How the Next Big Thing in Carbon Removal Sunk Without a Trace

Odlin confirms that for all of the Icelandic wood-chip ocean deposits, it was impossible for Running Tide to monitor the wood chips for more than three hours after their release, saying, “We couldn’t measure signal from noise in the ocean on the alkalinity.”

The Dead Zone

Despite having sold credits to Stripe, Shopify, Microsoft, and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, financial pressures on Running Tide continued to mount as the flow of funds from Silicon Valley dried up. According to one former employee, Odlin would start meetings in spring 2024 by announcing that the company had only a few more weeks of funds before it would have to close. That June, Odlin admitted defeat.

In a LinkedIn post on June 14, 2024, Odlin wrote that “there simply isn’t the demand needed to support large-scale carbon removal.” The company ceased global operations that month. Nearly all employees in Iceland and the US were suddenly let go. One employee was presenting about Running Tide at an algae conference when he was told the news.

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

The legacy the company leaves behind after its wood-chip dumping is unclear. It’s simply not known what effect the sinking of biomass will have on the ocean, and the scientists and deep-sea experts WIRED spoke to remain hesitant about pursuing such marine geoengineering until more is understood about the deep sea.

Dumping biomass in the ocean could create “dead zones,” areas where aquatic life is starved of oxygen, says Samantha Joye, 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.

Deep sea environments—some of which provide life-saving drugs or insights into how early Earth formed—could also be forever damaged, Joye adds. A recent carbon flux report by Convex Seascape Survey, an international research collaboration, found that once the seabed is disrupted, this could actually halt the ability for sediments to absorb carbon. Joye also points out that without proper research, ocean alkalinity enhancement could also cause spikes in ocean acidity if it draws lots of carbon into the sea that isn’t then distributed into its deep waters—the very opposite of what the treated wood chips were trying to achieve.