Speaker

About the speaker: 

Matthew started working at Running Tide in August 2023 as a Cultivation Scientist in the Alda research facility, located in Akranes, Iceland. He leads the cultivation and research efforts in the scaling of Saccharina latissima, sugar kelp, for its open ocean deployment, growth, and eventual sinking as a supplement for terrestrial carbon sinking. Matthew received his doctorate from The George Washington University in evolutionary biology, focusing on the population genetics of invasive plants, and has conducted research at the University of Iceland and the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History.

Company info: 

Running Tide, Inc. is an ocean health company and the leader in ocean-based carbon removal. They amplify the natural pathways of the ocean to remove carbon safely and durably. While being founded and based in the United States, Running Tide has facilities in Iceland and is expanding operations into other countries.

Presentation:

The biggest threat to ocean health is the excess of CO2 in the fast carbon cycle, much of which gets absorbed into the ocean, leading to acidification and other negative effects. To combat these issues Running Tide sinks carbon from terrestrial sources in the ocean. They coat the biomass in alkaline materials and plan to use it as a substrate for growing macroalgae in the ocean to increase carbon sequestration through photosynthesis. Their facilities are researching and cultivating macroalgae seedstock at an industrial scale, for this purpose. Iceland is the first place where Running Tide is operating this entire system: producing macroalgae and carbon buoys, seeding the buoys, and then deploying them.