Please note that the transcript provided below is AI-generated and intended for reference. It may contain missing words, misspellings, or other small errors. To request a correction or clarification, please contact info@theclimatecenter.org.
Baani Behniwal, The Climate Center (00:03:01):
All right. Thank you everyone so much for joining us today. I hope everyone had a good lunch. Right now we’re going to talk about marine carbon dioxide removal. I know some of you were in the previous session in which we talked about carbon dioxide removal in general and round tables. We’re going to delve a little bit deeper into what marine carbon removal is exactly. And we have an excellent panel here with us today as well as a moderator. So I’m going to go ahead and welcome Kevin. Thank you.
Kevin Travis, California Ocean Science Trust (00:03:36):
Alrighty. Thank you, Baani. Yeah, good afternoon everyone. As mentioned, my name is Kevin Travis. I’m with California Ocean Science Trust. I think we’ll get past here. I want to just first thank the Climate Center for organizing today’s session. I think it’s really important and great that we’re elevating the Ocean Climate Nexus here at the California Climate Policy Summit. At California Ocean Science Trust, this is much of what we do. We bring ocean science to decision making. So the state can both anticipate coastal and ocean challenges, but also make pragmatic decisions about the management of those resources. Very briefly, if you’re new to California Ocean Science Trust, we play two key roles for the California. We help build capacity and resources for ocean science, and we also help or also serve as science advisors to the state. And so it’s through these efforts that we kind of help bring our mission to life of strengthening the bridge between scientific research and sound ocean management.
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There has already been some great discussions today, earlier this morning in particular in this room actually around science-based climate solutions. So I’m really excited to turn it to our panel here in a moment that will talk about ocean-based climate solutions. I want to share and start this kind of discussion with two numbers for you all that really provide the essential context for why we’re here discussing this ocean climate context. And they’re really going to echo the remarks that we heard this morning from Ellie. And that is 30% and 90%. So 30%, that’s the amount of carbon dioxide humans have emitted that’s been absorbed by our oceans. And 90% is the percentage of excess heat that’s been trapped by greenhouse gases that the ocean has absorbed. And so the ocean really is a global climate regulator. And without this role the ocean plays for our planet in regulating its climate, we’d be witnessing a very different climate reality than today.
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But at the same time, this role that it plays also results in massive impacts to both ocean health and ocean livelihoods. As the ocean naturally absorbs CO2, it decreases its pH, increasing its acidity. And this ocean acidification can lead to impacts to marine organisms and direct impacts that we’re already witnessing with different shellfish hatcheries up and down the west coast. We’re also seeing warming temperatures, water temperatures at an accelerated rate globally. And even in the news just recently, some of you may have seen the sea surface temperatures off the California coastline have an above average trend, which may indicate another marine heat wave. And this is admits as the state is still recovering from the 2014 marine heat wave. And so this role that the ocean plays in the global climate system, but in particular the global carbon cycle is why many governments, institutions, scientists are looking at the ocean, in particular ocean-based climate dioxide removal as a potential scaling CDR pathway.
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So the international panel on climate change or the IPCC has been clear. Carbon dioxide removal is now a necessary tool for reaching net zero, but only alongside rapid and deep emissions reductions. And California is really leading the way here. Our state targets have indicated that up to 15% will be required of CDR in order to reach our 2045 net zero goal. And because of this CDR target and our climate policies, the state and the state agencies have begun to develop regulatory frameworks to evaluate and support CDR projects. We know that it will require a portfolio of CDR pathways in order to have a climate relevant impact. So very briefly, what is MCDR? You’ll hear a lot more about this from our panelists, but MCDR encompasses a range of nature-based solutions and technological approaches that pull CO2 outside out of the atmosphere and into the ocean through natural processes.
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And they do this by transforming the CO2 into more stable forms within the ocean. And this is an overall outcome of all CDR pathways, right? It’s just by the process at which you get there. We’re talking now about different ocean-based ways. I just want to briefly mention, I don’t want to take up too much time. Last fall, Ocean Science Trust held the first ever statewide forum on abiotic MCDR. You’ll learn more about what abiotic means, but we were able to bring together four different state agencies to talk with MCDR researchers and scientists to better understand what the gaps may be and what different science advancements and opportunities may happen in California. And so in today’s session, we’re going to explore this. What does it look like in California? You’ll hear about different pathways. You’ll talk about ongoing research in California’s coastal waters and community engagement, clear policy frameworks.
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We’ll get into a lot of different topics. And I think it’s just important here that as we explore ocean-based climate solutions, we’re still thinking about how do we protect our oceans and our coast at the same time. So with that, we can meet our experts and dive in. I’m going to introduce our first speaker, David Kowick. David’s going to provide an overview for you all on marine carbon dioxide removal. David is the chief scientist at Ocean Visions, where he is responsible for ensuring scientific accuracy and integrity around research, policy, and climate solutions that are developing at this intersection of ocean conservation and climate change. He’s a leading authority on the potential of ocean climate solutions, especially marine carbon dioxide removal. So I will turn it over to you.
David Kowick, Ocean Visions (00:10:01):
I’m Dave. I’m here to tell you a little bit about what exactly is marine carbon dioxide removal, why it’s important, what are some of the pathways where we’re seeing technological development, especially those with relevance to California, what’s happening in this ecosystem of innovation within a special focus on California? And I’m going to close by suggesting that this is a real moment for leadership within California. So let’s get started.
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Carbon dioxide removal is an imperative because we have been so slow to decarbonize our society. We have put so much greenhouse gas emissions into our atmosphere that emissions reduction alone is no longer sufficient to reach any of our climate targets. So we have to complement emissions reduction with carbon dioxide removal. And the amount of carbon dioxide removal that we need is staggering. The best assessment is from something called the state of carbon dioxide removal, and it has assessed that we need between seven and nine billion tons per year by the mid-century and increasing thereafter. This is in addition to zeroing out our current emissions. So it’s a massive global undertaking.
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Given this global undertaking, it’s important to ask, well, how are we doing against it? And the answer is that we are just getting started. So there’s currently about two billion tons of carbon dioxide removal that’s happening naturally. This is largely through additional growths of forests and grasses associated with a changing climate and a changing planet. But when you look at the amount of carbon dioxide removal that’s happening through these durable novel pathways, it’s very small. It’s less than 1% of what’s happening. And this is the portion of the pie that has to grow up to seven to nine billion tons per year by mid-century and thereafter. So we have this enormous staggering growth curve. We know we need these technologies. We need CDR broadly, carbon dioxide removal broadly. And so the question becomes not if, but how and from where. And if you want to think about getting to very large quantities of carbon dioxide removal, you have to think about what are the biggest parts of the global carbon cycle because carbon dioxide removal is fundamentally about rebalancing an unbalanced global carbon cycle.
