Plan Sea dives into the world of carbon removal certification, joined by experts Sophie Gill, Jing He, and Jennifer Yin from Isometric — a carbon credit certification platform and registry focused on high-quality carbon removal.

Carbon to Sea & the American University Institute for Responsible Carbon Removal announce a new collaboration for the second season of “Plan Sea” — a semi-weekly podcast exploring ocean-based climate solutions. Plan Sea will release episodes on a semi-weekly basis throughout Fall 2024, and is hosted by Wil Burns and Anna Madlener.

Our guests today, Lennart Bach, at the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies, University of Tasmania, and Veronica Tamsitt, Head of Oceanography at the mCDR MRV company, Submarine, are two of the authors of a very interesting research article recently published in the journal Global Biogeochemical Cycles, titled “Identifying the Most (Cost-)Efficient Regions for CO2 Removal With Iron Fertilization in the Southern Ocean.”

Ocean Iron Fertilization (OIF) is really the “OG” of marine-based CDR approaches, with the Ocean Iron Hypothesis being advanced by oceanographer John Martin in the 1980s, and 13 field experiments ensuing over the course of two decades, beginning in 1993, with the last experiment conducted in 2009.

It’s fair to say that interest in OIF largely fell into abeyance for a protracted period of time. However, recently, largely due to the efforts of researchers at Woods Hole, including Ken Buesseler, who we interviewed on a previous episode, as well as a spate of recent high-profile publications, OIF seems to be front and center again in the discussion of mCDR methods.

In this episode we discuss some of the most pertinent issues to assessing the potential role of OIF in a marine CDR portfolio, including costs, risks, and legal considerations. We hope this interview can do justice to some of the article’s most important conclusions.