies as well. And so it's trying to again bring the idea of quantification um that we're so used to thinking about for carbon removal but to environmental impacts to make sure that these considerations don't get left behind. Um, okay. That's what I had. Thank you. >> Thanks so much, Grace. Um, there's that mute button again. Um, so we're we're going to go ahead and save the questions um for the end. Um, and I want to go ahead and move on to to Frock. And am I saying your name right? >> Yes. Yeah. My name is Fra Kaka. It's it's a mouthful. It's it's proper German. Sorry about that. >> Thank you. Thanks for joining us. >> Of course. Thanks for having me. Let me see. Did I switch correctly? Yeah, this looks good. Okay, thank you all. Um, as I said before, and thanks Kelly and the team for for having me. Um, I'm Frogga. I'm the science lead um at Frontier, which is a group of carbon removal buyers. So I wanted to take the opportunity and give a bit of an perspective of what it looks like to be an early purchaser of carbon removal including marine CDR in a space where the science is constantly evolving. how we think about that and why we think that like early purchases can help um not only drive forward deployment to the scale that we ultimately need but then also um help drive forward like science and scientific questions and specifically to um to MRV. So I want to talk a little bit about uh what Frontier is because people might might not be so familiar with it, how we think about um our role in the carbon removal space specifically uh focus on MCDR um and then um going a bit deep on our point of view on uh MRV challenges and how we think about that. So Frontier is as I said like a buyer um collective. We have over a billion dollars to spend on carbon removal. And really our northstar goal is to build from the ground up a carbon removal market that um is robust and and gets to the scale that we need in 2030, 2050 and in the future. And the way we're doing that is by purchasing in two different ways mainly. One is like a pre pre-purchase track where we support very smallcale uh novel deployments. We call them pre- purchases. Typically on the order of like half a million dollars building a you know small first of a kind field trial or um demonstration plant in the field to really de-risk the technology and prove the efficacy. And then the bigger part of our fund is spent on offtake contracts and these are long um longer contracts multi-year contracts which are paid up on delivery. The volume is typically something on the order of like 20 50 $70 million. But here again like the the um distinction is very important to make that those are paid up on delivery which is verified against like protocols and with a third party um verifier and we look for carbon removal solutions that are tech like we're tech agnostic look for um solutions that fulfill our core criteria of like SC um that look at scalability, safety, verifiability uh and cost effectiveness at large scale. Um yeah, so that's that's important and includes MCDR. What have we done today? We have like over 50 carbon removal purchases um signed like over half a billion just north of a half a billion dollar contracted today including uh a variety of um carbon removal technologies including um marine CDR. Importantly, our role as a buyer, as I said before, or like try to allude to before is not only it doesn't end by like paying for a carbon removal credit. Really, how we see ourselves is um that there's a lot of role that we can take in building the market, right? Like by influencing others and especially um in the realm of like standard setting and really defining what does good look like, right? So like what types of like um uh requirements do we have for measurement and verification um and purchasing these credits in order to like build a robust market that doesn't move ahead of um the current uh scientific knowledge right specifically for um MCDR what does it look like in practice so I think what's different also like from where the last uh reports then in in 22 and where we are Now I think like really important to to highlight here we we purchased um from nine MCDR projects all abiotic project um approaches direct air capture as well as alkalinity enhancement. We approved a first credit issuer as well as a specific um protocol for alkalinity edition um co coastal outfalls and I I guess Ying after me will will get really into depth um on that. We accepted first delivered and verified tons from a smallcale deployment that we we and external experts went through all the data um and and uh got comfortable with the verification process here. So this is a really important tri run to go through. And then importantly I want to highlight too we have three pay on delivery these like large scale offtake contracts that I talked about that we signed with crew and and carbon run. These are inland water alkalinity addition. So like uh adding alkalinity to wastewater treatment plants or rivers. So you know one can argue this this is isn't really ocean even though the the ocean storage um is you know interpret part of that approach obviously. And then very recently uh after intensive uh diligence and a lot of um back and forth with the scientific community and really thinking through on what a first um offtake in ocean alkalinity enhancement should look like. Um we we signed the deal with planetary which I think you'll hear more about um in in upcoming sessions as well. So I think um it's really exciting uh progress kind of kind of slow and kind of fast. It depends on how you look at it, but uh to me it's very exciting and we spend a lot of time um really thinking through the nitty-gritty details um on what responsible moving um here looks like. Okay, I want to talk a little bit about um how we think about MCDR specifically. You know, I'm I'm going to talk a lot about OA as I think most of the previous speakers as well. So maybe maybe this is um nothing new but MCDR obviously the and and the future report and the updates here will focus on a variety of approaches. as a buyer like um or like they they naturally group into biotic and abiotic approaches. And as a buyer, um, we, you know, look at all the different carbon removal solutions and then, um, vet them against our core criteria in terms of like where we see most potential for, um, you know, building the carbon removal market of the future. And then also where uh, commercial activity is warranted, right? like where can we move forward in the scaling process and where are we really at the realm of like fundamental science. Um so here I want to show like um this heat map table which um should highlight a little bit like key challenges and risks across core criteria that we think about for MCDR technologies durability um scale scalability cost MRV and environmental risk. Now these type of heat map tables are never perfect right but directionally this should be right individual approaches within these pathways can have like you know very different um profiles. I think my key point here is really there's a lot of like when we say MCDR we need to understand that there's a lot of like different approaches under this which have like very very different risk profiles and requirements for MRV and and um uh environmental risk for example. So then from our standpoint out um where we focus on like high highly durable um CDR on the order of like uh a thousand year or more um and then if you overlay that with with a very high scalability criteria um we really think that the the biggest potential here lies in um the abiotic approaches because for biotic approaches it's really hard to achieve both at the same time while um you know having a clear path forward to MRV as well as like tracking unintended ecosystem consequences, right? But we are very excited about um ocean alkalinity enhancement in particular um given you know the this big storage capacity in the oceanic buffer system and we think that the MRV challenge and the ecosystem risk can be uh controlled um with very stringent guard rails up and under certain conditions. So I think that's that's really important. So again we are really excited um about these approaches but it's really important to put the right guard rails up because again not every approach is the same and not you know per se any um carbon removal approach especially um including ocean alkalin enhancement is ready for quification under all conditions but we think that for certain conditions so for example if we're able to um um very accurately quantify the amount of alkalinity added and if we work in a um location where we have like good models for uh baselining as well as uh modeling the FC gas exchange and like all these kinds of things um then we think there is a path forward to um quantification that um is acceptable to our bias which which we've proven right and there's like a bunch of documents here that that we published um on our website that explain a little bit more our thinking here and go into detail on the specific guardrails that are important. Beyond this thinking, we have like the leverage on um contracts helping us to um to put like really really specific requirements in the contracts that that suppliers have to fulfill in order to meet their requirements and then ultimately get paid and have their path toward verification. So, um there's a lot of them, a few that are like worth calling out specifically for ocean alkalinity enhancement. Um rigorous uh MRV, which you know, obviously we're here to talk about. Um these are things that are um super important and like top of mind for any of these process um uh projects. Um minimizing harmful ecosystem impacts is obviously also something that's top of mind for for almost anyone here. And um there are a lot of like very specific things that we put in place um in order to um monitor for that and then have requirements for the suppliers and the ongoing projects that we support. So