Odlin confirms that for all of Iceland’s ocean chip deposits, Running Tide was unable to monitor the chips for more than three hours after they were released, saying, “We were unable to measure the signal from the ocean noise based on alkalinity.”
Dead Zone
Despite credit sales to Stripe, Shopify, Microsoft and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, financial pressure on Running Tide continued to mount as the Silicon Valley funding stream dried up. According to one former employee, Odlin began spring 2024 meetings by announcing that the company had only a few weeks of funds left before it would have to close. In June, Odlin admitted defeat.
In a LinkedIn post from June 14, 2024, Odlin wrote that “there is simply not the demand needed to support large-scale carbon removal.” The company ceased global operations this month. Almost all workers in Iceland and the US were suddenly laid off. When he was told the news, a staff member was presenting on Running Tide at an algae conference.
“People were happy with our loans. We were fulfilling contracts. We were selling additional contracts. It just wasn’t enough,” Odlin says. Running Tide sold $30 million in loans and said it had tens of millions more in liabilities, but Odlin estimated the company needed $100 million to $150 million in sales. “This was the rent we were made for.”
The legacy the company leaves behind when wood chips are discarded is unclear. There is simply no telling what impact the sinking of biomass will have on the ocean, which is why scientists and deep sea experts interviewed by WIRED remain hesitant to pursue such marine geoengineering until the deep sea is better understood.
Dumping biomass into the ocean can create “dead zones,” or areas where aquatic life is deprived of oxygen, says Samantha Joye, a regents professor in the University of Georgia’s Department of Marine Sciences who worked on dead zones in the Mississippi Delta as well as on the cleanup of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill.
Deep-sea environments – some of which provide life-saving medicines or insight into how early the Earth formed – could also be forever destroyed, Joye adds. Recent carbon stream report The international Convex Seascape Survey has found that disturbing the seabed can actually prevent sediments from absorbing carbon. Joye also points out that without proper research, increasing ocean alkalinity could also result in spikes in ocean acidity if they draw vast amounts of carbon into the sea, which is then not distributed throughout its deep waters – the complete opposite of what treated wood chips were trying to achieve.