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And by far and away, the biggest part of the global carbon cycle are the oceans. They’re like the elephant, lion, tiger, and giraffe in the room when you’re talking about global carbon. The oceans in their dissolve form hold about 50 times more carbon dioxide than does the air. And so when we’re talking about marine carbon dioxide removal, we’re talking about a whole suite of proposed technologies that can augment the ocean carbon storage by relatively small amounts and have very large and outsized effects on atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations, which of course are the dominant long-term greenhouse gas. So what I’m going to talk with you about today are a number of pathways that accelerate chemical and/or biological uptake of carbon dioxide in the oceans and seek to store it in durable, safe manners. I want to start by talking about a few that are showing exceptional promise, research and development and opportunities and innovation in California.
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You’re going to hear more from that from Guav and Cheyenne later. And then also some others that I think are important to know about, but that are unlikely to scale in California for reasons I’ll talk about. Okay. So the first one that I’d like you to understand is something called ocean alkalinity enhancement. That sounds like a super technical phrase, but you can really think about it this way. Carbon dioxide in the ocean is an acid like Kevin talked about, and when you have an acid, what do you do? You neutralize it with an antacid, with a Tums, so to speak. And so if you added Tums to the water, which are found in the form of alkaline minerals around the world, you can neutralize the acidity and that allows the oceans to store more carbon dioxide safely in inert forms that are incapable of escaping back to the atmosphere.
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I don’t want to go into great detail, but basically you can get this alkalinity by mining, grinding, and distributing alkaline rocks, or you can produce it through electrochemical pathways. The next set of technologies that’s highly related, that’s showing exceptional growth and innovation in California are called electrochemical carbon dioxide removal pathways. We are not going to go into a PhD in chemistry to talk about these right now, but suffice to say this is doing something really simple. This is taking electricity and seawater and turning it into various combinations of acid and base to capture and safely sequester carbon dioxide. The third pathway where we’re seeing some research development and innovation in California is around scaling seaweed cultivation for a multitude of uses, some of which involve emissions reduction, some of which involve unintentional or incidental and intentional carbon sequestration, but this basically involves growing seaweed at scales that we have not yet grown seaweed.
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So if you’re familiar with ocean rainforest efforts off the Santa Barbara coast, that’s one example, but you can think about this at even larger and larger scales.
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There’s one other pathway that I want to share with you that I think is important to know about, but is unlikely to be relevant in California’s coastal waters. And this is broadly called ocean nutrient fertilization, microalgae cultivation, or perhaps you’ve heard the phrase ocean iron fertilization. This is a whole suite of pathways that are designed to enhance plankton growth by adding unnecessary nutrients to stimulate those plankton. Many of the plankton around the global ocean exists in places where they’re nutrient limited. That means that if you add nutrients, you get more growth. And so there have been ideas to add nutrients to stimulate phytoplankton blooms so that the plankton capture the carbon in their biomass, sink to the bottom of the ocean and sequester that carbon dioxide in their biomass for long periods of time. Okay. This is unlikely to be relevant for California because California’s coastal waters are not nutrient limited, but it’s important to know about, you might come across this phrase as you’re exploring marine carbon dioxide removal.
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Over the last five or six years, there’s been enormous growth in the ecosystem. And here I’m using ecosystem in the social sense of organizations and individuals contributing to the research development and enabling policy and regulatory and social license frameworks that are needed to help these technologies realize their full potential. My organization, Ocean Visions, maintains a completely open database. You can see the QR code here where we catalog the activities of all of these organizations. And at our last count when I was putting this presentation together, there are over 200 organizations globally, including many in California that are working to advance the responsible research, development, demonstration, and enabling policy and regulatory frameworks around marine carbon dioxide removal. There’s also been an explosion and interest in moving beyond the lab-based research and development into the demonstration phases where carefully controlled, well-designed research field trials are moving into real-world systems so that we can better understand how these systems function under real-world conditions.
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That’s important for being able to make evidence-based assessments of efficacy and impact.
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We also maintain a database where we track global progress on this. There are about 50 field trials that are either concluded or in operation around the world. Six of those are in California, and that might even be an underestimate. There might be a few more that we haven’t added there. So a really substantial amount of the innovation that’s happening in the marine carbon dioxide removal space is happening right here in California, which brings me to my last point. There’s a real opportunity for California to step forward and take a position of leadership in advancing the responsible research, development, demonstration, and all the enabling policy, regulation, and social license needed for these technologies to reach their full potential. Up until in the Biden administration, there was a lot of leadership at the federal level, a lot of sponsorship through the National Science Foundation, NOAA, and some other Department of Energy, other federal agencies around research and development.
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That’s completely collapsed, as I think we’re all well aware. And so there’s an opportunity here. AB1086 was introduced in the last legislature. There’s an opportunity to do that again here. That establishes marine carbon dioxide removal research and development leadership in California. And there’s just also a number of other opportunities for California to step forward and assume the mantle, just like what we’re hearing throughout the rest of this summit. So I’ll leave you with that. And if you have any other questions, please get in touch. And I look forward to the rest of the panel discussion. Thanks.
Kevin Travis, California Ocean Science Trust (00:19:47):
Alrighty. Thank you, David. We’re now going to turn to Garavsant.
Kevin Travis, California Ocean Science Trust (00:20:12):
Up next is Garav Sant. He’s a professor and the Pritzker Endowed Chair in Sustainability at the Samuel School of Engineering at UCLA. He’s also the director of UCLA’s Institute for Carbon Management, a cross-campus technology translation institute that accelerates science-based technologies for real-world impact. And related to today, he has co-founded several climate tech ventures, including Aquatic Inc, which uses a scalable process to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere while also generating green hydrogen. I’ll turn it over to you.
Garav Sant, UCLA’s Institute for Carbon Management (00:20:46):
Thanks very much. Hi, everyone. I happen to be the one guy with PDF slides, so don’t mind me scrolling through them. First of all, thanks very much for being here. So I’m going to start by telling you a little bit about the thesis around aquatic, right? So aquatic was built to do two things. It was built to power the green economy, but really by coupling carbon outside removal, along with the production of green hydrogen at the lowest cost. The thesis around this was quite simple. We came to the conclusion that simply carbon management for the sake of carbon management was going to be too expensive, and we thought it was simultaneously important to displace fossil fuels from the energy mix, whatever we could. As we put that thesis together, we came upon a pathway that we’ve now scaled quite substantially over the years that involves doing both of these things because they in effect acto synergize each other.