something like a stop trigger plan where direct um measurements of like ecosystems thresholds would like halt any uh operations if if any thresholds ever would um get reached. Um and then community support um is also something really important. You know, we this is probably not the right session or like I'm not going deep into it, but it's a very very big part of it. And at Frontier, we think very very much um about that. And specifically for MCDR approaches um there seems to be a very high role and and potential for friction. But then also we we think um potential opportunity here because some of these approaches such as ocean alkaline enhancement could have like co- benefits which can help um you know support some communities that are specifically affected from um climate change, ocean acidification and things like that. And then lastly um one thing that's really important for us is um transparent data sharing. And that's something that I think you'll also hear more about in like uh other se uh sessions. But that's something too that really comes from the core that I mentioned before that we want to drive forward with these purchases um the the building of a robust market right and with that it's really important that from any project that we support data is publicly available and the scientific community as well as just like the general public has like access to these data building trust like really understanding what we're doing why we're doing this and then can help also in an iterative process to um you know make the entire thing better eventually. So let's jump into MRV. Verifiability obviously is like a big part of our uh you know core criteria. You know we pay for carbon credits. We live in a world you know uh unfortunately that isn't pay for practice. I mean I don't know if that's if if we're ready for that yet but carbon accounting is like of course uh bread and butter and like really important. Um I want to say that in these what we call open system pathways you know directly dealing with like open environments where it's inherently hard to measure the approach that we're taking um is that of uncertainty discounting right so it's not it's um okay if there's like some uncertainty as long as we know what that is and can to a high level of um certainty quantify how big that uncertainty is right so um we in the process that we are coming through when when diligencing and signing up projects. We have like multiple ways importantly where this um uh is regarded, right? So during application and project diligence with with specific deployments, we uh require companies to have like a draft protocol and verification plan. Um at this point we mostly like you know look at the uncertainties. We have like scientific and and technical experts and reviewers that help us assess um the most conservative way of uncertainty discounting. And then for importantly for the point of like um delivery or like you know um yeah offt take uh payout basically um prior to that like all companies need to meet a set of conditions which are set in our contract and those um require us to review and approve like the project uh development plan the the methodology the verifier like um everything involved here. So there's a lot of like um back and forth going on on the specific um conditions. And then uh outside of like the contracting and the and the um supplier diligence um we also have like strong partnerships with the academic field um you know including um SeaWorthy for example or carbon plan or like there's there's a bunch of um players in the field that we support in order to um um you know yeah help drive forward the the north standard of like um towards better registry protocols and um data sharing tools and um all the above. Okay, again this is um I probably need to speed up one second. Um this is again just showing up really that there's a lot of like nitty-gritty detail going into these protocol um evaluations and ver verifier evaluations. So oftentimes we get asked uh questions like you know do you even account for like the upstream emissions of the feed stock that's being used and put into the water and what about a baseline and counterfactual. There's like all these like really important bits and pieces that are being regarded and then again we at this point like Frontier pays higher prices for carbon removal offtake. So we're really not trying to incentivize a race to the bottom. the the cost of any carbon removal technology for us is really important on having line of sight what what the that it can have cheap cost at large scale because ultimately that's very important because we need a lot um of carbon removal to happen. So uh we can't afford to have this like to be $500 a ton. However, today we are comfortable paying these like extra prices to pay for redundant measurements to take like very conservative um uncertainty discounts and um pay for additional studies that like test for ecosystem safety and and all these kinds of things. Um so again what does this look like? I just wanted to highlight um the uh last offtake that we did with like planetary planetary on ocean alkalinity enhancement. We have a first protocol that went through all of this um deep diligence got approved by us. We think there are conservative assumptions in there. Ying will talk a lot more about this. Is the protocol perfect? Probably not. But it's a perfect uh starting point. Um, and we think that with like upcoming field trials and first deliveries and these projects that are going on, we can address some of the questions. I think Matt had a good point in his previous presentation that there's an inherent challenge with MRV goals that are you know we want to measure um a signal and then keeping deployments like very very small in re research trials that probably like you know can't achieve like a measurable signal. So here's um uh hopefully something uh coming up that that will help here. Um and then again this is an iterative process. So for the the offtake with planetary that we we just signed um there is a basically a circle going on where we will have and review like all the data that's going on from a small scale deployment. This is um still uh not exactly a huge operation. It's like an extension of a pilot program in Halifax that has been running and ongoing for a very long time. So there's a lot of precedent, data, community support and and all kinds of proof points that we um that got us comfortable to increase operation at this location. Basically there will be um data sharing as I said with in in a collaboration with carbon 2C which similar to to what Cascade is doing for enhanced rock weathering. um there's a repository where the supplier will make all um public uh all data public um and then there's like an iterative process to um go through and increase the locations and then I just want to add um with like a quick summary on you know where we're at what's what's coming next and then what should the research community focus on or that's what's what's immediately needed. So I think um it's really good uh progress overall in the field. There's a growing evidence base and which I think should should strengthen the confidence and efficacy and best practices. So soon we will learn a lot more on like the there's a bunch of field trials um underway across um the globe. There are some commercial projects uh open that will have the data sharing requirements. So there should be a lot more data coming online that will tell us about efficacy and the best ways of um MRV and then importantly I didn't talk much about it but the the ecosystem impacts and co potential co- benefits are also something that's really important and we are involved in a bunch of uh research studies to get more proof points here. So I think immediately like R&D needs for the field and and to drive forward um I think are around like technically just like um access to fast dissolving safe alkalinity sources. Um I think we we need a lot more clarity on key thresholds for key parameters. um you know what what aragonite saturation states and and um alkalinity levels under like certain conditions in specific areas and and ocean um chemistries are important and relevant. Um and then proof points also for ecosystem and the co- benefits I think would be really important. And then very specifically for MRV um the tracking and near of near field mixing especially subduction models I think we need a lot more there there's the need for um high resolution models just in a lot more geographies more intermodal comparison we heard more about that earlier already um high sensitivity sensors and um and advanced dissolution models for feed stock that is um added before it's completely dissolved which is also um a big research need with that I want to end. Thank you all and um happy to take questions. >> Thank you so much. Um and you can put your your questions in the um slidoh and feel free to answer them in the slido as well. We are going to run out of time I think. Um this has just been so much information and really great information. So thank you. Um and next we we have Ying >> from isometric. Yes. Okay. >> Yeah. Let me share screen. Is that showing up? >> Perfect. >> Okay. Um, hi everyone. Uh, thank you so much to the standing committee for inviting me here today. I'm Jingi. I've spent the past few years working to bring scientific rigor and trust to marine CDR in the commercial sector primarily by developing protocols and supporting third party verification through my work at isometric which is a new type of carbon removal registry and I'm excited to share a little bit about the current state of MRV protocols today which will be the focus of my talk. Uh but first just in case anyone is not familiar I want to define what is a registry and what's their role. So a registry is a public ledger that tracks credit issuances, ownership and retirement. These public ledgers are important for making sure that