 Thank you all for joining us today for our briefing, Domestifying Ocean Carbon Dioxide Removal. I'm Dan Prasad, I'm the President of the Environmental and Energy Study Institute, and thanks for joining us in person and in our online audience. I'd like to start by thanking our friends at the World Resources Institute, WRI, for making this briefing possible with their partnership. I'd also like to say special thanks to Senator Schatz, Senator Heinrich, and their great staff, as well as the great folks at the Senate Rules Committee for help with the room today. ESI is celebrating 40 years of advancing climate solutions through congressional education in 2024. We were founded by a bipartisan group of members of Congress, and since 1984, we've been working to provide science-based information about environmental, energy, and climate change topics to policy makers and the public. Climate change has been around for a really long time. Congressional education has been a really run, a long, a really run, around a really long time. What does it look like? Things like this, where we bring experts to Capitol Hill to meet with staff to present on environmental, energy, climate change topics. We do a lot of briefings. If you are curious in Ocean CDR, well, great, because that's what today's briefing is about, but we do lots of other briefings. Our first briefing of the year was about the Fifth National Climate Assessment. We did one a couple of weeks ago with the Business Council for Sustainable Energy about the Sustainable Energy in America Factbook. Every six months or so, we do a briefing taking a look at a different part of the IIJA, or the Infrastructure Investment Jobs Act and the Inflation Reduction Act. The last one we did was about rural programs at the Departments of Agriculture and Energy. We have one coming up in a few weeks on dam safety, which will be really, really great. One in June on natural climate solutions, we try to cover the full range of issues. So mark your calendar for all of those. And also our Clean Energy and Energy Efficiency, or excuse me, our Congressional Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Expo is July 30th. So you won't want to miss that. That was a lot. And I can see at least in the audience, people weren't taking super copious notes as I ran through those, but that's okay. The best way to keep up with things at ESI is to subscribe to our bi-weekly newsletter, Climate Change Solutions. It comes out every other Tuesday. If you sign up today, you'll get one next Tuesday. Everything also, including the session today, is posted on our website, which is www.esi.org. So if you want to go back and revisit any of the presentations or additional materials, or if you want to learn about any of the other topics that your boss is working on or your boss is asking you to work on, that website is a really great resource. And we try really hard to be timely, relevant, accessible, and practical. We put a lot of thought to try to put these briefings on the calendar before the issues really come to a head, or in the case of this, the wave crests. And it's much better, in our opinion, to have this information before we need it, before you need it. I'm joined today by a number of my colleagues, we're all wearing our little lapel pens. If there are other issues that you think you would like to learn more about, whether it's in a briefing or a podcast or an article or an issue brief or a fact sheet, talk with one of us. I'm sure that we can help you answer your boss's questions about the topic. But today we're all about ocean carbon dioxide removal. Ocean CDR is the practice of removing and storing carbon from the ocean. This topic and its potential as a climate solution is garnering increasing scientific, governmental, and private sector interest, as evidenced by it being the subject of an ESI briefing. What we're here to discuss are all the things policymakers need to understand before scaling CDR up. While federal funding for research, development, and demonstration of land-based carbon dioxide removal approaches and technologies has increased significantly in recent years, the vast ocean also prevents opportunities for carbon removal to explore. What are the uncertainties of ocean CDR related to efficacy, ecosystem impacts, and governance? How big is its potential? And how quickly can we deploy it at scale without unleashing any unintended consequences? We have a really, really great panel today to help us understand these questions. The next slide is a quick survey. We'll have this at the end of the briefing as well. If you have any feedback about the session today, we really appreciate your feedback. We read every response. And like I said, if you are with us at the end of the briefing, we'll also put that slide up. It only takes a couple of minutes, maybe two minutes to complete. We are joined today by video remarks by a very special guest. Representative Shelley Pingree represents the first district of the great state of Maine. She became the first woman elected to Congress from the district in 2008. And at present, she's a member of the Appropriations Committee, chair of the Subcommittee on Interior and Environment, and a member of the Subcommittee on Agriculture and Subcommittee on Military Construction and Veterans Affairs. She also sits on the House Agriculture Committee, which is a pretty big deal these days. Representative Pingree is a leader on many issues, including assisting survivors of military sexual trauma, strengthening the creative arts economy, and helping coastal communities address that to their future. And we'll be joined by her in just a moment with a quick video. Thanks, Dana. Hi, I'm Congresswoman Shelley Pingree, representing Maine's beautiful first district. First, I'd like to thank the Environmental and Energy Study Institute and the World Resources Institute for bringing us all together today, whether in person or virtually, for this important discussion about the climate crisis and carbon dioxide removal or CDR efforts. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations are now higher than any time in the last two million years, and about 30% of the carbon dioxide we release into the atmosphere is absorbed by the ocean. Given the climate crisis and the need to mitigate carbon pollution as much as we can, it's clear we must make additional investments in marine CDR, especially for study and research. Maine is renowned for its lobster and shellfish, so you can imagine we take this threat very seriously. And I'm proud of the efforts Maine has made so far to tackle this challenge, such as implementing ocean monitoring and data collection and exploring the ability of seaweed and kelp to lower acidity in the ocean and to sequester carbon. This work will help address the growing and far-reaching threat of the climate crisis to help ensure that our ocean industries, including fisheries and the communities that depend on them, are more resilient to our changing oceans. As a senior member of the House Appropriations Committee, I've worked to increase resources for NOAA's Ocean Acidification Program and also authored language encouraging the administration to invest in research, development, and demonstration-related microalgae carbon sequestration in the ocean. I also supported the Historic Inflation Reduction Act, which invests in climate mitigation through research, which will help assess the potential of marine carbon dioxide removal. I've been pleased to see NOAA and the Department of Energy recently advanced projects in the research and development of marine carbon dioxide removal technologies. There's growing interest in this space and the Biden administration has proven to be a committed partner in working to take ocean climate action. While decreasing greenhouse gas emission remains the most effective way to address climate impacts, additional research and investment in marine CDR methods can play an important complementary role. Thank you for having me. And I look forward to hearing about today's discussion. Thank you, Representative Pingry and your staff for joining us today with the video remarks. It's great to see you again online. Speaking of online, we have a very robust online audience today. I know that because I just looked at our Slack channel that tells me how many people are on our online audience and we're doing really well. So if you're in our online audience and you have questions for our panelists today, we have options for you to ask those questions. And the best way to do it is to send us an email. And the email address to use is ask, that's ASK at ESI.org. You can also follow us on social media at ESI online. We'll be live streaming and covering this live on social media at ESI online on Blue Sky, our Instagram story, threads and X. For folks in the room, we'll also have an opportunity for you all to ask questions as well. And one of my colleagues will have a microphone and be willing to bring it around so that we'll be able to pick up everyone's voice on the live cast. But without any further ado, we have a really great panel. I like these briefings cause I get to learn a lot. And with a panel like this, I am been looking forward to this one for a while. Katie Liebling is an associate in WRI's climate program where she leads research and analysis to inform policy recommendations for scaling carbon removal approaches responsibly in the United States and globally. Previously, Katie worked on WRI's climate watch data platform. Katie and her colleagues at WRI have been great partners in putting together today's briefing. That is an understatement. So we're particularly looking forward to having her kick off the panel today. Katie, I'll welcome you to the lectern. The clicker is here. I really can't wait for your presentation. And if you, I can help you with that if any too. Great. Well, hi everyone. Thanks so much for being here. As Dan said, my name is Katie Liebling. I'm a research associate. I'm a research associate at World Resources Institute. So we're a global nonprofit research organization that focuses on global challenges at the intersection of climate change, environmental protection, and human development. And I work on carbon dioxide research analysis, mainly focused on the United States. So I'm gonna do a quick introduction presentation on some of the basics of why we need carbon dioxide, carbon removal or CDR, why we're considering the ocean as an option, and what some of the proposed ocean CDR approaches are. So I wanna start with the question of why we need carbon removal