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Now, I want to start with telling you a little bit about aquatic. So of course, speaking about innovation and given the fact that this did start at a university lab, I want to start with telling you that where we were in 2021 is this little bicompartment cell that you see right there. So just to give you an indication of scale, it’s about four inches high. From that bicompartment cell, which is four inches high, which is actually when David and I first got to know each other, maybe even a little bit before that, we built these two pilot systems in 2023. So in about 24 months, we went to a system that’s about a million times larger. We’re trying to ask the question, can this really be done? So does this only sit on a laboratory bench or can you actually scale it? We built a pilot system.
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In fact, where Terry’s our landlord at Olta Seas, we had one in Los Angeles and we built another one in Singapore, right? So why not Singapore? What we were really trying to do here is to really prove the thesis that this could be done. And the reason I say that is we often spend time sort of thinking about fancy full innovation, but it’s very hard to pull it off from a laboratory bench into the real world. Now, because it’s important that everybody has to know a little bit of chemistry, and you can all blame David for it. He started this antacid business, right? So the thesis around aquatic is really simple, and I’m not going to go into a detailed chemistry lesson here, but if you just sort of follow the narrative, I think it’ll hopefully make sense. The concept is really simple. You take sea water, which contains calcium, magnesium, sodium chloride, and dissolved inorganic carbon.
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You bring it into what’s known as an electrolyzer. For lack of a better word, you pass an electrical cut in through seawater and use electricity to trigger a series of chemical reactions. What is important about what you’re about here is that you use electricity to produce acid, base, hydrogen and oxygen. And everything that you do simply comes from seawater. There’s nothing else added to it. The objective here is to produce the alkalinity that you need in the form of solid minerals in the form of what’s known as magnesium hydroxide and sodium hydroxide that allow you to do direct atmospheric removal of carbon dioxide in a very, very simple way. Now what’s important about this process and the reason that we went towards this idea of using electrolysis is it’s a platform that we’ve known and we’ve industrially scaled for about a hundred years. And so we wanted to try and ask the question, what can we do with what we have?
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So that’s an important first learning. The second thing that we wanted to do is, I train to be an engineer, I’m not a scientist, and my thesis around carbon management in general is actually quite simple. If you want to scale a process, you need really simple chemistry because then engineering can help. If you’ve got complex chemistry, processes are generally much harder to scale. While not going to talk about this in a whole lot of detail, what I want you to really know is maybe two things, right? So I want you to walk away with one bit of information, which means per kilogram of seawater we put through these electrolyzers, we can remove about five grams of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. So that’s an important thing, right? So the second thing that I want you to know is that the manner in which this process works in the form of stabilizing carbon dioxide in the form of what’s known as bicarbonate anions and calcium carbonate is exactly the process that the world’s oceans use to stabilize CO2 at scale.
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All that we’re doing is by the provision of electricity, we are accelerating this process by a factor of about a hundred thousand times. And given the fact that time is of the essence, you want to be able to do this as quickly as you can. The second thing that I want to point out, which is important as well, is that you make about 30 kilograms of hydrogen per ton of carbon dioxide that you remove. And so what this does is taken together, you end up doing a couple of things. First, you use the oceans as you sink, you use the oceans as the source of all of the materials that you need. You use electricity to trigger the reactions that you need. And because you’re following a pathway that’s really, really well known in nature, you end up stabilizing carbon dioxide at very large scale from the atmosphere at a durability that’s well in excess of 10,000 years.
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And so the fact that you get this really long-term stability is very important, and you can do this without sort of the classical limitations that we might face of needing pipelines, of needing compression stations, of needing geological reservoirs, and you use the ocean as your reservoir itself. So I told you a little bit about these pilots, right? So we did these pilots, they seem to work not as well as we wanted, but the objective was not perfection. The objective was to show what can be done. We went from those two pilots, the one in LA and the one in Singapore, to a much larger system that we’re building in Singapore now, right? So if you were to take a trip to the tropics, well, actually to the equator in two months, we’ll hit mechanical completion on this plant, which is trivially small by planet-free standards.
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It’ll do about 4,000 tons a year by the time it’s commissioned, but it’s basically the largest ocean-based CDR facility we’ve built as humanity, right? So the first phase of this plant will go online. We expect to operate this plant for a couple of years, but what we’ve done in the meantime is we’ve actually kicked off the engineering on a much larger facility. So this facility, which is much larger, that is an artist rendering. I would actually show you a beautiful beach otherwise because there’s nothing on that piece of land for right now. That facility will do about 110,000 tons of removal per year. And what I want to point out here is two things, right? The basic engineering that has gone into these systems started right here in California. So we often think of ourselves as sort of an innovation engine, but the reason that we chose to go and do this elsewhere is because we were looking for where we could get to scale the fastest, right?
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And getting the scale is obviously an important thing for us to do. I want to close very quickly by just talking about one little piece that I think Cheyenne may touch upon in some ways. So when you’re trying to say you’re trying to do carbon dioxide removal, you’re essentially trying to sell someone in negative, right? And if I said to you, “Can you measure that for me? ” This is obviously an esteemed audience. I think the vast majority of you will struggle. And I think this is an important thing because if I said to you, it’s a gallon of gasoline, either based upon how far a car will go or based upon the amount of heat that you develop by burning it, you can actually tell it’s a gallon of gasoline and you could tell me whether it’s a 98 octane versus 110 octane versus a 92 octane.
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So one of the things we’ve been really focused on as we’ve been building aquatic is to think about this thesis of what’s known as MRV in the business, measurement, reporting and verification, where we can exactly measure the energy and the material flows of what goes into this process to be able to do two things. Number one, to build confidence so that you actually know when I say I’m removing a unit of carbon dioxide, you actually know it’s a unit being removed, but more importantly, to do it in a simple enough way that it’s replicable at scale, right? So replicability really matters. This matters at two levels, right? So number one is important, first of all, to prove that I’m not lying to you, but more importantly, it’s a way of being able to assess and compare and contrast different pathways against each other. So while all pathways essentially go off doing carbon dioxide removal and they’re taking it out of the atmosphere, you need to in fact demonstrate how simple this may or may not be.
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And what’s important about this aquatic process is all of the MRV of the process is really, really simply described by simple standard measurements like we would do for water quality analysis. We can take those measurements that we do use for standard water quality analysis, things like pH, things like total hardness, things like the dissolved and organic carbon content, the conductivity, and we can layer that onto the fact that we produce solids, right? We produce solid calcium carbonate, we produce magnesium hydroxide, we produce hydrogen and oxygen. It gives us, in sort of the engineering speak, a closed system. It’s a closed system that you can solve exactly. And I think this is something which we really want to try and emphasize because in the early days, as you’re trying to build and scale these processes, you need to be able to convince both society, but also the buying community that in fact you are accomplishing what you are.
