Climate change is ravaging the oceans. Some startups see a solution in marine carbon capture
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With the flip of a switch at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory’s seaside facility in Sequim, Washington, a tangle of pipes and filters whirrs into action, scrubbing acid from the cool gray waters of the Salish Sea.
It’s the pilot project of Ebb Carbon, one of several companies building a business on ocean carbon removal technology. As money pours into companies promising to take greenhouse gasses out of the atmosphere, there’s a small but fast-growing sector of startups that want to leverage one of the world’s biggest carbon sinks to clean up humanity’s pollution: the ocean.
“The ocean basically provides this huge surface for gas exchange for free,” says Ebb co-founder Matthew Eisaman. “We were trying to think of the lowest-cost way to do this, and you sort of naturally come to rely on Earth systems that are already happening anyway.”
The shore of the Sequim Bay in front of the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory’s marine research campus, the site of a former cannery. (Chris Bentley/Here & Now)
The system Eisaman is referring to is the . Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere naturally seeps in and out of the ocean’s