just to make sure we're all on the same page here. And when I say carbon removal, I mean approaches and technologies that can pull carbon dioxide out of the air and sequester them for climate relevant periods of time. So this is in contrast to carbon capture and storage, which captures emissions at an emission source like a cement plant. And so you've probably seen this chart before. It's from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC's latest report in 2022. And we know that greenhouse gas emissions have been increasing steadily since the late 1800s. And we know that this is causing the worsening extreme weather and climate impacts that we're already seeing today. We also know that we need to steeply cut emissions to get on track to meeting global climate goals and their strong scientific consensus that reaching those goals will require reaching net zero emissions by around 2050, which you can see on this chart as well. And that's where carbon dioxide removal comes in. Carbon removal is what puts the net in net zero. Along with reducing emissions as much and as fast as possible, we will also need to use carbon removal approaches that can pull carbon dioxide out of the air or out of the ocean indirectly out of the air. So to put it another way, even if we stopped all emissions today, there's so much carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere that we'd still need to remove a lot to bring concentrations back down to a safer level. And as we hopefully move toward net zero, carbon removal, excuse me, carbon removal will be needed to counterbalance emissions that we don't know how to abate in any other way. And after we reach net zero, it's the only way we have to remove excess CO2 that's in the atmosphere. So I want to emphasize that emissions reductions will play the biggest role as Representative Pingry said, bending the shape of the curve, the blue curve here, but that will need carbon dioxide removal alongside of it, the orange underneath the line. And carbon dioxide removal cannot be a substitute for emissions reductions or an excuse to delay action to reduce emissions. So before we dive into ocean CDR specifically, I also want to emphasize that carbon dioxide removal includes many different types of technologies and approaches that pull CO2 from the air and sequester it. So each of them will make sense in different places under different circumstances and present different benefits and risks. So you can see the approaches done on land up top here, which range from familiar things like growing trees to more nascent approaches like using machines that chemically scrub CO2 directly from the air known as direct air capture. And the ocean CDR approaches are on the bottom. So I'll get to those in a second. And just aside from soil, carbon and trees on the top and coastal wetland restoration on the bottom, the rest of these approaches are relatively new or novel. And so we've seen DOE invest a lot into direct air capture and some of the other novel approaches on the top, but much less funding has gone to research and development for the novel approaches on the bottom that can be done in the ocean. So why are we even talking about using the ocean for carbon dioxide removal? The most obvious answer might be that the ocean covers 70% of the earth. So it provides a lot of space for different ocean CDR approaches to be done. And if we can figure out how to leverage the ocean safely and responsibly for CDR, it could provide a potentially huge scale of removal. Second, the ocean's already the Earth's largest carbon sink. It holds 42 times the amount of carbon that's in the atmosphere today. So it has a demonstrated capacity to hold a lot of carbon. And this has grown as it's taken up about 25% of anthropogenic CO2 emissions each year. Third, leveraging the ocean can help us diversify the range of carbon removal approaches we have at our fingertips. So we wanna be developing as many approaches as we can to balance the risks and benefits of each. And because we're not sure that any of them, they might not all turn out to be successful. So I don't wanna put all our eggs in one basket. Lastly, using ocean for CDR means we don't have to reach all of our carbon removal goals just by using land-based approaches. So it can take some of the pressure off of the resources and land to do those approaches. So what are some of the proposed ocean CDR also referred to as marine CDR approaches? So there's several different ways to categorize these approaches. What I have here is just a simple differentiation between biotic and abiotic approaches. So biotic approaches that rely on biology or photosynthesis and the abiotic approaches that don't. So I'm just gonna quickly talk about two approaches. So you have a little bit more detailed sense. I think other panelists might cover this, other aspects of this as well. Seaweed cultivation is one example of a biotic ocean CDR approach. So seaweed can be purposefully grown, then harvested and sunk to the deep ocean for sequestration of the carbon that it contains. So seaweed as it grows takes up dissolved carbon dioxide and surface waters and then the CO2 depleted water re-equilibrates with the atmosphere such that CO2 moves from the atmosphere to the ocean resulting in atmospheric carbon removal. So there are some uncertainties around this, including how to optimize cultivation and harvesting methods, developing and improving methodologies to measure and monitor carbon sequestration and to better understand the permanence of the sequestration. And there's also several development efforts in this area. This is not a comprehensive list, but just to give you a sense that there's companies and other research efforts pursuing this as well. So one company based in the US, actually based in Maine is called Running Tide. They're doing seaweed cultivation. They're working most recently off the coast of Iceland to do this and there are other companies around the world, including Seafield, Seaweed Generation, et cetera. The Department of Energy's Advanced Research Projects Agency has also supported research on macro algae or seaweed cultivation. Ocean alkalinity enhancement is an example of an abiotic or a chemical ocean CDR approach. So this involves the addition of alkaline materials such as ground up rocks that react with dissolved CO2 in surface waters, storing, reacting with that dissolved CO2 to form carbonates and bicarbonates that lock that carbon away. So one potential benefit of this is locally reduced ocean acidification, which Representative Pingree also mentioned and several uncertainties here also, those include environmental impacts associated with potential introduction of trace minerals that could be harmful in the rock that's used when you apply that. Environmental impacts associated with accessing this material on land, potentially mining this material and transporting it. And then like most ocean CDR approaches, measurement, reporting and verification is also challenging. So there are several developments here as well. A company called Vesta based in the US adds ground olivine rock to coastlines and ocean water. The Carbon to Sea Initiative is a nonprofit focusing on advancing research here and Pacific Northwest National Lab is also working on research and testing. So as we think about the potential and next steps for ocean CDR, I just want to talk about a few complexities that are helpful to be aware of and that hopefully more research and development funding will help us resolve. But at the moment, there's generally a small knowledge base around the proposed ocean CDR approaches. Most are just beginning to be tested and piloted at sea. So there are remaining questions about how effectively they can sequester carbon and under what conditions, as well as what impacts they might have on the environment and coastal communities. The ocean is interconnected and moving so impacts would also not always be contained in one area. And the fact that the ocean is always moving can make measurement, reporting and verification difficult and expensive. The governance and regulation of ocean CDR can also be challenging because the frameworks that we have today, both in the US and internationally weren't necessarily written with ocean CDR in mind. And so they're being retroactively applied and there's room for improvement to be more comprehensive and proactive there. Lastly, because of the cultural significance and emotional significance, the ocean holds public perception and social license will be particularly important. But along with all these complexities and uncertainties, there's huge potential. And so that's why we're here today and that's why this topic has gotten so much interest. So with more investment to help resolve these scientific and regulatory uncertainties and challenges, ocean CDR could potentially provide multi gigaton scale removal in future decades. The National Academy of Sciences did an assessment a couple of years ago that points to this huge potential scale but also mentions a lot of uncertainty around their estimates. So focusing more attention on ocean CDR could also help the US maintain its position as a technological development and innovation leader in the world. So this would involve both increased funding to help do the research that we need to resolve the uncertainties as well as clarifying and improving permits, permitting process to enable that research to happen. And some approaches, as I mentioned, can provide non-carbon benefits like reducing ocean acidification, replenishing ecosystems, and then the last point here, providing jobs and economic benefits. So I'll stop here and pass it to the next panelist. Katie Webling, thank you. Sorry for mispronouncing your last name. I try, but never, it has to be one. So hopefully I got it out of the way. Sorry about that. But that was a really great presentation, really appreciated. And I'm pretty sure that you brought some materials as well and put them on the front table. So if you missed the WRR resources on the front table, I definitely encourage you to grab those on your way out because you wouldn't wanna miss those. Our next panelist also brought materials on the front table and you won't wanna miss those either. Savita Bowman is a Senior Program Manager of Carbon Management at ClearPath, leading the organization's carbon dioxide removal and carbon capture utilization and storage initiatives in supporting industrial decarbonization for steel and concrete. In this role, Savvy works to guide legislative efforts, including through new