Odlin confirms that for Running Tide, for all Icelandic woodchips in the ocean, it was impossible to monitor the woodchips for more than three hours after their release. He says, “We couldn't measure the signal from ocean noise about alkalinity.”
The dead zone
Despite selling credits to Stripe, Shopify, Microsoft and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, financial pressure on Running Tide continued to mount as the flow of money from Silicon Valley dried up. According to a former employee, Odlin would start meetings in the spring of 2024 by announcing that the company only had a few weeks of cash left before it would have to close. In June, Odlin admitted defeat.
In a June 14, 2024, LinkedIn post, Odlin wrote that “there simply isn't the demand needed to support large-scale carbon removal.” The company ceased its global operations that month. Almost all employees in Iceland and the US were suddenly laid off. One employee was giving a presentation about Running Tide at an algae conference when he was told the news.
“People were happy with our credits. We filled our contracts. We sold additional contracts. It just wasn't enough,” Odlin says. Running Tide had sold $30 million in credits and said it had commitments for tens of millions more, but by Odlin's estimate the company needed somewhere between $100 million and $150 million in sales. “That was about the rent we were designed for.”
The legacy the company leaves behind after the wood chip dumping is unclear. It is simply not known what effect the sinking of biomass will have on the ocean, and WIRED scientists and deep-sea experts said they remain hesitant about pursuing such marine geoengineering until more is known about the deep sea.
Dumping biomass into the ocean could create “dead zones,” areas where aquatic life runs out of oxygen, says Samantha Joye, a Regents' professor in the University of Georgia's Department of Marine Sciences, who has worked on dead zones in the Mississippi Delta and on the cleanup of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill.
Deep-sea environments – some of which provide life-saving medicines or insights into how Earth formed early on – could also be damaged forever, Joye adds. A recent carbon flux report from Convex Seascape Survey, an international research collaboration, shows that once the seafloor is disturbed, it could actually stop the ability of sediments to absorb carbon. Joye also points out that without proper research, ocean alkalinity could also cause spikes in ocean acidity if a lot of carbon is sucked into the sea that is then not distributed into the deep waters – the exact opposite of what the treated wood chips were trying to achieve.