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With that said, I’m happy to conclude. Happy to take questions when it’s time to, and thanks very much for being here.
Kevin Travis, California Ocean Science Trust (00:29:25):
All right, we’ll switch back over here. All right. Up next, we have Cheyenne Moreau. Cheyenne is head of operations and engagement at Hour Glass, a 501 nonprofit advancing safety and efficacy research for marine carbon dioxide removal, and they focus on a pathway that we’ve not yet dive into, but called ocean alkalinity enhancement. In Cheyenne’s role, she’s involved in the development, permitting, outreach, and operational management of MCDR field trials. She works closely with local communities, government agent and research partners to ensure that projects are both co-designed and developed transparently. Over to you, Cheyenne.
Cheyenne Moreau, Hour Glass (00:30:08):
Thank you so much, Kevin. Hi everyone. I’m Cheyenne. As you just said, I’m head of operations and engagement for Hourglass Climate, and today hopefully going to touch on the science behind OAE a little bit, engagement practices and pathway to responsible scaling. First off, Hourglass is a unique entity. We’re a 501 research organization that is actively researching safety and efficacy of OAE. And we do this through the development of various modeling tools to facilitate project planning, permitting, and impact quantification, as well as through conducting monitoring field trials to help ground truth a lot of our work.
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So I’ll just reiterate really quick. You had an example of electrochemical OAE, and then David talked broadly about what OAE is. Essentially, we’re adding alkalinity to seawater through the dissolution of ground alkaline minerals or electrochemical processes. And that drives an atmospheric CO2 in gassing for long-term carbon storage. And just on the right here is an example of a field trial that used mineral-based OAE. So it looks very different than the electrochemical version. In this one, there was about 9,000 tons of a mineral called Olivine placed on the sea floor. And hourglass is monitoring this field trial.
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So yeah, as a research organization, two big components of our engagement practices are data transparency for one. So we do that through peer review publication of all of our results. We have eight manuscripts being drafted right now, both on field trials and other research we’re conducting. And then trying to balance that with presenting that information as early as possible at conferences to balance the long timelines that come with the peer review process. So getting information to stakeholder hands as soon as possible. And then open source data access. All of our data is always published and available.
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The second part of that is open source toolkits for measure report and verification, which you just heard about. We really think it’s important to have tools that project planners, regulators, verification agencies can use to really democratize the access to CDR and environmental impact quantification. Because if we all have our private way of doing it, we don’t really have a way to make this a global effort. I’m going to spend a bit more time on community engagement for field trials. I’ve led the engagement program now for four different field trials, and the mindset and framework that I’m going to talk through today has led to a lot of success in that.
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If you have questions, please write them down because there’s a lot of specific examples. I think showing you guys in practice how this works is more important, but for time, I’m just going to talk through the process. First off, stakeholder mapping. So a lot of project developers will approach a project just like you would on land. You’ll identify the community surrounding, and then you’ll start your outreach. We’re working in a public commons. So the ocean is really unique in the sense that where you draw that stakeholder line is actually very unknown and it’s an active question in the field. So you want to consider your technical partners, industry partners, NGOs, indigenous communities, regulatory stakeholders, and start to identify within those groups, the leaders within the groups, figure out who’s going to be an advocate just based on their own entity’s mission and interests, and who’s going to be in opposition.
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Because I hate to tell you, there’s always opposition, and that’s okay. We don’t have to have everyone agree. I don’t care if you’re saving puppies and kittens, somebody’s going to disagree. So just know who those people are so that you can have open conversations with them, and they may never agree. From that point, you can then build your engagement plan based on specific stakeholder needs and preferences. So in that sense, some stakeholders might need a lot more education on the topic. Some stakeholders might just not want to be engaged with at all. And both of those things are okay, but you should be planning for different groups in different ways.
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So then you move into a phase called two-way information sharing. Really want to emphasize the two-way. MCDR is a new, interesting topic. It deals with chemistry, it deals with ocean. So you need to do a lot of outreach and education to bring people up to speed so you can have conversations on equal footing, but at the same time, you need to listen. There’s going to be a lot of special interests and even questions that feel like they’re coming from left field to somebody who’s in MCDR are really relevant to understanding where knowledge is today. If you’ve listened really well and you’ve spoken to the right people, you’ve set yourself up for project co-design. And what that can look like is just a few examples here. You can integrate local knowledge as you’re building your project, incorporate stakeholder priorities into your research plan. There’s a lot of great examples of that in the industry right now, and you can build monitoring and research collaborations.
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The last step I’ll talk about is post-project implementation. Engagement doesn’t stop after you’ve implemented your project. It’s actually now really important to continue to update your stakeholders. You’ve brought them along on the journey. They’re invested in the outcomes of your project, and they want to know if you’re true to your word. And then where applicable, demonstrate appreciation and give back. That should not be transactional. That should very much reflect the conversations that you had earlier in the process. Okay. So as you can tell, I’m very passionate about the engagement side of things, and I think it is fundamental to scaling MCDR. But beyond that, you also have science questions around the safety and efficacy of ocean alkalinity enhancement. And I’m going to give a few examples today of how Our Glass is trying to fill those gaps with some of our research and how those might help with improved monitoring reporting verification protocols.
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It stands on three pillars. You can simulate interventions in the lab. You can conduct and monitor real world field trials, which is kind of what a lot of the industry’s doing today, and then develop and validate models so that you can go far beyond and prepare for scale.
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This year is our Mariner Lab. It’s a long acronym that I’m not going to bother with. This is an LA based reactor facility. So this is right here in California. It’s at the Southern California Marine Institute. We have nine reactors where we can place different types of feedstock. Feedstock’s a fancy word for rocks or minerals or whatever it is that’s producing the alkalinity and simulate real world conditions. So this helps you de- risk OAE in the lab before going into field deployments. Our glass has also been monitoring an OAE field trial, the one you saw at the start of my presentation for two years now on a monthly basis. We capture both carbon removal data and have an exhaustive and ecological impact program. So we’re looking at things from microbes all the way up through pelagic fish. And then we’re deploying custom equipment to help measure those carbon removal signals and actually advance measure report and verification approaches.