there's no double counting of credits and to provide transparency into who's buying carbon removal and who's retiring these credits for their corporate sustainability goals. One credit represents one metric ton of CO2 that has been removed and verified. What does it mean for a credit to be verified? Um that just means that a project has gone through the full MRV process. And this is a friendly reminder that uh MRV is three different steps and there's no single person or organization can do MRV by themselves because the verification step by definition requires an independent third party to come in assess all the data and evidence um and justifications and make sure that the project actually represents real additional carbon removal. um following an MRV protocol and MRV protocols are the rule book that outlines all the requirements for how carbon removal is quantified for a particular pathway such as OAE. The protocols also outline what types of data and evidence needs to be submitted and the process for independent third party auditing. We currently have five marine protocols that you can find. Um these are publicly available on the isometric registry. We started by focusing our efforts on abiotic technology such as electrochemical or alkalinity enhancement approaches and our protocols are developed in an iterative process uh that involves multiple rounds of reviews and feedback from different stakeholders, independent subject matter experts as well as the public. So now I want to um dive into a bit more about what is in these protocols and I want to start with environmental and social safeguards because this is um the most important thing and safety is a prerequisite for any carbon removal credits. So in the protocol we focus on having a proactive approach to environmental and social safeguards. And this means projects do as much diligence as possible during the planning phase before anything hits the water. So all protocols um require project projects to have an ongoing stakeholder input process following the principles of free prior and informed consent. Um projects also must have official permitting and demonstrate ongoing compliance with those permits. So any measurements that are taken for permit compliance also need to be reported and verified as well and no credits can be issued if it was discovered that permit thresholds were exceeded. And then marine projects are also required to develop a tailored adaptive management plan for pausing or adjusting their activities if certain safety thresholds or triggers are exceeded. Moving on now to quantification. So at a high level, all of our protocols have this same net CDR equation. This is across marine and terrestrial CDR pathways. Um so uh oh, I think my headphones just died once. Hopefully hopefully you can still hear me. >> We can. >> Okay, great. using my laptop speaker. Um so this is the same highle net CDR equation that all of our protocols have. So the um net CO2 removed that's credited is given by the amount of CO2 that was removed and durably stored um as a result of the project. And then we subtract out how much CO2 would have been removed and durably stored in the counterfactual scenario. So this gives us the additionality and then lastly you subtract out all the emissions associated with a project and this is to ensure net negativivity. And for the rest of the presentation I will focus on our OA from coastal outfalls protocol as an example. Uh in OA the removal occurs through the additional air sea gas exchange relative to the ocean background. So we can combine the CO2 stored in counterfactual terms into this single delta air flux term. And next I just want to talk a little bit about how these uh two terms are quantified in the protocol. So starting with the airc flux term. Um the protocol outlines three steps that must be followed to quantify this term and these steps are designed to bridge the wide range of spatial and temporal scales that are relevant for an OEE from coastal outfalls project. So step one requires continuous measurements at the outfall to quantify the alkalinity dosing rate and also uh measurements for permit compliance. And then step two requires characterizing the initial turbulent mixing and dilution of your alkaline plume and upscaling that pertibbation into a 3D alkalinity forcing to apply to ocean models. This step also requires quantifying any alkalinity losses due to processes like secondary precipitation or biotic calcification. And then lastly um the larger scale mixing and adection of your perturbation and removal through air sea gas exchange is quantified using 3D physical biogeeochemical ocean models. Um this is a very high level overview but the protocol goes into more details on requirements for measurements and also requirements for models. Moving on to project emissions. So all the protocols um have standardized requirements for quantifying emissions and these align with best practices from ISO standards. So for example, for an OEE project, some of the emissions that uh must be accounted for in the system boundary include emissions related to your feed stock production and transportation. um emissions for operating your site such as energy usage for dosing, any um monitoring activities or surveys, personnel, transportation and accommodation, and then your emissions for establishing your project site as well as the expected emissions with closing your project site. And one final thing that um I want to touch on is uncertainty quantification. So the last thing we want to do is over credit. Um it doesn't help the planet if projects are inflating their climate impacts. And this is why a core pillar of our MRV protocols is acknowledging sources of uncertainty and being conservative in the quantification approach. So these are the actual sources of uncertainty for planetaries OA credits from earlier this year. Um, as Fraa talked about, this is the first and only OEE project that that has gone through the full MRV process so far. So, they quantified all of these different sources of uncertainty and that was propagated into an overall uncertainty value for the net carbon removal quantification. So for uh planetar's project for this particular removal period um they had a total gross of 881 additional tons of CO2 removed from the atmosphere and then the mean emissions associated with that was 151 tons and then the propagated uncertainty which represents one standard deviation is 105 tons. So in the end, the conservative number of credits that were issued was 625 tons. So that was a really quick overview into the current state of what marine CDR protocols look like today. Um, as all of the previous speakers mentioned, as technology and science evolves over time, the protocols will also need to be regularly updated so they can continue to represent the best available science. And we imagine that over time, um, the protocols will stabilize and become standardized across different registries and maybe even eventually regulated by governments. And our goal at isometric today is to take that first step and to set a really high bar for quality to lift up the standards for the field. And this is because we think it's really important for building trust and avoiding greenwashing and the pitfalls we've seen before in other carbon offsets projects. So we look forward to continually sharing learnings with the community to help scale promising technologies. And just to summarize, um there's been a lot of advancements in protocol development since the first NAB report, uh these protocols really lay the foundation for transparent data reporting and verification and set a high bar for scientific rigor. Um another thing I find particularly exciting is that these protocols help put marine CDR on a level playing field with terrestrial CDR approaches. So this is because they use standardized emissions accounting rules. So then we can really start to compare the emissions intensity and efficiency across different CDR approaches. Um and then the last point is just a reminder these current protocols are you know just version one right now. So they're are the first step and will definitely continue to evolve based on new research. Thanks. >> Thank you so much and thanks to all of you. Um, this really gave us a great foundation for for what's going on right now and where things are going. Um, we really appreciate this. Um, I know our committee is going to have some more questions that we may not have time for. Um, I put in the chat that we could go until about 2:20, which is kind of now. Um, but I I see a question from Lisa. If you guys don't mind staying on for a couple minutes, I don't mind um taking a shorter break myself, but if anybody needs to jump off, please do. Like, it's fine. Um but we do have to start back up with the other session at 2:30. Okay. So we have Lisa and then um Jessica and Kristen. Lisa. >> Okay. Thank you. Um my question was for Fra uh about just um explaining what is meant please by the term safety. I saw it appear in the protocols and I wondered whether this referred to like mainly compliance with water quality standards or um or whether there's some indicator taxa or thresholds or some kind of environmental certification process in >> Yeah. Yeah. It's a it's a great question and it depends a little bit or like there there are like multiple levels of like uh safety or um uh across the different deployments or like what what exactly is meant right like but um overall there is a um depend let's just talk about the OEFtake we did with planetary right like that that deal and and what's required there there are like ecosystem safety thresholds based on like water quality um that are just like regulated by the um you know by the regulator for the permit of that uh deployment right which tells you you know like uh safe limits for pH and so on. So then the question is when we do protocol review we question if we think these like thresholds