⚙️System Design & Principles

Running Tide set out on the ambitious mission to develop technologies which could remove enough carbon from the air and ocean to make a meaningful impact on atmospheric warming and ocean acidification. From the beginning, we noticed some important things about the problem we were trying to solve:

1. The scale of the problem is enormous. A billion tons of carbon is essentially impossible for a human to imagine and no one – not scientists, technologists, or regulators – really knows what gigaton scale carbon removal looks like.

2. Our world is also enormous. The oceans are vast in extent and similarly incomprehensible in their depth and volume. Humans have emitted a staggering net 1,500 billion tons of carbon dioxide (Gt CO2) since the industrial revolution – yet the ocean stores 37,000 Gt, or 25x that amount. Every year, humans emit 40 Gt CO2 but during this same period about 90 Gt CO2 pass between the ocean and atmosphere (though the ocean’s natural carbon pathways only remove 10 Gt CO2, an 11% efficiency, to long term storage – more about that in the full text of the Scientific Overview).

3. Carbon removal completely sucks and people hate it. We’ve made an absolute mess of our atmosphere and now we have to clean it up – cleaning up is not going to be easy or fun. It’s going to take a lot of energy and money, change the way we use vast amounts of land and ocean, and fundamentally alter communities and ecosystems. What’s especially offensive about carbon removal is that it is totally not optional. The international climate panel acknowledges that at this point, we unfortunately have to invent it to stave off the ravages of climate change. Carbon removal is by necessity a type of geoengineering. The obvious reason to distrust geoengineering is that it created this problem for us in the first place. We humans have changed the biogeochemistry of our world to optimize for energy and food production; and the unintended consequence has been a devastating distortion of the Earth’s carbon balance. For this reason, our impulse is to apply a high bar of caution to climate mitigation interventions like carbon removal. But this is a cognitive trap – since we cannot apply the same high standard to persisting in business-as-usual and inaction is not cautious, this intention to protect our ecosystems by halting carbon removal progress just perpetuates the carbon crisis.

The Running Tide team, like everyone else, did not know how to invent carbon removal. As engineers and technologists, we sought to take a disciplined, systems-design based approach to manage the challenges we were facing. Here are some working principles we adapted:

1. Seek leverage, prefer amplification.

In order to be useful, carbon removal needs to be operational and economical at scale. We did not think it credible that an engineered solution, one built out of steel and concrete and relying on grid electricity, could reasonably deliver. If you speak to the folks working on Direct Air Capture (DAC) – meaning giant factories that filter carbon from the air and stick it in a box – some of them will privately tell you that they are counting on the invention of nuclear fusion to power carbon removal at scale. We were, uh, not prepared to count on nuclear fusion. Instead we focused on open systems. If we could tap into the Ocean’s enormous existing system, amplify it, and improve its carbon removal efficiency from 11% to just 20%, then we’d be working at the scale of the problem. On the other hand, the drawback of open system interventions is that they are harder to measure. If you’re putting carbon in a box, then at the end you can just count how much carbon is in your box. We were not putting carbon in a box. We were, as our one time slogan stated, “putting carbon back where it belongs”: meaning into the slow-moving geological cycles of the earth system that begot the creation of fossil fuels in the first place. This measurement problem seemed like a good trade off. It was intuitive to us that we should prefer a solution that can remove, for example, 100 megatons of carbon +/- 25% than 1 megaton +/- 0.01%. We were surprised to learn that many people do not share this view.

2. Trust in the flywheel of investment and discovery

The basic idea here is that if you start doing something and realize that it is valuable, then you will want to keep doing it more and put resources behind learning how to do it better. There were so many parts of carbon removal that had never been done at any scale: how to survey, permit, deploy, measure, and explain it. Then in order to sell it you need to audit it, securitize it, and insure it. Running Tide’s approach was to get some rudimentary version of the full value chain up and running, and get the flywheel turning. There are so many things we don’t know about the ocean, but the best way to learn more about the ocean is to start working in the ocean. This turned out to be an incredibly controversial choice for us.

