How did the next big thing in decarbonization sink without a trace?

For all the woodchip deposits in Icelandic oceans, it would have been impossible for Running Tide to monitor the woodchips for more than three hours after they were released, Odlin emphasizes: “We couldn’t measure the signal from the noise in the ocean about alkalinity.”

Dead zone

Despite selling credits to Stripe, Shopify, Microsoft, and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, financial pressures on Running Tide continued to mount as the flow of money from Silicon Valley dried up. According to one former employee, Odlin would begin meetings in the spring of 2024 by announcing that the company only had a few more weeks of cash before it would have to shut down. In June of that year, Audlin conceded defeat.

In a LinkedIn post dated June 14, 2024, Odlin wrote that “the demand to support large-scale decarbonization simply does not exist.” The company ceased its global operations that month. Suddenly, almost all employees in Iceland and the United States were laid off. An employee was giving a presentation about Running Tide at an algae conference when he was told the news.

“People were happy with our credits,” Odlin says. “We were filling our contracts. We were selling additional contracts. It wasn’t enough.” Running Tide sold $30 million in credits and said it had commitments for tens of millions more, but according to Odlin’s estimates, the company needed between $100 million and $150 million in sales. “This was, like, the rental we were designed for.”

The legacy the company left behind after eliminating wood chips is unclear. It is simply not known what effect sinking biomass will have on the ocean, and scientists and deep-sea experts speaking to WIRED remain hesitant about pursuing such marine geoengineering until more about the deep sea is understood.

Dumping biomass into the ocean can create “dead zones,” areas where aquatic life suffers from a lack of oxygen, says Samantha Joy, a regents professor in the Department of Marine Sciences at the University of Georgia, who has worked on dead zones in the Mississippi Delta, as well as on the cleanup of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

Joey adds that deep-sea environments — some of which provide life-saving medicines or insights into how the early Earth formed — could be damaged forever. Modern Carbon flow report By Convex Seascape Survey, an international research collaboration, it was found that once… The seabed is brokenThis can actually stop the ability of sediments to absorb carbon. Joy also points out that without proper research, boosting ocean alkalinity could also cause a sharp rise in ocean acidity if too much carbon is drawn into the sea and not then distributed in its deeper waters, which is the opposite of what the treated wood chips were trying to achieve.