are conservative and safe enough or what can be done um on top of the already existing requirements for safety what what else we can we layer on top right and then there's um for example um additional studies to be done on um getting clearer information on ecosystem thresholds but I think right now is like there is um aragonide saturation, there is pH, there are like TSS levels. So it's all like water chemistry based um and as well as like metal toxicity like uh impurities and so on. So there's a monitoring for a bright sweep or for for for a broader sweep of parameters um and then we rely on existing ecosystem impact uh frameworks um to to tell like safe limits for for these parameters. Does that answer your question, Lisa? >> Thank you. >> Thank you. Uh Jessica, >> thanks Kelly. So my question is getting down a little bit into the nuts and bolts of how MRV works and specifically you know this idea that as any carbon chemist can tell you there are >> it's imperative that everyone stays to five minutes or we'll never get through. Um and then it's really just meant to you know um spark additional questions and and inquiry. Um so you know it's just this is a very starter highle overview. We understand you can't um get through a whole lot in five minutes. Um okay, so um let's start with uh Oh, okay. So, our first speaker is here. Grav, are you ready to go? >> Hey, Kelly, how's it going? Yes, I'm ready to go. >> Okay. All right. Five minutes. >> Okay. I I don't know if I can I don't know if I can click my own slides. Um but I guess I can say next slide. >> Yes. >> Okay. Uh hi everyone. Gorovant. I'm a professor of engineering at UCLA. I'm also the CTO of a company called Aquatic which I'm going to tell you about. Next slide please. Um so I'm going to talk to you about Aquatic which was built as a seawater electrolysis platform that couples carbon dioxide removal with the production of green hydrogen. Um next slide please. So the general approach behind the process is is really quite straightforward. The way I want you to think about it going from the left hand side to the right hand side of the screen. You start with seawater that contains calcium and magnesium and sodium chloride and dissolved in organic carbon. You bring it into an electrolyer where you let two things happen. The first is at the cathode you produce alkalinity. At the anode you produce acidity. You use the alkalinity to convert calcium and dissolve inorganic carbon that's present in seawater into a calcium carbonate and in a magnesium hydroxide. At the anode, you only produce oxygen. You don't produce chlorine because the approach that we've developed involves the use of what's known as oxygen selective anodess which allow us to suppress the production of chlorine. And of course, as you might imagine, um as a function of the hydrogen evolution reaction, we produce hydrogen at the cathode. I should point out that the way that the approach is is built, we use either rock or some sort of an alkaline solute to quench the acidity that we produce at the anode. Um the process has a gross energy intensity of about 2.3 megawatt hours per ton of carbon dioxide removed from the atmosphere and fully stabilized in the form of calcium carbonate and magnesium bicarbonate which I will talk about in a second. If you consider the energy that's associated with the hydrogen that you produce, that gives you a net energy intensity of about 1 to 1.5 megawatt hours per ton of CO2. Um, next slide, please. So, the way I want to try and build a thesis around this is really again, you know, to use use a block flow diagram. All the way at the left, you've got seawater that contains dissolved in organic carbon, calcium, and magnesium. when we bring it into the electrolyer we end up producing calcium carbonate by combining DIC with calcium um to the stochometric limit and this is really a function of being a inorganic carbon limited system so you actually have calcium still present as cations ions you end up producing magnesium hydroxide to the full stochometric limit you convert all of the 55 millm moles of magnesium into magnesium hydroxide um going on to what happens next we take the solution which is now alkaline um we add CO2 to it from the atmosphere. Um, with the idea being that we're using the CO2 essentially as a as an acidic gas to dissolve the magnesium hydroxide and convert into magnesium bicarbonate. As you add CO2 to that system, the calcium that you have left over that is still capionic converts into calcium carbonate. So, you end up with a process that gives you about 4.6 g of CO2 removal from the atmosphere per kilogram of sea water that you process. Important to point out that you're doing stabilization by producing calcium carbonate and magnesium bicarbonate which is the the means by which the the natural system so to speak absorbs CO2 as well. Next slide please. So we've been working on this for quite a while. It's been about 5 years now. Where we are is we are currently in the midst of building a demonstration plant in Singapore that'll actually go online in the next couple of months. That plant will do about 4,000 tons of carbon removal per year. Um, that's a rendering of what the plant looks like, but I want you to imagine it's effectively a bunch of electrolyers that are organized together. Next slide, please. I should also mention in in addition to this demonstration plant, we are in what's known as FE2, front-end loading, stage 2 engineering for a larger commercial facility. Um, which we think of sort of as a reference plant because it can be built in a variety of different locations. It's essentially designed to be site agnostic although there are a partic particular set of sites that we're spending much more time with than others. Next slide please. I think given as I'm coming up to my 5 minute mark I should just point out you know one of the things that we've been really focused on is really making sure that we've got a robust measurement reporting and verification platform that surrounds all of this. And while I'm happy to take questions, I should maybe just say the way the process is built, we can close the mass balance around carbon removal perfectly while looking at either the liquid phase, the solid phase, and the gas phase. by combining all of them together. So you can essentially establish the total amount of carbon removal as a function of the CO2 that's in the dissolved phase and changes thereof in the solids and changes thereof and including potential concepts related to evasion that you might get from seawater if you don't have your discharge design correctly. With that said, happy to conclude and take take questions when the time is right. >> Thanks so much, Grav. Um Ken Bisseller is next. Thank you and I hope you can hear me. Uh, basically my story starts with John Martin and young scientist at Woods Hall sitting on the floor of a packed room listening say this quote, "Give me half a tank of iron, I'll give you the next ice age." Obviously, he wasn't testing marine CDR, but he was considering the role of iron in controlling ocean productivity and photosynthesis. Fast forward 35 years, I was one of the authors on the academyy's oceanbased carbon dioxide removal report. Next slide. I realized today that there is a lot of focus on ocean alkalinity. So, just to remind you, why would you consider adding iron to the ocean for MCDR? Well, there certainly has scaling potential. There are in just the high nutrient areas enough excess nutrients to move on order of gigatons of carbon dioxide per year. There's also possibility of removing CO2 from stimulating nitrogen fixation in low nutrient areas. The unique thing about it, the second bullet, is it doesn't take very much iron. It's an essential nutrient, but you don't need very much. A little iron goes a long way. So unlike many of these other uh techniques uh one part iron can give you a thousand parts say of carbon growth and removal. That's not even what nature does. It's more like one to 100,000 because of that because we're using sunlight because we're now putting factories in the ocean. The cost will be low by most any metric. And back in the 1990s and early 2000s we did several field experiments. They were relatively shortterm. They did produce export. I think there's some uh confusion about that. It was measured relatively shallow. We were not there long enough to see the full additionality and durability, but it was on the order of several thousand tons if removed. And that was shown back in the 90s. Next slide. But there is more to it, particularly if you go to scale, right? We need information if we wanted to move forward with CDR of what might be impacts downstream from using nutrients elsewhere. Right now, we have to rely on models. Those models are pretty incomplete in terms of the biological carbon pump. A recent one showed a 5% decrease in biomass. Long way away from the southern ocean where those nutrients were removed, but that was accompanied by 200 gigatons of CO2 removal. So, we have to think of both. It will change the ocean. What are those impacts? Right now, we have models that are imperfected, particularly the further out in time you go. Oxygen is consumed as that carbon sinks to the biological carbon pump. Those decreases are relatively small. Actually, I'll be talking about that later today in a call in this forum I'll mention to you soon. Uh the type of datoms that grow in response to iron include the pseudonesia species. they can produce demoric acid a toxin that was not observed in those iron experiments and we did look for things like nitrous oxide and methane that can be produced from decomposing uh carbon organic matter those are small impacts even though they're more potent greenhouse gases they did not offset it was a couple of percent offset for the CO2 next slide so then I want to introduce what's happened since 2022 that report this kind of bottomup group formed. We're now