policy development and managed stakeholder engagement with policymakers, government, industry, and coalitions. Before joining ClearPath, Savvy was a business resolution analyst at Tesla, where she managed pre-litigation solar and storage assets across North America and conducted risk mitigation assessments to resolve issues ranging from system performance discrepancies to contractual disputes. Savvy, thank you for joining us today. I'll tee up your slides and turn it over to you. Awesome, thank you so much. I'm actually gonna... Great, thank you so much, Dan, appreciate that. And thank you everyone for joining us here today. It's, as you mentioned, a gorgeous day in DC. So my name is Savvy Bowman, Senior Program Manager for Carbon Management at ClearPath. And for those of you unfamiliar with ClearPath, we are a DC-based nonprofit, and we work on federal policy solutions for climate. And we were founded by Jay Faison. He's a North Carolina entrepreneur who decided to get into the intersection of climate and policy. And so we work a lot on bipartisan solutions in Congress. So I know we've covered sort of the basics of Ocean CDR. I think what I'm gonna really take us through here today is the policy behind it and what's happening in Congress today. So I'll start with the appropriations allocations that have been provided to Marine CDR and then work to the authorizations as well. So in fiscal year 24, we were pleasantly surprised to see a lot of resources allocated for Marine CDR. In the Commerce, Justice, and Science language, we received allocations for blue carbon research, and that was $2 million in the Consolidated Report Language, which allows NOAA to assess carbon sequestration potential for blue carbon. And it was mentioned slightly before, but blue carbon is the aquatic sources for biomass. So think of like seaweed, macroalgae, that sort of thing, mangroves, that kind of thing. And then the National Science Foundation also in the Senate Report Language received resources to support US Global Change Research Program and Clean Energy Technology to support research into Marine CDR broadly. There was a lot of allocations as well for CDR as a whole. So think of online pathways like director capture, mineralization, but Marine CDR was also called out in this. Then for the National Oceanographic Partnership Program, which is a great program, I'm sure my colleague Gavi is gonna cover in a little bit, received $2.5 million in the Senate Report for Partnership Program, but $500,000, particularly for ocean related carbon removal activities for partnerships there. And then moving forward into the Energy and Water Language, this was actually really interesting to see that for the first time, we were getting allocations for permitting clarity. So something that my colleague Katie mentioned is that there's not a clear regulatory pathway at the moment for getting Marine CDR projects in the ocean to get tested. And so one of the things to tell cover in a later slide is the Marine CDR Fast Track Action Committee. They are tasked with looking at how to deploy Marine CDR broadly, but also one of their scopes is to figure out the permitting question. And in the Props Language for Fiscal Year 24, we received allocations $250,000 for the Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management to lay that out. There's also allocations for Marine CDR at FECM to do RD&D, and that was $10 million for FECM. If you look back a year as well for Fiscal Year 23, there's been some pretty good resources allocated there as well. Having said that, I will caveat that this is not consistent with if you look back more than like 2021. These resources are very much newer and a lot of folks have started highlighting the value of the innovation, the technology, and that's where Congress has really seen the value of supporting a lot of these technologies to further provide the research and development resources needed, as well as the permitting clarity that's needed as well. So a couple other sort of resources that were allocated in Fiscal Year 23 were $5 million for NIST, and then NOAA to provide more support for Marine CDR technologies. The Department of Interior to $2 million allocated as part of the geologic carbon sequestration initiative that they were tasked with in the infrastructure package. This would essentially allow the geologic injection of CO2 underground in the ocean. So underground under the seafloor. And then there's also NOAA, which received $7 million for a partnership program and Fossil Energy, which received $15 million. So great resources all in all. And then looking into more of the authorizations, this slide actually shows you all of the CDR and active policies, and then in bold, you'll see all of the Marine CDR relevance. So starting all the way back to the Energy Act of 2020, there was a refresh for the first time in I think like 12 or 13 years for energy policy work in the US. And it was great because we modernized a lot of DOE's program initiatives. We started looking more at CDR broadly, and then there's the CDR Task Force and Report, which was set up to look at how we would deploy CDR technologies in the US. And one of the technologies which was listed was direct ocean capture. For those of you maybe unfamiliar with direct ocean capture, it's directly removing CO2 from the seawater, and that's through a process called electrochemical separation, which is a little technical, but it gets the CO2 out. And then in the infrastructure package, that's where the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act was amended to provide regulatory support for CO2 injection geologically. Then following in the chips and science bill, we had a couple of allocations for CDR, as well as $1 billion to carry out carbon removal, R, D, and D at FECM. And we had also the IRA, but unfortunately there were no marine CDR provisions in that package. So looking at what's moving in Congress, you'll see in parentheses, there's the 117th Congress and the 118th Congress, that's how they're broken out. But on the left most, we have the Remove Act, which is a coordination bill, which would help the federal agencies that are relevant for marine CDR and CDR broadly to coordinate with each other to get marine CDR deployed. It would be for the research aspects or for the permitting clarity or for the in-ocean testing, but this coordination would help support a lot of what's needed to understand the technology better. Then going back to Congresswoman Pingri's remarks, I actually know Dan's remarks, where we are trying to crest this way. The Crest Act actually provides resources in direction for our D&D on marine CDR. And that is extended to direct ocean capture, which I mentioned earlier, macro and micro algae, which is seaweed, and ocean alkalinity enhancement. And then following that in the second title, there's the advanced market commitment, which essentially sends the demand signal needed to ensure innovators that there is, there is sort of a demand for their technology, depending on the cost of the solution and all of that. And the Crest Act is, has been introduced in the Senate by Senator Collins and Cantwell and has other co-sponsors as well. So it's a bipartisan package that's moving in the 118th Congress. And then lastly here, we have the Ocean Restoration Research and Development Act. And that was very recently introduced by Representative Buddy Carter. And that's a pilot program to facilitate research on ocean restoration, carbon removal and carbon storage, our D&D. So Dan mentioned we brought some paper for y'all to have a look at. Something ClearPath has been working on is a report to identify the permitting roadblocks that currently exist and how can we create more of a streamlined look at who the right agencies are to permit these activities and what is the current landscape today? And so the report highlighted three main takeaways. And the first being that federal policies can really help the US secure a leadership position in this innovation space. As you know, and I've seen in previous slides, CDR is becoming a very highly authorized and supported solution in the US. And so a lot of innovators are actually flocking to the US. And so companies like Running Tide, like Project Vesta are all looking for the supports to continue their research here. And providing number two, the parallel development of a regulatory framework is essential to get that to happen. Because right now, to my knowledge, there's only two projects that have begun researching in the water how their technology would work. One is CAPTURA, which has a permit in the Port of LA and it's a non-profit general research permit where they get to understand how their technology would work. And then as well as Project Vesta, which does beach nourishment where they have olivine to remove the carbon through wave action. And then lastly, federal policy mechanisms like financial incentives can help MCDR projects bridge that valley of death, essentially. So ensuring that projects right now that need the support, particularly in the form of grants or cost sharing would be critical to help support early stage RD&D. So looking at the future outlook, there's three main things I think that could be really critical to support the field today. Permitting clarity through the MCDR fast-track action committee, which I mentioned earlier. So the fast-track action committee is an initiative that's ongoing. They actually have a comment period right now which allows you to provide comments on what should be considered as we are coming up with MCDR approaches, what are the regulatory factors to consider as well and how do we get the clarity we needed? Because, for example, if you wanted to do marine CDR for macroalgae, you would have to go through what's called an ocean waste dumping permit, which is not the same thing as what marine CDR is. It's a very different activity, which means that the public perception then changes on what that activity is and that can really negatively impact the technology itself. Also, there's not clarity on which agencies to currently go to. And there has been a lot of progress that has been made. EPA has issued a page that provides that clarity, but it's still very much an unknown and there's a lot more work to be done. Also, building up the RD&D resources at NOAA and DOE to continue researching and developing this technology as needed, as well as the enabling legislation. So looking back a couple of slides to the Crest Act, which would provide the direction to actually start researching this technology would be critical to help this technology succeed in the US. And with that, I will end my remarks. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Great, thanks. That was a very excellent presentation. As a reminder, we will have time with our expert panel today for questions. So if you're in our online audience and you're thinking of questions, send us an email. The email address to use is askask at esi.org or follow us on social media at ESI online. If you're here in the room, save your questions and we'll get to them and have one of my colleagues will bring her on the mic and we'll have a really great discussion. I'm really looking forward to that. Our third presenter today is Edward Sanders. Edward is Chief Operating Officer of Equatic, which is committed to achieving gigaton-scale ocean-based carbon removal. Prior to Equatic, Edward was a group executive at one of the world's fastest growing airlines and has worked for the Boston Consulting Group in Bain and Company, advising clients in aviation, infrastructure, travel and sustainability. Edward, thank you for joining us at our briefing today. I'll turn the lectern over to you. Thanks. So we have two global challenges. The first is ending fossil fuel reliance and the second is removing legacy carbon emissions. Equatic solves both. We use the oceans to do it. So Equatic produces green hydrogen using the ocean and we remove carbon dioxide using the ocean. Producing hydrogen is really important because as we've heard so far and we know that the number one priority is a reduction in the emissions and decarbonizing big chunks of industry will need hydrogen. It's not enough. And the second element, removing legacy emissions is something that all IPCC scenarios have said is required. How we do it matters. So it needs to be done in a way that is at a low cost, so accessible, that's going to be irreversible, measurable, incredible and without having negative impacts on the environments in which we are doing it. That's why Equatic uses the ocean. So we have a process that utilizes the fact that the world today, 80% of the world's carbon is in the ocean. We use electrolysis and a direct air contact step to capture the CO2 from both the ocean and the atmosphere and store it. We store it as two things. The first is calcium carbonate solids. And this is from the Port of Los Angeles where we're operating our pilot today. The second is bicarbonates, dissolved ions which you wouldn't be able to see. They are in the seawater as in the ionic form. This allows us to do efficient, permanent, planetary stale removals. It's energy advantage because we're using the ocean and producing hydrogen as part of the product. We can use it in many different locations so sighting is less of a concern than other CDR pathways, particularly many of the terrestrial or land-based pathways. Critically, the removal permanence is 10,000 years to one billion years. When it's out, it's out. We don't have to have CO2 transportation because we are changing the carbon dioxide from the atmosphere into the carbonates and the bicarbonates. We don't need CO2 storage and we don't have risks of degassing. So how do we do it? So the process begins by pumping in seawater to our plant and we measure what the carbon content of that seawater is. We then run electrical current through the system and it splits the seawater into four things. Into hydrogen gas, oxygen gas, a base and an acid. The base we react with the air and that traps the CO2 as carbonates and bicarbonates. The acid we react with rock to ensure we don't have any ocean acidification occurring as part of the process. We then measure the seawater again and that allows us to determine what the net carbon dioxide removal is before we discharge it. We then monitor the discharge and we sell the carbon dioxide credit based on the net change in carbon between the start of the process and the end of the process. If this perhaps looks familiar to something that you may have seen before, it's because we are actually accelerating a naturally occurring process. So this process mimics what the natural CO2 storage pathway is. Oceans have absorbed between 25, some people say 30% of total adipogenic emissions each year and rain gets neutralized by dissolving rock on its path to the ocean. What's so different about aquatic is that we have a process that operates inside of a purpose-built coastal plant that allows us to do two things. We can dramatically accelerate the rate of the carbon dioxide removal and we can measure it precisely. If we don't measure it, we can't sell it so we need to be able to measure it precisely. By way of example, at the 30 megawatt size which is the next size up from what we are building now, we remove one tonne of carbon dioxide every five minutes. The equivalent area of open ocean would take 12 months to do that same one tonne of removals. What we mean by high-quality CDR is really important to articulate and there's six key elements. It needs to be measurable, and I've talked about that so far. Secondly, it needs to be verifiable. Aquatic has an ISO standard in place for the way in which we do our monitoring, our quantification, and the reporting requirements of that carbon dioxide removal. It needs to be permanent, 10,000 plus years of permanence. It needs to be additional. This process itself only occurs because we have a engineered solution. It's nothing which would happen otherwise but for the fact there's a market there and credits there to sell into. It needs to be energy efficient. We have a best in class system because we produce hydrogen as part of the product and so that allows us to have a much more scalable, lower cost CDR credit to sell. And finally it has to be credible. The market is growing rapidly and we've seen some of the challenges in the offset market where credibility hasn't been there. We want to do it differently and Notion gives us a chance to do that, to rely on data rather than speculative estimates in how we generate our credits. So where are we doing it? We've got two pilots operating. They've been operating for over one year now. The first one's in Los Angeles. The second one is in Singapore. They've been doing about 100 kilograms a day of removal each and producing green hydrogen. The plant we're constructing now is the world's largest ocean-based CDR plant. That's got a capacity of 3,650 tons and will come online this year and be completed next year. The plant after that is commercial scale. That's got a timeline around the end of 2026 and at that scale, we're producing about 100,000 tons of removals a year and equivalent amount of hydrogen. I think on the policy and regulation side, there's a couple of points that are helpful as far as how we see it. This only happens in terms of community if the CDR and the green hydrogen are accessible. There is not enough public information about this and a quality could welcome seeing more publicly available information about the co-benefits. For instance, we do produce calcium carbonate, which can be used for beach replenishment, particularly where there's vulnerable communities and to be able to make a carbon negative source of replenishing coastal zones on site is something that would have a large benefit to communities where we deploy. Secondly, around permitting, we do want to see the right resources, tools and systems and policies for this. Many CDR companies can operate today under existing permits. Aquatic can operate today under existing permits. What needs to happen is a more efficient permitting process and this looks like a couple of things. Clearer timelines and a more effective intra-agency collaboration, particularly between NOAA, EPA, DOE, NSF. There's a lot more that's being done together and we are hearing a lot of support for this, which is really encouraging for us because it is going to require that collaboration. We would ask for a multi-agency pre-permaning consultory process, one in which we can bring data and our objectives for the plant and one in which the decisions are taking consideration the net impact of the aquatic process, including the risk of inaction. On employment, Aquatic was developed using the support from DOE and we would encourage other similar programs that really invest in innovation. They can be catalytic for jobs. We've retrained teams to work on the anodes for Aquatic and we see there's a lot of jobs across the whole supply chain as Aquatic develops. And finally on demand signals. In the past 12 months alone, there has been a lot of support for CDR as part of the overall portfolio for the US. Marine CDR should receive the same types of commercialization and technology support that the federal government provides to other CDR pathways. We cannot do this alone. We do need to have long-duration contracts and the government is going to play a better role for this perhaps than the private sector. Tenure really matters, not just volume and 10 year and 20 year procurement programs will allow us to get the necessary private sector funds in and the financing that will be required to build these plants. Thanks very much. Thank you, Edward. That was super interesting. Are you looking for your pen? I found it right there. Thanks, Edward. That was a really great presentation. As a reminder, if you want to go back and revisit the presentations, things will be posted at www.esi.org and the video. And if you give us a couple of weeks, we'll also have summary notes posted as well so you can sort of skim the briefing as well. That brings us to our fourth panelist today. Sarah Wanus works with the Ocean Conservancies or excuse me, works within the Ocean Conservancies government relations team to advance priorities that protect the ocean and the wildlife and communities that depend on it. Sarah is passionate about building connections between the scientists and communities working on solutions to ocean and climate-related threats and the legislators who can put these solutions into action. Sarah, welcome to the briefing. I'll turn it over to you. Thank you. Hello. Once again, my name is Sarah Wanus and I'm here with Ocean Conservancy. And in addition to all of the really great angles that people have taken on talking about marine carbon dioxide removal today, I'm going to be focusing a lot on the research governance and the research needs moving forward with implementing ocean, as we implement ocean carbon dioxide removal. So just a little summary of the things that I'll cover today. I'll talk about some context on the marine carbon dioxide removal research needs, what responsible