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And then models. Radio is one of our models. Radio is a sediment reaction transport model. In other words, you can basically understand how much alkalinity is fluxing out of the sand into the water where carbon removal is actually happening. You can disentangle alkalinity sources. And then really importantly here, you can extend predictions beyond what can be directly measured in the field. So you’ve heard today, we work in an open system, so the ocean is a big, complex, open space, and you can only measure what you’ve just put there for so long. We’re talking about carbon removal that happens on a hundred year timescale. So you can’t realistically be measuring that directly for a hundred years. Models are really important to high quality carbon removal quantification. So that’s what radio does. And last but very much not least, is a model that we have for environmental impacts.
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So this is our framework for ecotoxicological modeling of MCDR, FIM for short, and it essentially allows you to assess impact before you actually move into your deployments phase. So it’s a guidance document to quantify those ecotoxicological risks from MCDR. These are new perturbations. We’re adding new things to the water column, and we rely on existing widespread regulatory frameworks for things like pesticides or wastewater, and then you can apply those to these types of interventions. And that’s it. Thank you.
Kevin Travis, California Ocean Science Trust (00:39:45):
Wonderful. Thank you, Cheyenne. All right. Our final speaker is going to be Terry Tamminen. Terry is the president and CEO of AltaSea, a nonprofit blue economy hub at the Port of Los Angeles. Terry has an extensive career in public policy and climate advising, notably as Secretary of Environmental Protection from 2003 to 2006 under Governor Schwarzenegger. Today, through the work of Alta Sea, he supports researchers and companies in the development and commercialization of ocean-based climate solutions like tidal energy, as well as of course, marine carbon dioxide removal. This hub also partners with local community colleges to create workforce development programs that support and build up these emerging technologies. Over to you, Terry.
Terry Tamminen, AltaSea (00:40:30):
And I’m going to do it from here because I don’t have slides, so you just get to look at me. Look around the room. You’re never going to find such an assembly of geeks in your life because all of the other cool, sexy topics you could have gone to for breakouts and you’re in here. So either your geeks or those were all full. I don’t know which. But first of all, thank you all for being here in such a distinguished panel. I am not the scientist and I was asked to talk about the policy that relates to all of this. As you heard, Altosea is a nonprofit. I invite you all to come see it. We have public tours. We have, in fact, an open house this Saturday, if you happen to be in Los Angeles from 10 to one, where you can hear from guest speakers in the blue economy and the workforce and the education programs and a lot of other ocean related nonprofits come and table during those events.
(00:41:21):
So please come check us out. It’s in the port. We renovated 110 year old warehouses to be a home for K through 12 education so kids understand this is an ocean planet. For the workforce development programs with community colleges, as you mentioned, because the blue economy workforce will be very different from the people that are around today, but it’s also opportunities, especially for underserved communities around ports to get jobs again when the ports are automating and the fisheries business has gone elsewhere and so forth to have these new blue economy jobs in things like aquaculture, growing seaweed to extract food and fuel and pharmaceuticals, amazing array of products all over the world our researchers are working with. Things like ocean carbon dioxide removal, as you’ve heard. We have three universities at Altosea, including UCLA, Dr. Sant and his program looking at different forms of MCDR, and then a location for engaging the public with that.
(00:42:20):
We also do a lot with wave energy. We sponsored a bill two years ago, Senate Bill 605, to incentivize wave entitled energy in the state. And within the next three to five years, you will see wave energy projects all up and down the state adding to our clean energy grid. Port decarbonization, anything to do with the sustainable regenerative blue economy has a home at all to see. The businesses can come there, work with researchers, get better, get started up, find investors, but importantly, they will also find a home for policy. And it’s important to have a place like Alta Sea, and in fact, we’re trying to find affiliates around the world because if you invent a new better solar panel, you can market that to the hundreds of thousands of solar installers around the world and they will know exactly what to do with it.
(00:43:06):
If it’s better, they’ll stop using the old ones and they’ll start using yours. But if you invent ocean carbon dioxide removal technology or a new wave energy, who do you talk to in this country, in this state, let alone in another place? There’s no engineering firm you can go to that knows how to install these things, that knows how to operate them, knows how long they’ll operate to talk to investors and say, “Oh yeah, if you build it this way, you’ll get your money back because it’ll operate for 10 years at this performance level, et cetera, et cetera.” And importantly, there’s no policymakers for these things because policymakers haven’t seen them before. So that’s a lot of where we come in and where I try to use my background here in Sacramento to use California and the world’s fourth largest economy as a place to scale these things up, de- risk them, and then obviously that helps the rest of the world.
(00:43:59):
And so just to give you a sense, I made a list here and I’m going to just quickly tick these off because it’ll show you why policy is so important to these conversations. So just in the last three to four years, AB 1279 was passed to codify a policy of carbon neutrality by 2045 and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Okay, that feeds into why we need these kinds of technologies to achieve that. SB 1020 sets interim targets for 100% clean energy and builds off the renewable portfolio standards. Same thing. Importantly, Senate Bill 905 that we’ll talk more about creates the regulatory framework for carbon capture, utilization and storage and other things. Assembly Bill 1757, and I’d be happy to send this out to you guys if you want it, requires state targets for natural carbon sequestration and nature-based climate solutions. Senate Bill 1314 prohibits the use of captured carbon dioxide because you start to think about, “Oh, what are you going to do with that?
(00:45:01):
” For enhanced oil recovery, Senate Bill 1203 mandates that all state agencies achieve net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2035. Well, again, how are we going to do it without these interventions? You saw that in David’s first slide. AB 1207 reauthorized the cap and trade now called cap and invest. So now there’s a market mechanism to try to pay for some of these things. And then other efforts that are moving along in one way or another where different policymakers have sought to support specifically ocean carbon dioxide removal. There was a bill that we tried to co-sponsor last year. It didn’t make it because of fiscal concerns, getting agencies to staff up to be able to understand how to regulate these sorts of things, getting the Ocean Science Trust familiar with this so that they could work on the measuring reporting and verifying that you heard is so important so that we know that when somebody says a ton of carbon was removed, that it really was.
(00:46:02):
And the list goes on, but I think Senate Bill 905 really captures a lot of this about the importance of all these different pieces to actually go from the lab to commercialization. It included things like carbon capture regulatory framework. It required the Air Resources Board to create a program that would evaluate, demonstrate, and regulate CDR technology, monitoring and reporting, as we mentioned, pipeline regulations. Again, if you’re going to move CO2 as a gas, and these are not necessarily going to do that, but if you’re going to move these things around, how do you regulate that? And an implementation timeline, because nobody wants to be still talking about this 10 or 20 years from now at this level. We want to see, as we have with other policies that turn into action. And we know in California it can. That’s why Alta Sea I think is so important here, why I’ve dedicated my career the last part of my career.
(00:46:58):
I’m getting grayer than that picture and a lot less hair.