over 60 members, nine countries, 37 institutions. We are particularly interested in studying ocean fertilization. We're not saying we're ready to deploy, but we want to answer those questions. We're a nonforprofit house at Hoy, but we represent many institutions and we're looking for public and private partnerships to make that happen. Next slide. One of the first things we did in 2022 kilapartama Krishna Margaret line and myself we put together a code of conduct how would we guide those studies you can see the points here about we're doing this for the benefit of humans environment we are not seeking credits we did not form a business to do that next slide we meet every month including later today we've met in person to come up with five main types of activities from field studies to models to looking at the type of iron you might put in to looking at EMRV and MRV and the social and governance issues. We publish those for example in that article in frontiers and then my last slide because I know we have to be quick here today. I just want to point out that there's more that's going on. There are modeling comparisons happening through Noah Knop support. This is largely Dennis McGillicuy and colleagues and through our funding through Ocean Visions. We do have activities supported by RPA that's both models and technology improvements. Uh we had a field planning workshop. We want to get in the field possibly by 2027 2028. We would do that under permits through the London protocol convention. We're involving communities and of course MRV EMV. The fourth bullet we have brought in uh a group led by Liliana, Sarah Navas, Romney Webb to help us think about the governance, community engagement, social scientist needs and we tend to show up at these national international events to talk about what we're doing and be open about our plans. Thank you very much. >> Thanks so much, Ken. U next up is Kristen Davis. Welcome, Kristen. >> Thanks. Can you hear me? Okay. >> Great. Okay. So, um, awesome. So, I want to thank, uh, the committee for their work on this today. I'm just going to review our current understanding uh or current since the last report uh some things that have been going on to think about seaweed cultivation as a strategy for carbon dioxide removal. And first I think it's useful to review our current understanding for the pathways for carbon sequestration um for intent you know se farm seaweed that's intentionally sunk uh for carbon sequestration. Uh, and I'm going to use this figure I'm borrowing here from Dave Seagull because I think it's really useful. Essentially, it shows um the as a percentage of total seaweed net primary production on a farm. We expect that about 20% of that biomass is lost in the upper ocean due to growth, harvest uh during you know uh preparation for conveyance. And then while 15% of the fixed carbon is lost to dissolved organic carbon compounds that are released during growth either as exodation um or as seaweed tissue is breaking down uh with age or scinessence. So um assuming that the seaweed is harvested and somehow conveyed quickly down to great depths this leaves about 65% of the biomass transported to depth. Uh so there's assumption that about a third of the DOC pool is you know harder to break down and therefore effectively sequestered. So taking this um you can't see my um my gest gestures on the slide but essentially that left arrow doc loss about third of that which is the 5% is sequestered. So it's estimated that we can sequester a total of about 70% of the carbon from cultivated seaweed. There are a huge number of uncertainties in this hypothetical that uh we'll talk about a little. So next slide. So what do we know on the next slide? Great. Thanks. So what do we know? Uh well the reason we were interested in seaweed as a potential strategy to begin with is that it grows very quickly uh faster than than um terrestrial plants. It also has a high carbon to nitrogen ratio. So higher than red field which is advantageous for carbon sequestration uh as seaweeds can store more carbon per unit nitrogen or fix more carbon per unit nitrogen. Um and both stoometric and dynamic models suggest that it's possible to produce climate relevant scales of seaweed carbon. So greater than a gigaton a year in the global ocean. Uh even if we just look at uh exclusive economic zones. So nearshore or nearer to shore areas but certainly it can be cost prohibitive in some locations and it takes a huge area of the ocean. Um so for example uh some dynamic models suggest that um we can harvest greater than a gigaton of seaweed carbon but it takes over a million square kilometers of the most productive regions of the ees o the world's EEZs. So this really presents a scaling challenge. We are nowhere near that and it's challenging to scale up quickly an industry like this. So um so uh the next slide please. All right. So we are building modeling tools to help us to understand where it might make sense to cultivate seaweed for sinking or potentially for growing it for other enduse products that could h help offset greenhouse gas emissions. And some of this work shows that there may be other uses for cultivated seaweed biomass that make more economic sense than sinking it. For example, in replacing liquid biouels for transportation, which is a notoriously hard to to decarbonize uh energy sector. All right, next slide. But these models need uh a lot of improvement. uh we still really need to understand better the permanence of uh this seaweed biomass in different p uh you know this seaweed carbon in different pathways. How long uh does this seaweed carbon store uh seaweed biomass store carbon when sunk to the bottom of the ocean? Uh what is the fate of the seaweed derived EOC compounds? How many of them are recalcitrant? uh how long do they last? Um and then certainly a big an important part of this are the environmental feedbacks. How does uh the um cultivation of seaweed alter upper ocean nutrients? Uh how does it shade phytolanton productivity and what are the feedbacks on the bi the plant the biological pump? Uh and then in the deep ocean certainly how would sinking biomass change benthic ecosystems and biogeeochemical cycling. Um and you know both the permanence and uh the environmental feedbacks as well as the MRV. The last point these really require field trials. Uh we need to be able to really measure uh the the um environmental feedbacks and the breakdown of this material under controlled situations but at a scale that's relevant for answering these questions. And so those field trials and you can flip to the next slide I think uh have come many of them have started since the report came out in 2022. This is an example, some pictures of one that uh we just got back from the field uh less than two weeks ago from the Pharaoh Islands working with ocean rainforest uh growing sugar kelp and really setting up uh some of those inside outside farm measurements really trying to understand uh carbon cycling associated with these uh farms. So, I think many more of these are needed to begin to get at uh some of the questions. And I just the last slide is a couple of um references that I I put there just for later for the committee. >> Thank you. >> Thanks so much, Kristen. Thank you. Um next we will have Peter Raymond um for to discuss blue carbon le. Hey everybody. >> So yeah, we're gonna talk a little bit about ocean alkalinity from blue carbon ecosystems. Um bunch of work we're doing here at Yale. Next slide. So the geocchemistry from this I think is you know known to most in this group but uh blue carbon ecosystems sort of naturally produce bicarbonate through multiple mechanisms. um one of them sulfate reduction. Um but another mechanism is when these um systems have a lot of calcium carbonate in their sediments which is not uncommon uh alkalinity can be uh production can be quite high through the dissolution of this calcium carbonate. So this is the production of ocean alkalinity. Next slide. Um we've done some modeling and empirical work. Moji Fakuri here wrote a paper with Noah that you can look up where he modeled the um the alkalinity production in mangroves that don't have calcium carbonate in their sediments and those that do. You get alkalinity production in both, but you get quite a bit when these mangroves um sit on calcium carbonate. Next slide. You can keep going. Yeah. And so we have a bunch of sites where we're sort of doing empirical measurements. This is some um recent results from the Everglades uh where if you can see that blue down arrow, that's the amount of organic carbon burial in this system from other studies. And we're constraining all the other carbon fluxes and the alkalinity production depending on the estuary that you're looking at. That's that talc um number. depending on the estuary that you're looking at or the season that you're at in there is in this system yeah about equal to organic carbon burial. So these systems can pump out uh quite a bit of alkalinity. This is in mangrove that sits on calcium carbonate. Uh next slide. And so what we're doing here is uh we're trying to uh quantify uh the the carbon and the economics of this and sort of see if this can be a mechanism and work in this as a mechanism for um facilitating mangrove restoration. So see if we can come up with a long-term funding mechanism for mangrove uh restoration. Next slide. Um currently uh we are in conversation with a bunch of restoration partners. So we're actively looking for partners uh for an ideal uh test site. Obviously we're looking for sites that are undergoing restoration where we don't have to where Yale you know does not have to lead the restoration where this is already occurring. We are targeting sites that have this calcium carbonate substrate and that has a partnership that we can work with um you know not only through them leading the restoration but on some of the MRV and if you'll show the next slide