development and scaling of U.S. MCDR research would look like, what research governance would look like, monitoring, reporting and verification complexities and the need for a clear regulatory regime. What further ado, let's jump right in and talk about the needs surrounding marine carbon dioxide removal research. As we move forward into this field, there are a lot of knowledge gaps that still exist of how we should be moving forward and how we will address concerns and questions as they come up. So what we really need to be targeting is research to support the decisions that people will be needing to make as we implement and study ocean carbon dioxide removal further. Just a few of those questions that still exist on this topic are things like what information is even relevant and what decisions and who will be making what decisions. When should activities be scaled up or closed out and who benefits and is anybody harmed? How do marine CDR activities fit in among other marine uses and so on and so on? So these are some of the questions that we need to be addressing with our marine carbon dioxide removal research. And you might be wondering now how we can accomplish this. And one major way that we can accomplish this is through establishing a research code of conduct. Codes of conducts are a quite common tool in research fields as a way to create common norms and best practices and to encourage responsible research among public and private sectors. Codes of conduct encourage researchers to assess, minimize and publicize impacts of their experiments and can reduce the harm done by field experiments. One of the main principles that would encourage the growth of a rigorous body of research such as requiring the disclosure of funding or the peer review and publication of results, a code of conduct could help researchers transparently and honestly determine the efficacy of ocean-based CDR technologies, which they need to be doing if these technologies are going to play a meaningful role in climate mitigation. This is a really great report that I have up here on the screen, which is a, what a code of conduct could play in marine carbon dioxide removal research and what that code of conduct might look like to be effective. It has more than, it has 10 authors from Discipline Spanning Ocean Science to Anthropology to Law and Policy and more. And our very own Sarah Cooley at Ocean Conservancy is one of those experts on this report. So diving in a little bit more to what that report said and what a code of conduct for marine carbon dioxide removal research would look like. We can boil that down into three phases of that responsible, that should be described by that code of conduct. It starts in the planning stage where we should be really considering whether, when, where and how to conduct this research. These questions will span considerations in project design, identifying work, identifying and working with stakeholders, identifying physical and social impacts, citing and permitting. Once the planning questions are worked out, there are considerations in execution. Projects must be monitored for both their positive and negative impacts and we need to make sure that these projects have appropriate levels of accountability and liability and transparency around the impacts the tests are having, as well as checkpoints around how to decide when to scale up or when to scale back. On the slide here, it shows this as a direct arrow going through the conclusion, but it really could show an off-ramp here from conclusion or it could show a loop back up back into planning because this section describes considerations for concluding a study which could include decommissioning or it could move into further study of research on different hypotheses or on different scales. And depending on the outcomes, it could include remediation of any adverse effects of the studies or the fair distribution of any benefits of these studies. In any case, it should also include the communication of results with other scientists and with communities. So now you're probably wondering how this work applies to Congress and how Congress can have a role in the implementation of a research code of conduct in a field that is incredibly international. One possible point of influence that Congress can play and has in this is Congress as a funder of research. Funders have a key role in encouraging the widespread adoption of a code of conduct meaning they can require the documented use of a code of research code of conduct in order to qualify for funding. More development would be needed on the code of conduct developed in the Aspen Institute report that I showed earlier but the goal is to create a document that has elements relevant to the implementation in both field and or lab or model studies and Ocean Conservancy is committed to continuing on that work. Funders can also require adherence to permits and protocols, for example environmental permits for field studies which we saw with the NOAA NOPP awards that were made last year or institutional review board or IRB approval for living subject studies. We've noticed that there's been really good backend coordination between NOAA and the EPA on those kinds of permits for field studies so far which is a great sign in this field. Funders can also require and support data sharing and establishment of reasonable rules around intellectual property. The challenge with intellectual property is to give startups a chance to have something that's proprietary to offer but not to allow the prioritization of data about carbon cycle baselines or environmental outcomes that would not only shed light on the full outcomes of a company's approach but would also provide important information for other MCDR researchers and verifiers. Funders can also tie future funding to past performance which I know sounds a little bit harsh but NSF does have rules to this effect about data sharing already in place. Last but not least, funders can help coordinate research in the research community in many ways such as the development of joint activities and resources. Some examples of joint activities and resources that could really pay off here include support for methods of inner comparison projects or the support to grow a verification system that's operated by neutral third parties. So far we've talked about why it's so we've talked about how to get this research right and I want to pivot a little bit back to why it's so important that we get this research right and talk about MRV complexities. If it would play a little bit better on the video I might ask us all to shout out what MRV stands for because we've heard it a few times today but because it probably wouldn't I'll just say it for you MRV stands for monitoring, reporting and verification which is a really big challenge for MCDR and but it's also central to counting MCDR's contributions to greenhouse gas emission mitigation. So MRV is where we do the actual counting of understanding how much CDR methods are removing carbon from the carbon cycle are removing carbon from the atmosphere. Two words that I want to take some time to define here are additionality and durability. Additionality is meaning the additional amount of carbon that is being stored because of the implementation of these carbon dioxide removal research of carbon dioxide removal methods and it's not as simple as I know we were just hearing earlier just counting as you were explaining earlier it's not as simple as just counting at the beginning how many carbon molecules are present in a system we need to know how many additional carbon molecules are being sequestered because of the implementation of the carbon dioxide removal methods which requires us to have a good baseline and durability meaning how durable that carbon is stored whether or not that carbon is going to be released back into the atmosphere is something that's important to know before we're counting something as sequestered. MRV is more straightforward for some methods than it is for others for example a direct ocean removal as we've heard about already today you're collecting carbon directly and you can count the molecules of carbon that you're storing and you can monitor that they remain stored in other methods such as alkalinity enhancement or seaweed cultivation and sinking that rely on ocean processes in an open ocean and atmosphere system. There are a lot more variables at play from how even including how fast the seaweed is growing that can be more difficult to predict. Right now there is no true MCDR MRV protocol the best that we have are models that are run by practitioners to approximate what their in-situ method is able to do Seaworthy is a startup that's working on creating a universal protocol but MRV requires high quality regional to global scale observations as well as nested regional and global scale models without MRV additionality and durability of carbon sequestration cannot be confirmed. The last thing that I wanted to talk about today was the is something else that congress has a role in which is the need for a clear regulatory regime research governments and permitting are evolving quickly at EPA EPA is leading work on collaborating collaborating across agencies to determine how issue research permit how to issue research permits within the U.S. easy. Agreements also needed on what constitutes responsible appropriate deliberate experiments and not implementation guidance is also needed to determine what constitutes unregulated or rogue behavior in this field. Code of Conduct and best practices and best practice guides are a good start to that work and maybe another step towards community and maybe another step is towards community research norms, funder imposed requirements or regulations requiring an external auditor. Other disciplines such as biomedical research may hold more inspiration for us as technologies move from laboratory tests toward in field use and guidance is also needed about who holds authority over MCDR is it simply environmental permits or who has a say over whether any carbon removal achieved should be incorporated into green house gas mitigation plans like our NDC. Last but not least liability guidance is also needed who is liable for the outcomes of these experience and how can we deal with any harmful or unintended consequences and are these things the same for both experiments and deployment. With that I know that I've raised a lot more questions than direct answers but I do also know that Ocean Conservancy is really committed to continuing to work with all of our colleagues in Congress on reaching answers to those solutions and are reaching answers to those questions and we're really excited to move forward with that. Thank you all. No, I don't know anything about this stuff. Someone's going to ask me a really hard question and I won't have the answer. I'll just, you know, I'll make you look bad. Our last panelist of the day is Gabby Kitch. Gabby is a marine chemist who leads NOAA's involvement in marine carbon dioxide removal research. She first joined NOAA's Ocean Acidification Program as a John A. Knoss Fellow focused on international policy during which time she began to support carbon dioxide removal efforts. In her current role at NOAA, Gabby manages the National Oceanographic Partnership Program Marine CDR Research Portfolio supports the development of actions outlined within the new Ocean Climate Action Plan, participates in various domestic outreach activities, and continues to track international engagement in the marine CDR space. And I know that we have other Knoss Fellows right now. So, Nico, thank you for one and they do amazing work and eventually they become EESI panelists. So, Gabby, all welcome you to the lectern. Thanks for being here. