Interview: Climos founder Dan Whaley on carbon sequestration and climate change

By now we all know that global warming is happening, big time -- it seems that every day scientists are telling us it's happening faster than before. Enter carbon abatement methodology, or, in plain English, a way to use environmental science to reduce the amount of carbon floating around. Our friends over at the Cleantech Blog in the US recently did a lengthy interview with Dan Whaley, the founder of a company called Climos, whose aim is to use sea power to fight climate change.

The basic idea is to sink massive amounts of carbon into the ocean, using iron fertilisation to absorb it. It's an approach that's been talked about and researched for years, and, as our chums on Cleantech remind us, it's got a way to go. But Climos is making progress and sees huge potential in the scale of carbon sequestration (apparently it's billions of tonnes) and in the low cost (possibly only three or four pounds per tonne of carbon). 

Here are a few interesting snippets from the interview.

Cleantech Blog: Dan, you are one of the new class of technology entrepreneurs who is moving into cleantech. Can you share some of your background, and why you chose carbon?
Dan Whaley: In 1995 I founded the first company to commercialise travel reservations over the net, GetThere.com. We went public in 1999 and sold to Sabre in 2000. If you've booked a ticket on United Airlines' website, you've used an example of the infrastructure we built.

A few years ago, I drove from here down to Buenos Aires. Somewhere along the way, I think I woke up and really fully realised that there were some extraordinary challenges out there facing us that were much more pressing than most people had been giving them credit for. Challenges that were much more important than whether people could book their travel online, for instance. GetThere was a powerful lesson to me that I could set my mind to something and achieve it, but it was also a little numbing at times too -- sometimes I wondered just exactly what I was really contributing to the world.

CB: Tell me a bit more about the concept of ocean fertilization and how it could abate C02? Why iron?
DW: Ocean Iron Fertilization (OIF) was first proposed nearly 20 years ago by an oceanographer here in California named John Martin; at the time he was the Director of Moss Landing Marine Labs. He was the first to discover that iron was the trace nutrient limiting photosynthesis, and hence primary production, in most of the world's oceans.

Photosynthesis uses freely available sunlight to convert CO2 to organic material, which higher level organisms consume directly or which sinks into deep waters of the ocean to be sequestered for up to 1,000 years. Clearly we need to lower our emissions dramatically, and immediately; but if atmospheric CO2 that we have already put into the atmosphere is ever to decline, it will be photosynthesis that eventually does the work.

Over the last billion years, phytoplankton (the micro algae that grows ubiquitously in the ocean) have helped to concentrate over 80 per cent of all mobile carbon on the planet into the deep ocean. This process is referred to as the biological pump, where after plankton bloom, mature and die, they sink to the deep ocean, carrying carbon along with them. The deep ocean re-circulates over very long time periods. The lag between downward flux and eventual recirculation creates an extremely effective trap. This process is probably easily 20-30 times more effective at storing carbon than plant growth on land, which returns most carbon back to the atmosphere on short time scales (10-100 years).

CB: Who else is doing this and what exactly do you do differently as far as ocean fertilization goes?
DW: Up until now, it has been purely been a research effort, with cruises funded by public agencies such as the National Science Foundation. There are now a few companies proposing to do this, though the primary competitor, Planktos, appears to be winding down operations due to problems fundraising.

What is different about what is happening now is that the demonstrations of OIF will be larger, focused on different questions and also funded in part by the private sector. The carbon market is the mechanism that the world has chosen to fund emissions reductions and carbon mitigation, and so if OIF can be an effective way to safely remove CO2 from the atmosphere, it will probably be financed via the carbon market.

CB: Can you go into some more detail on the questions of permanence, always a major concern in new carbon reduction methodologies?
DW: The IPCC defines permanence as at least 100 years, so we will likely use this definition -- but ultimately the carbon market will decide what that number is, not us. Keep in mind that significant amounts of carbon are stored for timeframes which are shorter as well, i.e. 75 years, 50 years, etc. This time shifting of carbon is meaningful and helpful as well, but we won't claim credit for this. Also, the minimum (i.e. 100 years) is just that, the minimum. Much of the carbon will be stored for much longer -- hundreds to even thousands of years.

CB: Aren't you worried about the impact on the environment on 'adjusting' ocean nutrients? I know that has been a concern of some environmental groups.
DW: I think there are a number of distinct concerns rolled up in your statement. One is the fear that OIF is 'messing with mother nature.' Many people feel that humans simply can't get anything right, and that we if we try to fix what we've already broken, we're likely to make it worse. This is an unscientific attitude, and one that I think also fails to appreciate some of the unique aspects of this concept.

CB: So this process is kind of like planting trees, except in the ocean?
DW: Yes, except it happens faster and the storage is more permanent. Forests store carbon in the form of standing biomass -- in other words, you get storage for as long as the forest is managed and preserved. If it burns down, or gets harvested, a large part of that carbon is returned to the atmosphere. Also, if the tree dies and is not replaced, nearly all of that carbon is returned on short time scales (less than 100 years). This is not to say that we shouldn't be planting trees. We should, and we are -- the UN just finished planting a billion trees the week before the recent Bali conference. We need to be doing a lot more of that.

CB: Two of the most attractive aspects of ocean fertilisation are low cost and large scale. Can you give us some insight into where ocean fertilisation fits on the spectrum of cost and potential abatement levels?
DW: We think credits from OIF can be delivered for about five to seven US dollars per tonne long term. No one knows what the annual global capacity might be. Certainly three billion tons a year (of CO2) are already being done naturally. It is possible that another billion tonness annually might be able to be added to this number, but that is pure speculation. Some people have quoted numbers that are much higher than this, but I think that's probably not a constructive exercise right now.

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