um and so the MRV is something that Yale will lead as I said we've been doing this at multiple sites and sort of like working up established meth methods and trying to work up new models mod and um improve old models for sort of near field and far field modeling dynamics and 1D sedimentary models. Um the field modeling we're trying to keep uh to to simple methods that we can work with partners to sort of um you know take the lead in the MRV but also provide some training so that our local restoration partners can can um play a role in in the field monitoring. Next slide. So um we're in phase one. We have seed funding for this from the builders initiative. Um, and we've done uh a hire this summer uh Gabby to help with the development. Um, and so we're right now we're engaging with multiple restoration projects and seeing if we can um find one or two ideal sites. I think importantly we're also developing a partnership with a registry to try to work out commercial protocol development by which these restoration projects could perhaps um earn some revenue. And while we're doing this, we're securing the capital for phase two and three. And and the next phases include developing a field campaign. So working at a couple um pilot sites. Um next slide. and um you know um refining our modeling um continuing to work with the protocol development um and advancing relationships with buyers which would be the final stage where we try to go through what we're calling research through deployment where we partner with a buyer buyer the registry and restoration projects to try to produce uh revenue for for mangrove restoration. last slide I think. So there's a couple names you can email any of us if you have any questions or interest or want to get involved. And uh thanks for the platform and the time here. >> Thank you so much. Um and moving right on um we have Jess Atkins um with South Korea. >> Uh hi everybody. Really appreciate the chance to speak to you. I just want to make sure you can actually hear me while my lips are moving. Is that all okay? >> Yes. >> Okay, great. So, um, yep. I am CEO and co-founder of Calcaria. I'm on leave from this other job I have as a professor at Caltech. And I'd like to tell you a little bit about, uh, what we're up to about trying to decarbonize, uh, decarbonizing shipping by using the accelerated weathering of limestone. And so, here's a ship that has a schematic of one of our reactors on board. Um it is uh uh that reactor is running the reaction that you see down below. It's CO2 from the exhaust gas is being combined with limestone. I'm going to show you some actual reactors in a minute with limestone um packed beds to produce salty water, calcium ions and bicarbonate. If you click I think we get some other bullet points here. If you could just advance. Thank you. So why are we doing this on ships? um they're really uh a beautiful coupling for the for the accelerated weathering of limestone. They are little floating power plants. And so this is carbon capture and storage. This is not CDR. I want to be super clear about this, right? We are trying to mitigate the emissions of a current load to the atmosphere in a hard decarbonized uh sector of the economy. Um and there are two reasons that we can be inexpensive in how we do this. The first is that because we don't make an intermediate carbon product in that CCS value chain, we just immediately convert the CO2 to bicarbonate. We don't purify or concentrate or refrigerate or pressurize a carbon uh product that has to get pumped underground. And the second part is that the ship's forward motion is a giant water pump. And so we get a real advantage there in how much water you need to move to do AWL. So if we click to the next one, we have been working at this uh for uh well over 10 years now. Uh that first bullet down there on the left 2011 the first dissolutionary PhD thesis starts that was Adam Subhachu's PhD thesis uh is being referred to there. Uh I'll show you the uh endline here of some of the reactors that we built. The one thing I want to emphasize is that one of the really great things that came out of Adam's thesis was the discovery of a catalyst for um the dissolution of calcium carbonate. Calcaria is not using that catalyst. That we get confused by that sometimes. I'm sure that's my own messaging problem, but we've abandoned the use of the catalyst for some really good science that got done that was like a solar plexus shot to the engineering. So I'll show you these reactors now. If we click to the next one, we started out in the lab at small scale. This is work that just came out this year from Sichadong at all. So uh early um uh mixed bed uh reactors and and gas absorbers. We click to the next slide. Data from that uh uh reactor is uh shown here as over the course of a few hours. The data are the X's and then the key here is all the lines that I'm going to show you are our model because we've worked out the dissolution kinetics in the lab very well for the last decade. We can build uh first principal models of our system that don't require scale up factors in order to do it. You can see the data model comparison is working out well. This is published now in science advances just a few months ago. Next slide. And so we built larger scale versions of those. On the left is a fluidized bed reactor. On the right is a packed column reactor. We initially in the fluidized bed had the gas, the water and the solid all in a bubbling cauldron there together. We've actually separated the gas absorption step and the solid dissolution steps and that in what's labeled ripple three there. If we click to the next slide, you can see that that's helped us a lot. So here is data in the PCCO2 before and after as a function of time. Ripple one, the fluidized bed reactor on the left there, and ripple 3, the split um gas absorber and solid dissolver. We've gone from 30% of the CO2 absorbed to close to 50% of the CO2 um absorbed. and uh coming to a nice steady state. If we click to the next slide, of course, the key issue though is how much of that CO2 that's gone into the water has actually uh been neutralized by limestone. And so here you can see data from ripple 3 and an alkic plot. If you start in the lower left, that's where the seawater that we fed in came from. This is about 5% CO2 stream. So that in the in the gas absorber increase the DIC in those first stops you see moving to the right with no alkalinity addition. And then the red arrow is a two to one line pointing up to the final effluent coming out where now we've neutralized a lot of that CO2 by reacting it with limestone. And so that here about 2third of the CO2 that went into the water was actually neutralized by the limestone. This gives us about 480 kilowatt hours per ton of CO2 or about $99 per ton when we scale up to the large levels of a of a ship. So next slide. We've been working uh a lot and this is work from uh Will Burlson's graduate student Rucho Wani uh out at Cat working out of Catalina to uh do control and add experiments with uh monitoring the local community off of Catalina just to see the first stages of is there an ecological impact to what we're up to. It's PCCO2 hawk and pick the three plots that you see here and there's no difference between the control and the additions of calccaria effluent. And last slide here. Uh we think that in the future you could build ships that uh purpose-built ships that just react CO2 in limestone to store um that CO2 in the ocean is bicarbonate. And so doing more than just decarbonizing shipping, which is a gigaton a year of CO2, right? It's a fair bit to try to do. This is competing with storing CO2 underground. and it kind of it frees the carbon storage part from the fossil fuel industry and brings it back to a second way that we might be able to store CO2 at scale. Last slide is just my email. I'll be happy to take any questions uh at any point. Thanks very much for the time. >> Thanks so much, Jeff. Um next we have Steve Romaniello um with Vesta. Thanks for joining us >> everyone. Just checking that you can hear me. Okay. Perfect. >> Great. Thanks. Um, so I'm gonna be representing Vesta today. Next slide, please. >> Next slide. Thanks. I just want to tell you a little bit about myself. So I'm a marine biogeeochemist, is geocchemist with uh before joining Vesta full-time, I was a professor at University of Tennessee Knoxville. Um, but I've been with Vesta now about four years. Um, I switched to Vesta full-time during the pandemic. Um and at best I'm responsible for our scientific direction stuff. Next slide please. Um so uh Vesta was actually mentioned in the first uh 2022 report from nationalmies. We're really grateful for that. Um and we were mentioned specifically for our work developing pilot projects. And so what have we been up to since 2022? Well, we've done three different pilot projects. One in Southampton, New York that was a beach project with about 600 tons of olivine. Uh we did a project in Heron River, Massachusetts that was a salt march facing project with about one ton of olivine. And we did a project in North Carolina, our latest project that I'll talk about more in this presentation with about 8,000 tons of olivine. Um that duck project was really significant. That was the first uh federally permitted standalone OE field trial in the US. Um we've been busy doing lots of other things too. So we've conducted uh more than a dozen ecotoxicology experiments since 2022. Um and that's on top of the dozen or so experiments we had done before. Um we've published five papers in the last three years. Um with results for as about 10 more papers that are in prep. Um we've raised and invested more than $20 million into marine OE research and development. Um, we've established a new innovative model. We're working with our partners, Hourglass Climate. Um, they're a nonprofit that provides objective independent monitoring and evaluation of our field