(00:47:05):
But because the ocean obviously is really what will make our planet or break it. And I don’t think we can totally appreciate it when we talk about the fact that 70% of the planet is ocean and 30% is land, right? I mean, you look at the map, you can figure that out, but that doesn’t tell the story because the land that you look at, that’s kind of what you have for plants and animals and humans to inhabit if you’re land-based, but the ocean is deep. So you also have that habitat and that use and a carbon sink and so forth that is deep, not just horizontal. So I asked a researcher at UCLA, by the way, what would happen if I took all the water from the planet, from the oceans and put it on the 30% that’s land? How deep would my swimming pool be?
(00:47:54):
And the answer was five miles deep on every bit of land. So the height of Mount Everest, that’s how much more ocean there is than land. That’s how important this is, but it also highlights for you that humans have been powerful enough and stupid enough to change the very chemistry of five miles deep all over the land. Again, if you imagine that thought exercise, we’ve been able to change the very chemistry of all of that with our carbon pollution. Now, that’s the bad news. The good news is, what you’ve heard today is that it may be possible to reverse that with these technologies if we’re smart about the policy, the technology, and then ultimately the financing of these solutions.
Kevin Travis, California Ocean Science Trust (00:48:50):
All right. Thank you, Terry, and thank you to all of the panelists for giving us that intro and then a walk through different examples of all the different conditions and considerations to be taken into account when thinking about marine carbon dioxide removal, and certainly here in California. We’re going to transition now to a Q&A. I have a few prepped moderated questions just to get the discussion going, but we encourage you all to think of some questions and we’re happy to turn to audience questions here in a moment. I want to start with this question about scale. As you heard, David describe MCDR is really going from lab-based to field demonstrations and at relatively small scale pilots, but there remains really a lot of questions and uncertainties that these groups and these research projects are trying to answer at this scale, trying to ask and fill in the gaps of what we understand about the efficacy and the safety of these.
(00:49:48):
So my question here for you all, from each of your perspective, what are the major hurdles the field needs to really overcome in order to scale safe and effective MCDR? Taking it from these small scale demonstrations and going from there. And I may start with you, David, from your organization, Ocean Visions as a field building, bringing together a lot of important actors in this space. What do you think the hurdles are as we continue to consider scale with MCDR?
David Kowick, Ocean Visions (00:50:19):
Thanks, Kevin. I think that we’re in kind of a chicken and the egg situation where we know we need to field trial these technologies, and yet every time somebody goes to do them, it’s incredibly hard for some of the reasons that Cheyenne laid out and also some of the lengthy processes around permitting. And so we don’t have the evidence that we need to figure out which of these solutions are going to work or not because fears about the small scale testing of some of these are inhibiting the actual testing where we can get the evidence that we need about which are sufficiently safe and effective. At the small scales, and they really are small scales where these technologies are being field trialed, there’s really no substantive evidence that any of these are going to have lasting impacts to marine ecosystems, but the value of information for understanding which have scaling potential and which don’t is enormous.
(00:51:19):
And we can’t solve this problem or over the rest of the century. If we do that, if we take that long, it’s going to arrive too little too late to save marine ecosystems that are facing existential threats from warming and acidification. And so we have to think about ways to do research rigorously and responsibly on the timelines that matter for delivering the solutions that we need for the people and the planet on the timelines that matter.
Kevin Travis, California Ocean Science Trust (00:51:49):
I appreciate that kind of understanding of where the field trials are at. And maybe to you, Grav, as an academic, but you’re also working in the private sector. And as you mentioned, aquatic is nearing completion towards a scaled up demonstration in Singapore. Is there any hurdles you see from maybe project development or from the private sector side, even coming from academia as well?
Garav Sant, UCLA’s Institute for Carbon Management (00:52:15):
Sure. Thanks very much. So maybe two or three dimensions, two or three axis to really reflect on. So the first comment that I’ll make is, I think we often get caught up in thinking about what could go wrong, but before you think about what could go wrong, I think there’s a fundamental question answer, will the technology actually scale? Will it fulfill promise in terms of what it costs? Will it fulfill promise in terms of can it actually be built? These questions about what could go wrong only matter if it can actually scale. So I very much take sort of an engineering centered view on this that we first need to determine if the technology itself is viable and scalable. That’s number one. The second thing that I will say is that I think we’ve done two things which in hindsight have turned out to be quite clever.
(00:52:58):
We’ve done lots of anticipatory work. So we’ve anticipated what the questions might be and we’ve tried to work on things like environmental impact assessments and we’ve done them a priority. We started a very extensive program a couple of years ago trying to study the effects of effluent discharge as an example on plant and animal life. And that study which has now matured essentially has now come back to answer the questions that we thought it would, which is, in fact, these processes, just like David reflected, are very, very benign. Now, while I will say that there was lots of anticipatory planning, the other thing that we’ll do, and particularly with the work that we’ve done in Singapore, is we’ve essentially used our baseline standard that we will comply with all existing regulatory discharge guidelines that exist. So we’re not asking for any sort of allowances. So we’re setting the baseline as we want to be just like everyone else, but we’re going to layer on top of it other information that we need because you do have to decision make under uncertainty.
(00:53:53):
And when you need to decision make under uncertainty, you go above and beyond. But the reason that I draw caution to this approach that we’ve taken is perfection is the enemy of the good. These excises end up taking a really long time. They don’t answer all the questions that you want in completeness in any event, and they cost an enormous amount of money. And so the question does arise, is this really the best use of funds when you say you need to act and time is off the essence. And so I think there’s a need to find a balance here. And I want to sort of maybe just provide one context here, which is important, right? So indeed, carbon dioxide is a very large problem. It’s a problem that we’ve created at a very large scale, but in the grand scheme of things, the number of pathways that we have of dealing with carbon dioxide are really quite simple.
(00:54:39):
It’s an asset every time you’re going to treat it with a base every time. We understand the basic chemistry around this really well, and I think that’s something that I think should give us a little bit of comfort.
Kevin Travis, California Ocean Science Trust (00:54:52):
Great. Thank you. Turning to you, Cheyenne, you mentioned you’ve been hands-on for, I think you said around four OAE field trials, and you’ve learned very specific outcomes from how you engage the public and what those processes and strategies consist of. I’m wondering if there’s any hurdles that have come to you from those efforts that you see when we think about larger scaled demonstrations.
