Odlin confirmed that for all Icelandic wood-chip ocean deposits, it was impossible for the running tide to monitor the wood chips for more than three hours after their release, adding, “We could not measure the signal from noise in the ocean on alkalinity.”
dead zone
Despite selling credits to Stripe, Shopify, Microsoft, and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, financial pressure on Running Tide continued to grow as the flow of money from Silicon Valley dried up. According to a former employee, Odlin will begin meetings in the spring of 2024 by announcing that the company only has a few more weeks of funding before it will have to be shut down. That June, Odlin conceded defeat.
In a LinkedIn post on June 14, 2024, Odlin wrote that “the demand is simply not there to support large-scale carbon removal.” The company ceased global operations that month. Almost all employees in Iceland and America were suddenly laid off. An employee was giving a presentation about Running Tide at an algae conference when he was told the news.
“People were happy with our credit. We were filling our contracts. We were selling additional contracts. It wasn’t enough,” says Odlin. 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 between $100 million and $150 million in sales. “That was, like, the fare we were designed for.”
What legacy the company leaves behind after wood-chip dumping is unclear. It’s not clearly known what impact sinking biomass will have on the ocean, and scientists and deep sea experts WIRED spoke to are hesitant to pursue this kind of marine geoengineering until more is understood about the deep ocean.
Dumping biomass into the ocean can create “dead zones,” areas where aquatic life lacks oxygen, says Samantha Joy, 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 the cleanup of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill.
Deep-sea environments – some of which provide life-saving medicines or information about how the Earth formed – may also be forever damaged, Joy says. A recent carbon flux report from the Convex Seascape Survey, an international research collaboration, found that once the seafloor is disrupted, it can actually inhibit the ability of sediments to absorb carbon. Joy also points out that without proper research, an increase in ocean alkalinity could also lead to an increase in ocean acidity if it draws a lot of carbon into the ocean that is not then distributed to its deeper waters – the exact opposite of what the treated wood chips were trying to achieve.
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