pilots. And finally, um, what you guys would normally think of as broader impacts. We've worked with at least 22 different academic organizations, NOS's, federal agencies, and commercial partners. Next slide, please. So, I want to talk to you a little bit about our duck field project. This is our most our latest pilot, our largest pilot to date. This project was deployed in May to June of 2024. Um, there's about 8,300 metric tons of olivine. It was deployed about 500 meters offshore and 7 mters of water as a nearshore burn. Um, we were interested in that burn deployment model because it's very efficient. It was also a result of our permitting process. We spent about three years in permitting working with local partners to identify optimal project design and uh that project helped us avoid potential impacts on things like sea turtles. Um we're collaborating with the Army Corps of Engineers, Hourglass Climate, Coastal Studies Institute on this project. Um and just for scale and so everyone understands sort of what these pilot projects cost. Um, this is about a $12 million effort and about $7 million of that goes into MRV and EMRV. Next slide, please. So, probably the most important part of this, the thing that might be of most interest to many of you is the monitoring plan. So, we've got two years of independent monitoring of this program. One of the things that Vesta was really set up to do was to figure out, hey, can you actually do this? Can you monitor the geochemical effects? Can you monitor the ecological effects of a project like this? A lot of people thought this might be impossible and as Grace alluded to as well, we think we're making a lot of progress here. Um, I can't go through all the details in this table, but the major monitoring categories that we look at include water quality, ecology, sediment transport. Um we're also using things like sidescan sonar to and protective species observers um to look at impacts during placement. Um we monitor all the geocchemistry things that you think of water quality uh pole water geocchemistry things like that. Um and uh we have annual reporting requirements as part of our permits to state and federal agencies. Um, we've got multiple independent monitoring collaborators that help us with all of this. Um, and help to ensure that they bring a degree of rigor um, and independence to the project. And this whole monitoring plan is available publicly. So, please email me if you'd like a copy. Next slide, please. Um, our ecological monitoring plan is based on a Baky design. Um, we use that actually for monitoring geochemical, sedimentological, and ecological parameters. Um, so we've got a control site, we've got a treatment site, we've got measurements before and after treatment. Um, I think in the uh for a sake of time here, I'll go next slide please. So I want to do show you some of the results from this project. Um, these are data that was pres presented a little bit earlier by hourglass. Um, but the main questions we ask is is it safe? Right? Yes, it's safe. Um so our ecology results to date show as we expect a low but detectable nickel concentration. Um there's no evidence of ecological impact. We see full species recovery in terms of abundance and diversity after two months here. And so you can see on this figure on the right but there is a little bit of nickel in these species but this is about 7 ppm something like that. Um which are not expected to be harmful levels. Um we don't see any other evidence of uptake of trace metals. Um and we do see potential evidence of nickel dilution which is sort of the opposite of biomagnification and that's what we expect to see for nickel in marine environments. The main takeaway here is that ecological safety is driven by olivine concentration and our job is to evaluate safety thresholds and engineer deployments so that we maintain these safe levels on a sightby-sight basis, not a one-sizefits all model. Next slide. Um, and here's some of our geochemical results. That's another question we get asked all the time is, is it working? Um, yes, it's working. Um so the olivine's dissolving and our geochemical parameters suggest that carbon remov removal is happening at about the rate that we had predicted in models. U 3 weeks post placement data indicated that we were precipitating primarily removing carbon by precipitating calcium carbonate minerals. Um nine week by nine weeks post placement the data suggested that the primary carbon removal mechanism was probably alkalinity degeneration of release of bicarbonate to the water column. And as Grace showed, um the treatment site sustained a higher pH over about 7 months now. So you can see here in this figure on the right at a control site, we've got respiration derived CO2 in the poor water at about 1,00 to500 ppmV and and our olivine treatment site. Um we basically completely take up all of that respiration drive CO2. And again, same message here. The carbon removal effectiveness will be driven by olivine concentration. That's the real technology here is engineering these deployments on a siteby-sight basis to optimize what we're interested in. So, next slide, please. Um, this is my last slide. So, you know, what's next for Vesta? Um, we're working on getting pilot uh publications out from all these pilot projects from peer-review journals and public reports. Um, in the meantime, I have lots and lots of data. We're happy to share all of our results with the academy or other people. Um, please reach out by email if you're interested in getting copies of that. We're working a lot on partnerships and governance. So, over the next 18 to 24 months, we're going to continue our strategy of research through deployment. Um, we're currently working on uh engaging with coastal construction partners, establishing an independent oversight uh committee to guide and govern our research evidence efforts. So, stay tuned for that. Um, we're also working on finishing up our MRV methodology with our partners at Absolute Climate. Um, and then lastly, just wanted to say, you know, we're delighted to assist the academy however we can be helpful. Um, we're recalling Antonius's comment from the June meeting that um, we're really hopeful that the academy could help to develop standards and expectations to guide safe and responsible scaling from the lab to small-cale field pilots and eventually to initial commercial deployments. With that, thank you very much. >> Thanks so much, Steve. Um, and then we have two more. Um we've got Noah Ponovski um with Crew Carbon and with Yale switching over to wastewater. Welcome Noah. >> Great. Yeah, thanks for the opportunity to uh share with you. Um so I'm a professor at Hale University, but we have a long-term research collaboration with Crew Carbon. Um, so we're going to pivot a little bit here and talk about how we can drive long-term storage of carbon in the oceans by focusing on improvements to wastewater treatment. Next slide. So, it's uh lots of ways you can make a case for having new carbonox removal projects. You can equally make cases that we should be having projects that are improving or ways to pilot new techniques for um new techniques for improving how wastewater treatment plants work. One of the easiest ways to frame that is that the amount of money that folks paying for wastewater has dramatically increased um relative to basically all other sectors in the US. Um so that's what's shown as a main figure here. We can show that as kind of the US price index. Um even relative to food prices which is something we obviously think about as increasing price relative uh increasing prices that are putting a strain on average folks. wastewater prices, your sewer taxes, your wastewater treatment taxes are something that is rapidly increasing um in rapidly increasing in the US. So our basic idea is how can we try to drive wastewater treatment costs down? How can we improve wastewater treatment plant processing while also driving the co- benefit of long-term storage of carbon in the oceans? Next slide. So wastewater treating plants as as folks are are basically available is to deal with the problem of the roughly billion tons of bioolids that we produced in cities that we need to export from cities while minimizing the amount of pollution and environmental degradation that that causes as much as possible. Um so in the US this is done mostly through utilizing roughly $2 trillion of infrastructure to move bioolids into series of wastewater treatment plants um in wastewater treatment plants to try to drive down the pollution as much as possible. We're really just trying to oxidize the organic matter as as quickly as possible. that produces huge amounts of CO2 which in natural systems will move back to the atmosphere but that also acidifies the waste waters which can actually inhibit this process of biological um biological treatment of our of our bioolids that we're moving through. Um can move to the next slide. So we've been trying is trying what we've been doing is trying to think about ways in which we can both minimize that acidification that's occurring in waste water that can inhibit some of the the biochemical processes that need to occur in wastewater treatment plants and also capture some of the CO2 that is happening the some of the CO2 that is leaving that system naturally. So what we've been doing is adding alkaline minerals. Um foremost right now we are focusing on adding finely mil limestone to wastewater treatment plants. um in a way that by having a closed system allows us to both directly monitor the amount of carbon dioxide removal that is occurring and that allows us by having in many cases real-time monitoring of the system allows us to optimize the wastewater treatment plant to ensure that we have uh optimize the wastewater treatment plant to for instance focus on how we can reduce nitrogen pollution from these plants as much as possible. we can increase the amount of we