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you to EESI. Thank you to WRI. And thank you to the wonderful panelists who set me up so well for this presentation. So now I get to focus on all the fun things and don't have to define a single term in my whole presentation. So as I was introduced, I'm Gabby Kitch. I'm the marine carbon dioxide removal lead with NOAA's ocean acidification program. And I would want to take just one moment to point out that I am located within the ocean acidification program. This is largely due to what Katie mentioned as the benefits for ocean acidification mitigation that marine carbon dioxide removal potentially has. So it's an important distinction to point out. You all are very familiar with what has been going on on the hill and Savvy did a great job of walking us through with a current carbon dioxide removal policies that are in place right now. I just want to take one more moment to focus in on the ocean climate action plan or OCAP as many of us refer to it as. This was released in March of 2023. And in the ocean climate action plan marine carbon dioxide removal was one of the actions mentioned and moving us towards a carbon neutral future. And this is really important, especially because NOAA was outlined in nearly 75% of these marine carbon dioxide removal actions as the lead agency. Of course, we can't do it alone. Many other agencies are outlined in the ocean climate action plan as well. And the ocean climate action plan resulted in what Savvy also mentioned the Fast Track Action Committee or FTAC as we call it. This FTAC was set up by the National Science and Technology Council and now brings together about a dozen agencies across the US government to write a research plan on marine carbon dioxide removal. So we have had a number of listening sessions throughout the month of March and one in April. And as Savvy also mentioned we do still have a public comment period right now through a federal register notice. So we love QR codes. If you want to check out that FRN, please scan the QR code and we welcome anybody to submit comment through that portal. So NOAA's role and mission in science stewardship and service is really key to its leadership in the field of marine carbon dioxide removal. NOAA has always invested in foundational climate research in terms of monitoring greenhouse gases both in the atmosphere but also in the ocean. Climate impacts to ecosystem and of course climate models. With this perspective, NOAA wrote a carbon dioxide removal research strategy which was published in June of last year 2023. Another QR code here. If you haven't had the opportunity to check out our strategy, I do encourage you to scan this QR code and take a look. This will take you to a landing page which has a couple of different resources. I didn't bring any hand out so this is your avenue to the resources where you can have, you can find a two pager that summarizes the research plan but also the full research plan. And the research plan really takes you through four different aspects of carbon dioxide removal research. First it starts with the federal motivation for carbon dioxide removal research which we briefly went over and Savvy did a really great, robust overview of that. We also go through the state of the science which is ever-evolving so do not default us if it is now out of date already not even one year later. And then the third part of it really goes through NOAA's assets that could be expanded to support the marine carbon or the carbon dioxide removal ecosystem at large and I'll take a second to go through those in just a minute. And then the last aspect of this is really a vision for carbon dioxide removal research at NOAA and this is not assuming that we need carbon dioxide removal research that's outlined in the other parts of the plan but indicating if the field moves forward and is scaled and is commercialized how NOAA envisions it could play a role in supporting the field. What that largely has to do with is these existing assets that NOAA has. So this is a simplified version of Table 2 in the full strategy and I'll quickly walk through these four different bins here. So we have our observing networks which of course are kind of the gold standard for observing atmospheric and oceanic greenhouse gases. We also have our modeling capabilities that can really focus on the projection different climate projections and impacts to ecosystems of those various projections. Those two together are what underpin the foundation of an accountable marine carbon dioxide removal ecosystem right? So we're talking about selling carbon credits. Sarah did a really great job of discussing MRV and our need to understand a baseline carbon dynamics in the ocean. These two are the keys to unlocking those markets and the accountability for those different aspects. Third, we have our ability to assess environmental impacts and so we have shown this through our laboratory involvement in looking at ocean acidification impacts for instance and this involves modeling laboratory research and large tank experimental research along within the field. We also have our decision support products right? We like to provide services to the public. So these range from data management what it means to actually upload an archive ocean data in a long term site and how we can then expand that to incorporate marine carbon dioxide removal research that is key again to this accountability picture but also to moving the field forward in an equitable way for the global community. We also have marine spatial planning research and services that are provided and I can talk more about those in the panel if you are curious about that. And I'll also point out these assets are spread across the agency not just within one office even though I am representing my office here today. So it's very important point to call out and I will note to right now we have very limited investments that are going to expanding these assets. We can currently just maintain what we have been investing in to support that foundational underpinning of the ecosystem. So many people mentioned this NAP program and I will go through it in a minute but I want to take a moment just to drive home one point here about the necessity of marine carbon dioxide removal research. So we know that the earth and our ecosystems are currently feeling the impacts of climate change. I'm sure many of you have been reading popular news stories about coral bleaching recently that Noah's coral reef watch has quantified as unprecedented due to the carbon pollution that exists in our atmosphere causing dramatic ocean warming this year. Yes, the risks of marine carbon dioxide removal research are there and many of them might be unknown but the risks of climate change are also very much here. So we are living in this risk risk scenario and what we can do in terms of marine carbon dioxide removal is expand the foundational research to better quantify the risks in this research portfolio and be able to make decisions and form decisions in the future about deploying these different strategies. So with that introduction I'm going to talk a little bit about our National Oceanographic Partnerships Program leadership and this is really Noah ocean acidification programs lead here but again this would not be made possible without a lot of our interagency partners and also one philanthropic partner. So we leverage the National Oceanographic Partnerships Program in both fiscal year 22 and 23 and I'll focus on the 22 portfolio first as this is a little bit more robust as you see from the slide we ended up supporting 17 marine carbon dioxide removal projects for a total of $24.3 million and this does include $14 million in inflation reduction act funding so even though there weren't necessarily flags and earmarks for IRA for marine carbon dioxide removal we were able to leverage this under the climate resilience accelerator program and what's really great about the knob is that it's a multi-sector partnership the eligibility requirements in this grant require applicants to be from multiple sectors and this is really representative of the field here as you can see from the panel it's bringing all these different federal agencies private partners and academic partners together so while we supported 17 projects we in total supported nearly 50 institutions across the US and one collaborator in Japan and 80 unique principal investigators I'll quickly go over our 22 portfolio which is just one project and this was this is a project that is led by the University of Washington in collaboration with the Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory, the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and EBCARBIN as the private partner so all of our funding partners are listed on this slide I do encourage you to check out this project search function as if you want to learn more about our research portfolio this just shows the diversity of partners here so with that I'm going to wrap up here and just talk about what is next many of these points have already been discussed so Noah is directly involved in the F-TAC we are currently co-chairing the fast track action committee and we have two members myself included we're also formalizing relationships with multiple agencies on marine carbon dioxide removal that goes beyond our funding