For example, a piece of international policy called the London Protocol (LP) suggests an explicitly anti-flywheel regulatory paradigm, though notably it is not actually implemented in law. LP’s Annex 4, which was never “entered into force” singles out ocean fertilization, perhaps our most promising carbon removal pathway, and imposes a de facto ban on all but academic research. This not-law has quietly been considered to set the tone for all marine carbon removal, and for a decade it essentially halted all work on ocean fertilization, including strictly academic research. It turns out that people don’t want to invest in the development of a technology for which there is a regulatory barrier to its use.

Also, here is a paper written by scientists and published in a journal saying that using seaweed for carbon removal is unethical because hungry people could eat the seaweed instead. But today we don’t perform any meaningful carbon removal and world hunger is not mitigated by seaweed aquaculture because seaweed aquaculture is expensive and inefficient. This speculation about a nonexistent dilemma ignores the flywheel effect that any investment in the cultivation and biotechnology of seaweed will be advantageous toward all seaweed end uses.

3. Uncertainty does not demand inaction.

Humans do not like uncertainty, and many things about carbon removal are uncertain. How much carbon will be removed by an open system intervention and for how long will it remain away from the atmosphere? In measurement, uncertainty can at least be quantified. Running Tide was always willing to handle uncertainty with conservative fudge factors and keep moving, trusting that the flywheel would catch up with us. Sometimes that got us skewered for being “ahead of the science,” but that’s because we were doing the science.

The question of action in the face of uncertainty becomes most controversial as it pertains to the effects that carbon removal could have on ecosystems. Any intervention in a complex dynamical natural system is going to change it, but by how much? And how much is “acceptable?”

Many people in carbon removal discuss the precautionary principle, and equate it with the phrase “do no harm.” But the precautionary principle tells us to contextualize uncertainty and risk against the urgency of a positive intervention. The baseline uncertainty about the future of ocean health within the context of climate change is enormous. The set of potential negative outcomes that need to be considered alongside carbon removal interventions pales in comparison. Guaranteeing no harm to commence climate mitigation work is simply not the bar to clear.

4. The progression principle.

The challenge of inventing carbon removal is that you have to develop technology that is robust in the field while not losing sight of the massive scale of the problem you are trying to solve. To manage this tradeoff, we endeavored to be hyper-disciplined in our thinking about separating top-down and bottom-up considerations.

Top down, open system carbon removal is limited by thermodynamics and the Earth system’s biogeochemical budgets. You don’t want to design down a path that will be hamstrung by these constraints at scale. Hence, Running Tide’s emphasis on minimizing anthropogenic energy inputs and rate matching our systems against nutrient and oxygen availability in the ocean.

Bottom up, the philosophy was to engineer and analyze systems at the scale we were currently operating. Because nobody knows what gigaton carbon removal will look like, don’t try to design a gigaton system until you’ve built a megaton system. We called this the progression principle.

At the megaton scale, our most reduced unit of design was the “carbon buoy.” This was a drifter that was intended to carry a payload first across the surface of the ocean, and then down to the ocean depths. The analytical toolkit we developed was organized around modeling and monitoring the motion of these carbon buoys through the ocean. The payload was designed to be flexible: it could be waste streams of biomass from agriculture and forestry at sites near deployment, it could be juvenile macroalgae endemic to the ocean basin we were operating in, or it could be alkaline material designed to dissolve in seawater.

The purpose of this flexibility was to rate-match what industrial logistics could provide – a bioreactor of algae seed here, a forestry project there – with the rate that ocean basins could metabolize carbon removal given their biogeochemical budgets. We believed that creating this interface was the only way to deliver open system carbon removal at scale.

But flexibility created complexity, and we found it hard to get certain stakeholders to pay attention as we tried to explain the plan. It became hard to shake our early branding as a “seaweed sinking” company. A prominent scientist and persistent critic once told us: “This shape-shifting across kelp iron OAE and woodchip dumping is not helpful.” But, like, not helpful to what?

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As Running Tide unwinds we are embarking on the project of disclosing the work and analysis we performed. Carbon removal is a complex subject. Our hope is that these systems principles give a frame and context to engage with the work we are presenting here.