Marine Carbon Dioxide Removal

Defining key principles for “fishery sensitive” mCDR

This resources page supports our Marine Carbon Dioxide Removal initiative.

mCDR Resource Center

Marine carbon dioxide removal (mCDR) is a new and experimental set of strategies. Many questions remain with regard to these methods’ technological readiness, carbon removal abilities, and ecological and social impacts. The resources on this page are here to build the fishing community’s essential literacy in the science and governance of mCDR, helping to ensure that we have a prominent role in guiding this field as it matures.

Video: Intro to mCDR for commercial fishermen

mCDR Pathways: Fact Sheets

These fact sheets, created for the Fishery Friendly Climate Action Campaign, are designed for a fishery audience. They highlight possible co-impacts (positive and negative) to fishery ecosystems and activities.

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Ocean Alkalinity Enhancement

This method involves the addition of alkaline materials to seawater to accelerate the ocean’s natural carbon uptake. Natural carbon uptake occurs when carbon dioxide from the air dissolves in seawater, and then combines with molecules already in the water to form bicarbonate and carbonate molecules, which are stable forms of carbon that do not re-enter the atmosphere. Adding alkalinity can increase the rate at which this process occurs, in turn enabling the ocean to absorb more carbon dioxide from the air to restore equilibrium.

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Ocean Fertilization

This approach involves the addition of micronutrients (e.g. iron) and/or macronutrients (e.g. nitrogen or phosphorous) to the surface ocean with the deliberate intent to (1) increase photosynthesis by marine phytoplankton, and thus enhance uptake of carbon dioxide from surface waters, and to (2) enhance the transfer of the newly formed organic carbon to the deep sea, away from the surface layer that is in immediate contact with the atmosphere.

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Artificial Upwelling and Downwelling

Artificial upwelling (AU) and downwelling (AD) could enhance the ocean’s natural vertical circulation patterns via a system of long vertical pipes equipped with circulation pumps. In AU, these pumps circulate nutrient-rich seawater upwards from the ocean’s depth into nutrient-poor surface waters, where (it is hoped) these nutrients can stimulate phytoplankton blooms. In AD, pumps circulate plankton-rich surface waters downwards into the ocean’s depths, where (it is hoped) the plankton biomass will remain deep underwater for thousands of years.

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Direct Ocean Capture

Direct Ocean Capture (DOC) involves the capture and removal of dissolved CO2 directly from seawater using electrochemical treatments, which can include electrolysis or electrodialysis. Under these treatments, an acidic solution is applied to seawater, converting bicarbonate to CO2, which can be subsequently stripped from the ocean water using membranes and vacuum pumps. The end products of DOC include CO2 gas and CO2-depleted seawater.

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Macroalgae cultivation and sinking

To count as carbon removal, the carbon sequestered by seaweed via photosynthesis must be locked away somewhere where those carbon molecules cannot re-enter the atmosphere for at least hundreds of years. The most cost effective and scalable use of seaweed as a carbon dioxide removal technique would be to simply cultivate large amounts of seaweed and sink it directly to the ocean floor.

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Key to mCDR Pathways

This resource, created for the Fishery Friendly Climate Action Campaign, is designed to help newcomers to the mCDR field tease apart the key differences between various abiotic and biotic mCDR pathways. Click here to explore the key in Lucid Chart.

Information and Resources from Around the Web

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Conversations on Ocean Carbon: A U.S. West Coast and Alaska Perspective

This recorded webinar series is co-organized by the California Ocean Science Trust, California Current Acidification Network, and Alaska Ocean Acidification Network to deliver the best available information on marine carbon dioxide removal (mCDR) and to explore concepts related to coastal ocean carbon. The series creates a direct dialogue among industry members, tribes, natural resource managers and scientists within the California Current and Alaska Ecosystems. Through these co-designed webinars, participants gain a better understanding of mCDR technologies, limitations, risks, and learn how to become engaged.

ClimateWorks Ocean CDR Animated Explainer Videos

These short explainer videos use animation to graphically explain various mCDR methods.

NOAA's Marine Carbon Dioxide Removal Engagement

Gabby Kitch from NOAA’s Ocean Acidification Program provides an overview of mCDR methods, NOAA's role in the space, and connections to larger U.S. government initiatives.

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A Research Strategy for Ocean Carbon Dioxide Removal and Sequestration

This report, published in 2022 by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, assesses what is currently known about the benefits, risks, and potential for responsible scale-up of six specific ocean-based CDR strategies. It describes the research needed to advance understanding of those approaches and address knowledge gaps. The resulting research agenda is meant to provide an improved and unbiased knowledge base for the public, stakeholders, and policymakers to make informed decisions on next steps.

Strategy for NOAA Carbon Dioxide Removal Research

This document was developed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Carbon Dioxide Removal Task Team (CDR Task Team), a cross-NOAA interdisciplinary team with relevant expertise in climate and carbon, coastal and open ocean science, aquaculture development, and ocean conservation. This report was published in May 2023.

A Code of Conduct for Marine Carbon Dioxide Removal Research

This Code of Conduct exclusively applies to mCDR research. Its purpose is to ensure that the impacts of mCDR research activities themselves are adequately understood and accounted for as they progress. It provides a roadmap of processes, procedures, and activities that project leads should follow to ensure that decisions regarding whether, when, where, and how to conduct mCDR research are informed by relevant ethical, scientific, economic, environmental, and regulatory considerations.

The Ocean Carbon Dioxide Removal Decision-Making Landscape

This overview of “who’s who” in the mCDR ecosystem focuses on four questions: Who is involved? Who should be? What do they want to know? What do they worry about?

Precautionary Principles for Ocean Carbon Dioxide Removal Research

This four-page statement makes the case that “principled ocean CDR research will help safeguard ocean systems” and “precautionary, inclusive, and well planned ocean CDR research must be conducted to ensure these technologies can benefit the climate without harming the environment and people.”

Toward Responsible and Informed Ocean-Based Carbon Dioxide Removal: Research and Governance Priorities

This report by the World Resources Institute distills the potential scale of mCDR, expected costs, risks, co-benefits, and areas of research needed for seven mCDR approaches. It proposes an overall approach centered on informed and responsible development and deployment of mCDR that balances the urgency of emissions reductions against the environmental and social risks of mCDR, including halting development where risks outweigh expected benefits.

A Comprehensive Program to Prove or Disprove Marine Carbon Dioxide Removal Technologies by 2030

This eight-page living document by Ocean Visions outlines a research agenda to answer fundamental questions about both the additionality and durability of carbon sequestered using mCDR approaches, and their environmental and social impacts.

Columbia University Sabin Center Publications on mCDR Law and Policy

Columba University legal scholar Romany Webb and colleagues have published a wealth of analyses on international, federal, and sub-national legal and policy dimensions of mCDR research and implementation.

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Ocean Visions

Ocean Visions is a science-based, nonprofit conservation organization that works with and across diverse sectors and disciplines to identify, co-design, evaluate, and support the implementation of bold, ocean-based solutions to counter and reverse climate impacts to the ocean. Resources include a global map of mCDR field trials, a set of interactive roadmaps focused on specific mCDR methods, and an mCDR ecosystem database that highlights the range and flow of mCDR activities and the interconnected roles of participants in researching, governing, and developing mCDR solutions.

[C]Worthy’s mCDR Ecosystem Map

The mCDR Ecosystem Map by the nonprofit [C]Worth illustrates both the flow of the emerging mCDR industry as well many stakeholders involved in researching, governing, developing, and deploying mCDR solutions. This source has since been updated and re-homed as Ocean Visions’ mCDR ecosystem database.