portfolio so this includes the Department of Energy and also the EPA and then the big takeaway here is that our role and Noah's role in the earth system observing is critical to determine if marine carbon dioxide removal is valid and responsible as a climate solution right we're thinking about defining the efficacy and the safety of these methods through our research portfolio as a Noah entity we are currently drafting our our own implementation plan that discusses concrete actions and prioritizes different actions within the agency and we plan to work closely with the F-TAC strategy on that so with that we can move to questions I think that was a great presentation and we have a fair amount of time for cues and we'll count on our panel for the A's so thank you very much let's see I'm going to kick us off with just a quick overview question and then we'll go to the audience and this one and Katie I think we'll come back to you maybe and we'll start and then maybe we'll move through the panel but now that we've all heard the presentations from the five of you do you have any more thoughts about what to make of the uncertainties surrounding ocean carbon dioxide removal and how for folks in our audience today who are having questions about these uncertainties what should they be thinking about from the perspective of how do we go about making decisions, policy decisions funding decisions given the uncertainties what are some ideas for the path forward and then Katie we'll hear from you and then we'll move through the rest of the panel and then we'll open it up yeah so I think everyone kind of touched on the fact that there's uncertainties around the efficacy how well do these approaches work how quickly can they sequester carbon over what duration do they sequester carbon is it re-released at some point and then also uncertainties around the ecological and environmental impacts the social impacts of these the ancillary impacts of doing these so and I think of course all of these depend on the scale of the project the location probably the season the duration of the project how it's applied so there's a lot of different factors at play here and I guess one thing that we've been thinking about is if you think about the uncertainty around efficacy and environmental impacts they're kind of dependent on each other like if you know directionally that the efficacy is going to be positive but you have less certainty about the environmental impacts that can tell you something else rather than if you have no certainty about the directionality of the efficacy and no certainty about the directionality of the impact so maybe it's better to prioritize an approach that you're more certain is effective and then thinking about the impacts there but yeah I think this is kind of the perennial question that comes up a lot is like how do you who gets to decide what a suitable threshold of uncertainty around the impacts or the efficacy is how do you compare that to a business as usual kind of trajectory that Gabby mentioned we're dealing with climate change the risks of that versus the risks of potentially doing an ocean CDR approach that might have different types of impact so how do you weigh those different types of uncertainties against each other and who gets to decide that ultimately so no real answer there just more questions but I'm sure other panelists will have more to say on that thanks Katie savvy so I think I might tie it back to something Sarah said at the end of her remarks which is there are a lot of questions right now with marine CDR and not to you know keep beating on this but research and development right now is super critical to better understand what are the power needs for a lot of these technologies right now we're working in labs and we're working in very controlled situations when we take these out of the lab they're going to function very differently and we don't know what those different anomalies could be so power use location yes we all think of the coast but is there any infrastructure that we can leverage from the coastal areas I know waste management treatment centers are one of the options that a lot of companies are considering at the moment just because there's already sort of that built-in capacity to retrofit maybe system onto it and then also second thing I want to drive home is on the permitting piece so Edward made a really good point that you know a lot of this can work today but there's no clarity on how this process is permitted and there's so many different types of marine CDR technologies that are emerging that every process will have a different permitting process as well related to it so marine or macro algae syncing is going to be very different than electrochemical separation for example and I think that clarity is really really important and then lastly to the MRV point we really need to know how much carbon dioxide we are removing and what the net removals are and the impacts on this on total carbon removed thanks Edward so when we think about uncertainty very rarely is the right answer in action right and when we're thinking about a pending calamity I can tell you now the right answer is not going to be standing still or red tape so the right answer is going to have to be based and grounded in science in facts and data the right answer is going to have to be grounded in communities those who are actually going to bring these projects within what they are doing and then allow for deployment on scale and the right answer is going to have to be done in the pace that's commensurate with the actual challenge that we're all facing so I'd flip it around and I think implore those who are listening to think through science and community and pace and those three things need to happen and that's the priority and the uncertainty will be awash once you've thought through those three thanks sir yes to piggyback off of that one thing that there is a lot of consensus in the scientific community about is that we will need some form some level of carbon dioxide removal in order to meet our being the global our climate goals and the uncertainty exists then in the implementation of these methods within that uncertainty there's uncertainty surrounding to the extent that the uncertainty is surrounding implementation I think the answer to that is research and making sure that we have the data to back things up to the extent that the uncertainty is surrounding the research I think that we do know a lot around the kinds of things that we need to take into account that things like to go back to my presentation a code of conduct could address as we move forward with that research to make sure that we are doing this all with the best intent and not causing unnecessary harm thanks and Gabby yeah the panelists have done a great job setting me up once again so it's a great question about uncertainty it's an emerging field there are so many uncertainties in this field but really what I'm thinking about in terms of this fast-track action committee process and also with our not research portfolio is field testing and what are the uncertainties that are prohibiting field testing and getting these projects in the water and when that question is asked it's usually the uncertainty around what's happening with marine ecosystems right that's what the communities care about that's what the other marine users care about and also that's what we should care about as ocean scientists is what is going to happen with our ecosystems there's not a lot of research right now there is some research maybe that just needs to be synthesized but I would love to see a greater research effort focused on environmental impacts and ecosystem impacts great thanks and I think we have some questions in the audience I have to go to Nico first because I have to go to Nico first but then we'll go to in the middle of the aisle and thanks to Megan our policy intern for being on my duty today go ahead Nico what a privilege thank you my question is about MRV which came up in basically everyone's presentation I'm wondering if there's any lessons we can glimpse from the terrestrial CDR space with regard to MRV and sort of what role you see policymakers or the government playing in regulating MRV or do you see this being more of a third party regulatory role for example should the federal government come up with standards for MRV or do we want to leave that to the third party so just curious if you have thoughts on that thank you thanks this is a audience questions are free for all questions so whoever would like to chime in please feel free lots of note taking you triggered it's going to be both so it is both and for us I think it comes back to that demand and the importance of peace we need clarity over MRV it allows us to then build large and large facilities and establish credibility with buyers and so we are seeing what's working well in some parts of the globe so you've got independence and you've got governments working together on the MRV piece thanks oh go ahead Savi yeah and I'll just add there are currently a lot of initiatives to better understand MRV from not just third parties but the federal government itself and so currently through DOE's FECM there's the actually it might just be through DOE as totality but carbon negative shot that's actually looking at MRV as well and then the office of technology transfer actually just put on an RFI I think last year on better understanding what MRV looks like and what are some of the factors to consider so it is being worked on in the federal government and then also with nonprofits that are looking at how to better understand the frameworks for every different type of process but I think there is something to be said about a federal sort of stamp of approval that would help de-risk a lot of the uncertainties around MRV at the end of the day so while we are figuring it out now that is definitely needed but at the end of the day as it relates to some of the comments that were raised earlier like what happens to this carbon once it's removed and when we purchase it like right now the voluntary carbon market has a lot of different evaluation metrics and I think a lot of varying levels of confidence whereas when we are trying to work on this now I think we have the opportunity to work off a blank slate basically and so I would say federal sort of stamp of approval is definitely something that would be valuable. Great thanks, go ahead Gabby. Yeah and just from the federal perspective I will say that thinking about these kind of more standard operating