Cheyenne Moreau, Hour Glass (00:55:18):
Yes, definitely. I think the most impactful thing has been early engagement. Nobody wants to feel surprised by anything that’s happening in or near something they love and cherish that ocean, for example. I think one of the challenges we face as these technologies start to scale is that when you are working in not just a public commons like California’s coastline, you can start working in a global commons, right? If these things are happening offshore and it’s trying to understand what is your stakeholder radius in theory, the globe, right? And how do you wrestle with opposing opinions, right? There’s a lot of different interests as these technologies start to scale and being able to make really good risk assessments so that you can compare it to no action, right? No action is still a choice. We are tackling climate change right now. So I think really good risk assessment tools so that you have really hard evidence to point to when you also start needing to expand your stakeholdership.
Kevin Travis, California Ocean Science Trust (00:56:32):
Great.
Cheyenne Moreau, Hour Glass (00:56:32):
Thank you.
Kevin Travis, California Ocean Science Trust (00:56:34):
Lastly, Terry, would love to get your thoughts on hurdles, certainly through the lens of California climate policy, having seen different climate technologies and waves occur over the past 20 years. And you mentioned this dynamic between technology, policy, and finance. Is there a hurdle you see there for marine carbon dioxide removal, maybe and specifically in California’s coastal waters?
Terry Tamminen, AltaSea (00:56:56):
From a policy perspective, I think our current way of doing policy doesn’t work for something of this size and scope and urgency. And that’s probably true about most of the challenges with the climate crisis. It’s getting worse faster. And unfortunately, we have a system and we’re fortunately that obviously takes a lot of opinions into account, takes a lot of years to mature. Even when you pass a law and get a budget appropriation for staff or studies or research, it’s not until the next year that any of that really gets started. The budget year budget gets passed in June and by the time the rules are made for it and the rest of it, it’s the following year and a lot of things change. We don’t have that time anymore. And I think one of the things that I would emphasize to whoever is the next governor is that the governor is probably the only one that can cut through that, that can get people together to find what is the path.
(00:57:55):
And this isn’t to say cut out any stakeholder or any process or any committee or any proper review, but communicate better to the public, especially when it’s a topic like this that is complicated. And again, we’re all geeks or we wouldn’t be in this room and then get the various stakeholders together in the government, in the executive branch, in the legislative branch to try to move these things forward faster. And when we have a SANE administration in Washington DC, obviously communicate with them in the meantime, work with other states and cities that have like- minded interests to develop policies and learn from other places around the world that may have already done this. We don’t have to invent everything. We often do, but we don’t have to be the only ones or even the first ones.
Kevin Travis, California Ocean Science Trust (00:58:44):
Great. Thank you. I’ll pause here to see if there’s any questions from the audience. I certainly have more, but would love to turn it. I think I saw you first. Okay.
Speaker 8 (00:59:01):
Hi, I’m Carl Danz with Citizens Climate Lobby, and I want to plus one on Terry’s comment. Alta Sea is great if you ever get a chance to visit. I’ve been there twice. So kind of riffing on, Terry, what you said about policy not moving fast enough, and we’re all geeks, and I’ve been struck by how many California legislators themselves, and certainly their staffs, are also geeks. I mean, it’s wild. I mean, just to hear … Anyway, you get the idea. What’s the role for AI here? Because I think AI can really help. Obviously there’s downsides, but it’s like anybody can be a geek now, right? So I’m imagining thinking, take this policy conundrum thing, it’s not going fast enough and just supercharge it with … Well, Claude’s my favorite now because I like Anthropic’s ethos, but just put AI to work to help us accelerate all of it, but in particular policy.
Terry Tamminen, AltaSea (01:00:01):
I’d actually ask our scientists because how much can AI do experimentation in a computer essentially that would take months, weeks, years in the real world? And could we rely on that? Because I think that’s the one way to try to engage these new models and new intelligence. Turn it over to scientists.
David Kowick, Ocean Visions (01:00:23):
Yeah. I get this question a fair amount. AI represents a very powerful set of tools, perhaps some of the most powerful tools that have been developed in the last generation or even longer than that. It does not replace human thought. And so we very clearly understand, I think, the science, technology, policy, communications, and social license challenges to advance responsible research development, demonstration, and potential deployment of marine carbon dioxide removal technologies. And so AI I think can help along all of those if used correctly, but I don’t think it is going to solve any one of those pillars individually or autonomously.
Kevin Travis, California Ocean Science Trust (01:01:15):
Appreciate that. Yes, over here.
Speaker 2 (01:01:25):
I’m curious why you went to Singapore and what was the experience? How different was it and how can we learn from that? Second part of that is how about a CQA exemption for these experiments?
Garav Sant, UCLA’s Institute for Carbon Management (01:01:38):
If you can get me a CEQA exemption, I’ll happily take it. So let me start there. I’ve inquired, just to be clear. So a couple of things. We had an interesting opportunity to go to a place that seemed to have bigger mission. Singapore’s actually passed a carbon tax. It’s legislated into law. It will not get de- legislated. That’s number one. Number two, we were very interested in working in a part of the world where the population growth curve is steeply ascendant, which means that you’re at a part in the industrial growth cycle when new industries will involve steel and concrete in the ground at large scale. The last piece around this is we were very concerned about what the actual rate of deployment would look like in the US. I think while we have enormous ambition and aspiration, the timeline between announcing a project and putting a project into the ground, these are two highly decor-related quantities.
(01:02:39):
And I said, “I don’t think we’re capable of doing this. ” And this is just for small pilot scale systems. It’s not like we were going out to build a large demonstration facility or we were going out to build a commercial facility. And as we spend time thinking about this, we also spent time looking at the regulatory landscape. We wanted to be in a place that’s small geographically because everybody knows everybody else, which means you can get every regulatory agency in the room at the same time. And so we wanted to solve some of these issues, which I think turn out to be really important, also because Singapore’s a very credible jurisdiction as an example. And so after having done things in Singapore, it’s easy to sort of take that model and extrapolate it out to other places. And so indeed, this is all work that we did at UCLA.
(01:03:24):
Indeed, it’s work that we demonstrated all to see, but when it was time to step it up, we said we need to go somewhere else.
Speaker 2 (01:03:31):
Tell all the legislators that.
Kevin Travis, California Ocean Science Trust (01:03:34):
We have.
(01:03:36):
I had one quick question and I’m happy to pass it back to the audience. There’s CEQA and different regulatory requirements that can be applied to MCDR and potentially more regulations to come. But regardless of that, there’s also, and we’ve touched on it here and there, the social license to operate. And part of that is doing this community engagement in and around a field trial because I think for this room, we understand the value of something like this, but does the public audience understand what their benefit is? And how do you take these concepts down to, what does it mean for me and my community? I’m wondering in any of your efforts, maybe Cheyenne, with talking to various public members, if there’s a certain communication strategy to educate folks about MCDR, is there something that sticks when trying to understand this concept and what it means for their community?