can increase the amount of bioolids that are actually removed instead of moving into coastal oceans. Okay, next slide. Um, one of the things that makes this a particularly appealing process, one of the things that we're particularly excited about is that in many cases, this is an example of our dosing system from the New Haven wastewater treatment plant is we're tying into it's very easy to tie into the infrastructure to have this occurring. There's no new permitting that's required from this. Alkalinity is already your acidbased balance is something you're already managing on wastewater treatment plants. And in many cases, it's very easy to move the infrastructure that is needed for these things into wastewater treatment plants. Next slide. Um, so to jump to some actual data here to to kind of close this off, this is an example of some of the data we've been collecting from a plant in Fryberg in Germany. Um, Fryberg is an interesting case as you have multiple different trains where waste water comes in homogenized and it moves through several separate channelized systems. So what we're comparing here in the blue line is one of these trains that does not have alkal our alkalinity management system to our upper line here which is where we've been dosing that system with calcium fine grain calcium carbonate. And what you can see from this obviously is there is a marked increase in the alkalinity that we're adding to that system that we can consistently measure. And importantly, instead of having something that is very variable, which leads to huge problems for the actual wastewater treatment plant, we have a constant elevated alkalinity label. Then shown in green here is just in one of these trains, we're actually seeing the amount of carbon dioxide removal that is occurring through this process of of uh carbonate weathering in wastewater treatment plants. Next slide. Yeah, and I we'll leave it there. Um, this is something we're really excited about, but I think as we're thinking about marine carbon dioxide removal, this one of the main messages from that that it would have is it behooves us to also think about how we can be doing things that ties into existing infrastructure and doing things in the early stages of marine carbon diox. Thanks. >> Thanks so much, Noah. Um, our last one for today is um, Morgan Raven um, to talk about biomass syncing. Thanks for joining us, Morgan. >> Thank you. Can you hear me? >> Yes. >> Sound okay. Okay. Um, well, first of all, thank you so much for the chance to be here again. I'm Morgan Raven. I'm at UC Santa Barbara. I also want to make sure that I'm clear. I'm also wear second hat as the chief science officer for Carboniferous, which is a startup that's working on R&D on related topics. And I want to make sure I update the committee about both aspects. So I'll try to be clear about which are which here. U next slide. So I want to talk to you about um biomass sinking or what we've started calling marine anoxic carbon storage. And essentially this CO2 removal approach takes advantage of plants which are incredibly efficient land-based of course CO2 concentrating mechanisms um that we use to concentrate that CO2. The idea is to transport that material and store it in a long lived marine reservoir um comparable to natural feedbacks in the earth's system um over the cenazoic. And so to identify a marine reservoir like this um we're thinking about something with a density interface that's going to inhibit mixing with the broader ocean making this significantly different from a lot of techniques we've heard about today. And that density interface is also going to enable the generation of anoxia beneath it which can lead to the efficient preservation of biomass under those conditions. And just a quick note on semantics. I recognize as Jess mentioned for his technique that this is not an marine CDR technology although it exists in the ocean and it interacts with all the same processes we're talking about here. This is a hybrid land ocean approach. Um but I'm really grateful for its inclusion with the academy. Next please. So the reason we want to talk about this first and foremost I'm going to give you four big reasons but the number one is that photosynthesis is incredibly efficient and therefore this is a technology that can scale fast and do so with really high carbon efficiency. So this is a recent compilation um from this year comparing the carbon efficiency and energy use per ton of a lot of techniques we've seen here including some that were talked about as scaling quickly like beex and DAC um marine biomass sinking is among the highest carbon efficiencies and the lowest energy uses per ton and although there's wiggle room around that blue star LCA's can readily achieve better than 90% efficiency. Next slide. Uh benefit number two is that we're relying on existing agricultural biomass and infrastructure that has been optimized for by humans for hundreds of years. This material already exists and that means there's also opportunities for co- benefits. In the United States, we've mostly been thinking about sugarcane beos which is available in megaton quantities as a waste product all around the Gulf, especially in Louisiana and Florida. This is a nuisance product. It releases methane. It takes active tending and its removal is a co- benefit for these communities. Next, please. Two other quick benefits. Isolated anoxic basins have edges. This gives us a lot of things to work with. Uh, it facilitates monitoring because you have a fixed volume to work with. Permitting can occur within a defined jurisdiction and it also limits the potential broader impacts into that global commons of the surrounding environments. Because it's isolated, we also get characteristics like anoxia that limit biological processes. um eliminating complex ecological communities on the seafloor involving animals and macroona and our bread and butter scientifically enhancing the overall preservation of that organic matter over time. And so we're talking in this case in the US again about Orca Basin located about a day steam south of New Orleans. This is about a 200 meter thick anoxic brine pool on the seafloor that underlays about two and a half kilometers of normal seawater above. Next, please. So I just want to tell you a little bit about the project we've been doing for the last couple years doing some initial field experiments. This was the ocean carbon retention under an oxia project. Um and it involved a series of cruises to the site four of them where we deployed and recovered benthic landers with var various biomass materials and did a bunch of parallel lab incubations at UCSB and with some other academic partners. This is what those landers look like. There is a lot of science on here but I just want to highlight a couple of things. Um the first is just a gut check. The photo on the left is a picture of macrocystus that was freeze- dried, sterilized, put in the basin, left for 200 days, and recovered. And if you did this in an anoxic site like Santa Barbara basin, it would be half gone and the rest would be goo. In this case, we're looking at material that is pristine turgid green and almost the same as when it was originally deployed. Next, please. We can get more detail about the mechanisms that are underlying this exceptional preservation in brines in lab experiments. There's a lot to talk about. I would also love to share any of this data that people are interested in. But essentially what happens when we put sugar cane in anoxic seawater is that about 1% of it dissolves makes DOM and that depending on whether we're in brine or regular seawater, we may or may not see breakdown. So we were able to observe slow breakdown of sugarcane bags in anoxic normal seawater. A sequence of uh microbial metabolisms you would expect. But even using radio labels in lab we were not able to detect any breakdown through metabolic processes through 200 days in the brine conditions. And so this is telling us this is potentially a hot spot for preservation worth studying further. Next please. So I just want to give you two forward-looking updates. Number one, um, as I said, I'm also the cso with Carboniferous and so growing on a lot of these initial data, uh, Carboniferous has spent a couple years applying for an EPA MPsa research permit that would allow the placement of 20 experimental bales about one ton in size over about 18 months loaded with all the science. This would be to basically verify what we see in lab meas to develop and validate the MRV tools that are needed for these environments. Um we are currently waiting for the EPA's um word following the closure of the public comment period mid July. Next please. But on a global scale I mean this is where this particular pathway has the potential to make a really large impact. And so we've been trying to build a much larger global community around this. In February, we co-hosted a workshop in Bucharest that brought together more than 30 researchers from 15 countries to discuss potential risk pathways and concerns to evaluate sites and to develop criteria that we could use to evaluate potential scale. Um, and there is an impre manuscript from that for submittal to biogeeocciences in the coming weeks. Next, please. Um so just to conclude uh marine anoxic carbon storage or terrestrial biomass thinking has pretty tantalizing potential to contribute especially to near-term rapidly scaled CO2 removal needs in the US and globally. There are really important key unknowns out there that we need a focused research program and essentially field trials um to move forward on. Um and I'm grateful for its inclusion um in the consideration for this report. Thanks >> everyone. Yeah, I don't see any hands raised. I will give um one quick opportunity to our our panelists if you have any questions for us. I see one in the chat. Yes, all the slides will be posted and the recordings will also be posted.