procedures for monitoring and reporting of verification is definitely a shared interest among multiple federal agencies now included given our existing assets for monitoring carbon in the ocean we definitely would one of the vision points in our carbon dioxide removal research strategy is to act as a verifier for carbon going into the ocean ultimately if we can't constrain this new carbon dioxide removal sink we're failing at our mission to constrain the carbon cycle. Great thanks Sarah. Yeah the only thing that I'll add to all these really great answers is that because your question asked about land-based methods and how that translates to ocean one thing that we'll always have to think about in translating land-based methods to the ocean is that ocean will always be more international in nature in our solutions to these problems just by the fact that it covers 70% of the globe and currents exist so that's one thing to think about. Great thanks and I saw you had your hand up I think you might be the first hand I saw go up so take it away. Thank you Dan. Nicole Gardner from the foundation for climate restoration first of all thank you to all of you you were really clear and very specific which is very helpful in the sea of uncertainty sorry for the pun and I want to thank both Katie and Edward and Gabby for pointing out the conundrum we're facing or the paradox of the risk-risk nicely put Gabby of weighing the uncertainties versus the calamities that we're facing so for all of you what's the single thing you can think of beyond everything you've already said which has been fantastic that could push us forward faster our goal is to push forward the idea of the legacy load and the recognition that we need to get below net zero by 2050 in order to and that's a pretty fast timeline so what can we do to move ourselves along faster thanks. Gabby would you like to start or is that too much and then we'll move down the line maybe. I'm happy to start and it relates back to my point about field testing so I think really focusing on scaled research so for those approaches that haven't had any foundational research yet starting at the modeling stage going to laboratory studies then getting out into the water and making sure that we have efficient pathways to get to the point where they're testing responsibly in the water would be the easiest way to get us moving again that takes resources and research programs and those types of things. I can't say I have anything to add to that I will go on that one. Edward Yeah it's price and it's too expensive it needs to be stimulated demands to the market for high quality CDR and until we get price lower we won't see the volume. I don't really have anything to add so I'll just pass on to that. Yeah agree with everything everyone else has said I think and I already said this so it's not necessarily new but I think more funding to do this research to do the at sea testing we need to see how these approaches work under what conditions what their impacts are I think also just more general education for the public I guess we talk a lot about doing community engagement to inform these projects but a lot of people don't even know what carbon removal is they don't know what ocean carbon removal is so doing more of that general outreach I think it's also a question of who bears that burden should it be the government should it be local entities etc that could be a whole other discussion but I think that's something that's also needed. Great thanks there's a cluster of hands I saw you next so I think you are you might be the last question unless the questions real quick and then I saw you next so. Okay hi I'm Lauren Barrett with House Science I think this question is for Gabby but I welcome other chiming in I'm wondering if you can speak to the state of the science in even doing the monitoring and I'm thinking for things that are diffuse more like ocean alkalinity enhancement is the technology even there to see those changes in carbon and to verify permanence or duration and what do you need to make it better this is a great question and the quick answer is no not yet and the Department of Energy's RPE launched a program cco2 that really focuses on exactly this question and thinking about different sensors that could be used for monitoring reporting and verification so I think that's a very valuable program and one that we are closely working and coordinated with but in terms of you know understanding what needs to happen it's increasing like RPE is doing increasing these sensors and the availability of these sensors also increasing the ability for sensors to be outfitted onto autonomous platforms right we all love robots self-driving cars no I'm just kidding but it can definitely speed up the process of monitoring and the ocean rather than just doing shipward assessments and also lower the cost in the long run so there are a few key points there and we could talk many more details about specifics in terms of the sensors available and what needs to be improved there great thanks Gabby I think we can squeeze in one more and I saw your hand go up so Megan we're in the front row Megan we're in the front row thank you just quickly I think this might be for Savi but we talked a lot about the regulatory hurdles the investment needs the new policies the environmental degradation possibilities is there I'm curious how you think about the differences between nature based solutions and tech based solutions because most of that is around tech based solutions right but there are current nature based solutions and maybe more that can develop over time they won't have some of these same hurdles so can you you have to put it all in one category or is there a way that you can think about it in different sections and move nature based solutions forward in the interim while technologies are still being tested or you know how do you how do you think about that yeah I think you put it beautifully I think that there's a lot of different solutions out there and we should be taking a technology inclusive approach we shouldn't be putting all of our eggs in one basket because that definitely stimulates technology lock-in and sometimes we could be moving forward with the wrong either less efficient solution or just more costly solution and so making sure that we're looking at all different options and moving forward with the natural solutions because they might be more ready for prime time today is highly valuable and and I mean an example of this is running tide they are growing seaweed which is a very natural process and allowing that to just accelerate by you know intentionally moving forward with these projects and creating sort of a pathway forward for that is is valuable but again we need to understand these technologies as they work in scale because of course growing seaweed naturally is very different than growing seaweed intentionally and that can change like ecosystems and so there's still a lot of questions that need to be answered in that way but I think that's why you know ensuring that permitting rubrics outline different sort of pathways as they become ready for prime time is really valuable and actually my colleague Jasmine Yu who helped co-author the report that I mentioned earlier on charting a course for Marine CDR is here and so if you guys have any follow up questions after we'd be happy to stay behind and answer those. Great thanks Gabby did you have something you wanted to or are you just looking eager? Just a quick point here that piggyback's office was saying nature based versus engineered solutions are a little bit tricky in this space because a lot of pathways do augment accelerate natural processes just like you pointed out with the seaweed example ocean alkalinity enhancement is the same as Edward pointed out right this is a weathering process that happens on land but I think people are just thinking about speeding it up so those terms get a little tricky in this landscape. Thanks all right well that I'm sorry we didn't get to all the questions but hopefully our panelists may be able to hang out for a bit and do some networking but they deserve a round of applause because they did a really great job thank you such a great panel it was such a great panel I'd also like to thank our representative Pingree for joining us via pre-recorded remarks thanks to her and her staff for making that possible just monster thanks to Senator Schatz's office Senator Heinrich's office and the senate rules committee for all the hard work they did helping us with the room today and we really couldn't have done this without our friends at WRI with their partnership so thank you so much for everything that you were able to do and Katie thanks for being part of our amazing panel today I also have a great set of colleagues at ESI I'd like to thank Dan O with Dan O'Brien because there's two Dan's I'm Dan B I'd like to thank Omri, Allison, Aaron, Anna, Molly and Nicole for all their hard work pulling the briefing together today we also have three great interns who will be leaving us soon unfortunately Emily, Kylie and Megan thanks for all your hard work as well and Troy of course we couldn't do this without you everyone watching our live cast today should say thanks right now to Troy for helping us with the videography before I wrap it up I'm just gonna put the survey up on the screen if you would like to share comments about the session today the QR code we like QR codes too the QR code will take you to the survey like I said we read every response and if you have any feedback if you're an online audience and the sound was weird or something didn't look right just let us know and we'll always do it a little bit better our next briefing is on May 1st and we'll be presenting this with our friends at American Rivers and it's gonna be really great it's called Dan's in every district challenges, opportunities and what's ahead I'm mostly just excited about the pun opportunity and a briefing all about Dan's I can't wait so don't miss that May 1st we'll also be on Capitol Hill on July 30th for the Congressional Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Expo Policy Forum and Reception and if you want to keep track of everything that we're up to subscribing to our bi-weekly newsletter Climate Change Solutions is a great way to stay in the loop and keep track of everything we're a few minutes over sorry about that but I think it was well worth it I hope everyone enjoys the rest of their amazing afternoon here in DC and we'll be back on May 1st so thanks everyone, thanks