Cheyenne Moreau, Hour Glass (01:04:33):
Yeah, definitely. I can say for a fact that the words ocean and chemistry immediately lights something up in most people. So if you want somebody’s attention, you can say those words to get started and you should have a room full of people. So that aside, what really matters, I’ll go back to saying like thinking about your stakeholder groups and where they’re starting from and making sure you’re meeting them there. So in terms of strategies for communication, it’s if you approach a community … I worked with a really rural community in Dominican Republic for a while ago and they had never heard of carbon dioxide. Okay. All right. So I’m going to start there with it. I’m going to start with carbon dioxide. I ask questions. I do interviews, focus groups to really understand where does this conversation need to start at so we can have a real equal footing conversation discussion.
(01:05:31):
And then you have other groups in the US. A lot of coastal communities in the US are well educated of a higher economic status. So they’re in some cases coming with their own information, but that information might not actually be accurate. So that’s a whole different conversation you’re about to have is first starting with listening because they have formed opinions, they’ve looked up their own information, they’ve done their research, and then you’re going to work backwards to either debunk some myths or dive deeper into what they’ve already discovered. So for me, it’s just really important that with each community you go to, you’re rethinking how that group needs to be engaged with from the
Kevin Travis, California Ocean Science Trust (01:06:13):
Start. Right. And Terry, I mean, AutoCAD’s doing this at the hub, bringing all sorts of community colleges, high schoolers, varying levels of engagement. Is there anything in the Los Angeles community, to put it into California, that you’re learning when it comes to just conveying these concepts? Well,
Terry Tamminen, AltaSea (01:06:33):
I’d say the fact that … The fact that a lot of people don’t have trust. As Cheyenne said, there may be misinformation or parts of information you have to overcome, but for example, at Alta Sea about two years ago when we thought there was going to be a hydrogen hub initiative from the federal government, and of course Trump administration reversed that, but we wanted to educate people about hydrogen would be used in the port economy to decarbonize the diesel equipment and so forth. And we had about 400 people show up for a listening session and a discussion, which was great, but many of the speakers got up and said, “Well, I don’t know that much about hydrogen or the port, but the port promised 10 years ago that they were going to do this to reduce truck traffic in my neighborhood and they haven’t done it.
(01:07:22):
And what about that? ” So there’s a lot of background noise that I think you have to address with many communities to get them to even sort of listen and engage on a topic that’s very new and very technical because the trust just isn’t there.
Kevin Travis, California Ocean Science Trust (01:07:38):
Right. The trust is research. I have time for one shorter question. Yes.
David Kowick, Ocean Visions (01:07:50):
Go ahead. Go
Speaker 9 (01:07:51):
Ahead. This isn’t short, but I’m going to throw it out there anyway. Well, I now get the electrochemistry part of this, but you’re going to stick it in the ocean at Singapore. You’re going to neutralize a certain area. Now, after a while, surely you’ve got to move somewhere else. You’re not going to get all the oceans in the world through that one place. And this danger as you go, that this sudden change in alkalinity will cause strange things to happen to some of the sea creatures because while we might understand the physics and chemistry, understanding all the possible impacts on all the sea creatures, ecosystems, which we don’t really understand that well in the first place, that’s tricky. And I can’t quite see how this gets implemented everywhere in the world.
Garav Sant, UCLA’s Institute for Carbon Management (01:08:44):
So I don’t have a short response, but I’ll try to be brief. So two parts. You’re not going to do this just in Singapore, you are going to indeed do this around the world, right? So make no mistake, this is not a single point solution, so we should not presume that for a second. Second comment, the ocean’s all what we call as convective, which means they move around, right? So there’s circulations in them, but the circulation is both good and helpful in general, because in effect, you can advect the benefits of what you’re doing in a single location to others. Now, coming back to the issue around sea creatures, I grew up by the ocean, so I like my lobster just as much as you do. By no means would I claim that we know every effect to the perfect extent. However, that’s a unrealistic bar to fulfill.
(01:09:30):
I think the bar that we need to fulfill is following the precautionary principle in a reasonable way, where we say we don’t want to do any harm, but we really try and establish boundaries of what we think is sufficient information to practice, right? It’s kind of like driving a car on the street. There is no such thing as a no accident condition. The question is, what is the probabilities of an accident that we’re willing to accept, where we say that the overall benefit is much bigger than inaction. I think that’s the same premise that we have to follow here.
Kevin Travis, California Ocean Science Trust (01:10:00):
Thank you, Grav. All right. Well, we are at time and I’m going to ask for just one minute and close out with a final question to each of this panelists, if you could answer it in 10 seconds or less. If we are sitting here five years from today, so 2031, what is one success milestone that you would like to see in California in particular that would indicate that the state is responsibly advanced, viable, safe, effective MCDR? And I’ll start with you, David.
David Kowick, Ocean Visions (01:10:30):
Yeah. For me it would be that … That doesn’t count as part of my 10 seconds.
Kevin Travis, California Ocean Science Trust (01:10:37):
Five seconds.
David Kowick, Ocean Visions (01:10:37):
Yeah. For me, it would be that California passes and implements AB 1086 or something like it that establishes a marine carbon dioxide removal research development initiative that allows the state to responsibly advance the research and development and enabling policy and regulatory frameworks to move these very high potential climate solutions forward.
Garav Sant, UCLA’s Institute for Carbon Management (01:11:02):
So my response is not limited to California, but this plant that we’re building in Malaysia, if we manage to get this plant built, I think that’ll be a big thing. So one of the things that this field fundamentally needs is markers of success. And passing builds is great, but we’re short on markers of success and there’s no marker of success like steel and concrete on the ground.
Cheyenne Moreau, Hour Glass (01:11:22):
If we’re talking about five years from now, in five years, I’d like to see field trials being executed in California, which would require clear regulatory frameworks for enabling those between now and then, but I want to see science happening in the field within the next five years.
Terry Tamminen, AltaSea (01:11:39):
I would just echo what the other panelists have said and give you an example of how that’s possible. So when we passed the Million Solar Roofs Initiative, we were looking to get the million rooftops done within 10 years and generate what we thought would be three gigawatts of power and bring down the installed cost maybe by 30%. We achieved the million roofs in eight years, generating nine gigawatts of power. The state only has 50 gigawatts, by the way, and brought the installed costs down 70%. So when California leans in, we can do this.
Kevin Travis, California Ocean Science Trust (01:12:16):
All right. I appreciate those closing comments. Thank you again to our panelists. Thank you to the audience for joining this ocean climate panel. Yeah, please give them a round of applause and have a great rest of the summit.