Carbon sequestration isn't just for coal-fired power plants anymore.

More and more groups are now dipping toes in the water of ocean iron fertilization.

Plankton naturally sequester over 2 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide every year to the deep ocean, according to the U.S. Department of Energy's Center for Research on Ocean Carbon Sequestration.

Groups pursuing ocean iron fertilization aim to scale and speed up that natural process by introducing trace amounts of iron into the ocean to trigger large blooms of phytoplankton, which live near the surface.

As they continually bloom, mature and die in a 60-day lifecycle, part of the phytoplankton's biomass sinks into the depths of the ocean, locking away carbon for long periods of time.

The concept has its critics, who believe tampering with Mother Nature could have unintended consequences. But it's advocated by companies like Planktos, and research groups like the Climate Foundation, headed by Brian Von Herzen, a vocal proponent of the technology, who've both been citing positive results.

Dan Whaley, founder and CEO of Climos, a new company aimed at commercializing ocean iron fertilization—and, coincidentally, also based in San Francisco like competitor Planktos—believes the carbon trading markets can finance fertilization projects.

Dan Whaley, founder and CEO of Climos

In an interview, Whaley talks about his entrepreneurial roots, the science of iron fertilization and standards for the new industry.

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?

In 1995 I founded the first company to commercialize 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.

I think that entrepreneurs by nature love big challenges. We like to find opportunities where key technologies, services or business transformations can make a profound difference to the world.

We understand that the missing ingredient we provide is the vision and the sheer will to make those transformations happen. We are perhaps at our best when the odds are against us, and when most people say we’re crazy.

A few years ago, I drove from here down to Buenos Aires. Somewhere along the way, I think I woke up and really fully realized 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.

By contrast, the energy and environmental challenges we face as a species are exactly the kind of thing an entrepreneur likes to tackle head on. Plus, it actually makes a difference whether we succeed or not.

Tell us about the concept of ocean fertilization and how it could abate C02? Why iron?

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 percent 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 recirculates over very long time periods. The lag between downward flux and eventual recirculation creates an extremely effective trap.

This process is probably easily 20 to 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 to 100 years).

A tiny amount of iron can stimulate a lot of phytoplankton growth. Twelve publicly-funded, open ocean experiments over 15 years have shown this.

The science community is now proposing the next generation of experiments, at moderate as opposed to small scale and potentially funded by private sources.

We hope to answer the question just how much carbon is sequestered (not just grown), at what scale can this be done safely, and whether this can fit in to the market mechanisms that have evolved worldwide to fund the mitigation of carbon dioxide.

Who else is doing this and what exactly do you do differently as far as ocean fertilization goes?

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.

We decided to pursue this because we feel like this is one of the largest potential tools mankind might have to address global warming. Perhaps our primary differentiator is that we want to make sure that if this is done, it is done credibly and scientifically.

Our chief science officer, Margaret Leinen, left NSF in January. She was the head of Geosciences there and managed a $700 million research budget. Her research career was in paleoceanography and biogeochemistry.

Our Science Advisory Panel includes people such as Rita Colwell, the former director of NSF, Tim Killeen, the director of the National Center for Atmospheric Research and the recent president of the American Geophysical Union, Bob Gagosian, the former president of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, and Tom Lovejoy, the president of the Heinz Center.

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, that will probably be financed via the carbon market.

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