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Here's how one startup is using seaweed to reduce carbon emissions

Marty Odlin, Running Tide CEO, discusses the startup's latest initiative to fight climate change.

Video transcript

AKIKO FUJITA: Welcome back to Yahoo Finance Live. Well, it is no secret carbon emissions caused by human activity are accelerating climate change. Our next guest has come up with a pretty creative way to capture some of those harmful pollutants from the air, in part by trapping it under the ocean floor. Let's bring in the CEO of Running Tide. We've got Marty Odlin joining us today. And Marty, you've got some pretty big name investors who've lined up behind your company, including Chris Sacca. Talk me through the process here. How does it work?

MARTY ODLIN: Sure, well, you know, the goal of carbon removal is to remove anthropogenic emissions and sequester them. And sequestration can mean a bunch of different things. It can mean storing it in soils, injecting it underground, or in our case, sinking it into the deep ocean, which is the largest carbon sink on Earth.

AKIKO FUJITA: I mean, you've been growing out kelp farms as well as part of this process. We've heard a lot about carbon capture technology. We've had startups like Climeworks on the show as well. Why--

MARTY ODLIN: OK, great.

AKIKO FUJITA: --is this or how is this different? And why is it more effective?

MARTY ODLIN: Sure, well, you know, all carbon removal solutions are great. We need to pursue all of them. Our approach is unique because we're using the ocean. And we're using ocean currents, the sun, and gravity to remove carbon from the upper ocean and atmosphere. So what makes our solution unique is that it's a nature-based solution similar to, like, forestry, but we're getting permanent. So we're moving it permanently from the carbon cycle by sinking the forest that we grow. So we grow a kelp forest, sink it into the deep ocean, thereby removing the carbon from the carbon cycle.

ZACK GUZMAN: That's pretty awesome. And for anybody who maybe didn't take marine biology in high school, I mean, talk to me about the partners that have now jumped on board here because you guys work with Shopify is one of the ones I saw on the list in terms of them also signing up to kind of leverage this technology. How have they helped in really growing this out?

MARTY ODLIN: Oh, yeah, I mean, the Shopifys and Stripes of the world are being-- are fantastic partners. They're really pushing these emerging technologies that permanently remove carbon from the atmosphere. And they've been very supportive, signing-- helping us to sign contracts and research partnerships, et cetera. But we're also working with the Ocean Visions Group and Cambridge University on validating the technology and the carbon storage that we're seeing.

There seems to be this groundswell of support among large companies that are interested in offsetting carbon emissions and reaching their net zero goals over the next 15 to 20 years. And they see that permanent carbon removal solutions are basically a critical part of their future climate strategies, and they're starting to support these emerging technologies in order to have a foot in the door, essentially, into these industries.

AKIKO FUJITA: You know, Marty, we should point out that Running Tide isn't just about carbon capture. You're also helping with rebuilding, you know, food systems, restoring the oceans. But I'm curious about what inspired you to do this because you come from a family who has spent generations in offshore fishing. What is it that you saw that you felt the need to act in this way?

MARTY ODLIN: Yeah, you know, very fortunate to grow up in a family of-- both sides of the family, you know, commercial fisherman and outdoors people who, you know, are always living right at the interface between nature and industry. And over time, you just see an accumulation of signals that all is not right in the natural world, and the provisioning capacity of nature is at risk.

You know, just being involved in these industries from an early age, you can just see when-- you learn how to observe nature and learn that that interface between nature and industry is, like, basic-- that's what feeds us. That's what supports civilization. And we're starting to see an erosion there, so alarming that we have to do something to stop it. We have to do something to reverse it.

We have to start approaching these-- the problems that we're seeing in the ocean and in the natural world on land. We have to start restoring them at the scale of the problem, essentially. We have to start working at the scale of the problem, which is at an industrial scale.

This isn't something that we can-- carbon removal, ocean ecosystem restoration, rewilding on land. These are necessary things to do to-- and they're going to be massive industries moving forward. They're just not optional. And I just-- growing up in this-- in a family where nature was held in such high esteem, there's just-- you know, I felt like it was a responsibility of mine to do the best I could to make a better future.

ZACK GUZMAN: Yeah, and scalability really does seem to be the question. We have a lot of climate guests on here who are debating whether or not any of this, you know, carbon capture technology is going to be enough to kind of combat all the pollutants out there, all the carbon emitted. And so when you try and scale this, I mean, how scalable is it, really, to be growing this much kelp at the rate that needs to be grown and sinking it to the bottom of the ocean? And if you hit that, are there maybe any other ecological questions around that much kelp sitting on the bottom of the ocean floor?

MARTY ODLIN: Absolutely. I mean, look, like, we are a technology company. And what we do is we add sensors to every system we build, and we try to understand what are the possibilities for scale and where are the limitations. That's, like, what we're actually doing is finding out what's possible. You know, you can pencil out these types of solutions. And it's really hard to get to massive scale.

You know, the IPCC report that came out was very clear we need to remove at least 450 gigatons of carbon from the atmosphere in order to reach 1.5 degrees of warming. If we don't do that, we are going to see devastation on a scale that no one-- there's no devastation in living memory can match this. So we have to compare any environmental drawbacks of any specific solution against the sum total of what warming is going to do to our planet and ecosystems.

Yeah, I mean, we're committed to finding and being transparent with the results of our experiments, with all of our partnerships that we mentioned. But I think that people need to understand that what we're talking about, what carbon removal is, removing 450 gigatons of carbon from the atmosphere, that is the biggest industry in the history of the world. That's what needs to get built. It's nothing has been built like this in living memory of anybody. This will be 150 years of the fossil fuel industry reversed and done in 20 years. So--

AKIKO FUJITA: So--

MARTY ODLIN: We're--

AKIKO FUJITA: --to-- Marty, to what extent has this already been deployed, this particular technology Running Tide has? And how quickly can you scale up enough to make some dent in that massive number that you just pointed to?

MARTY ODLIN: Yeah, I mean, look, like, with-- one, this is a natural system. You know, kelp sinking into the deep ocean, macro, microalgae sinking into the deep ocean, that's where oil came from, right? So what we're doing is accelerating it, nudging it forward. We've done enough testing to know that this will work. We can remove carbon in this way. We can remove additional carbon this way. So we've been doing ongoing testing for about 18 months.

How quickly we can scale up is going to be determined by the results of these experiments and this data analysis that we're doing. We're certainly not going to jump ahead of science. We're going to do this in lockstep with the academic community and with research institutions and with governments. Suffice to say that this is, I think, probably the-- I think that what Running Tide is doing, sinking kelp forests can get to megatons very quickly relative to other technologies.

But who is going to-- what technology is going to work to get us to the gigaton scale or the 10 gigaton scale? Too early to tell. I think these production ramps that we're talking about, everybody is just at the flat part of an exponential curve. And we're going to have to try all these different technologies to see where the bottlenecks emerge, so.

AKIKO FUJITA: We certainly look forward to following the progress. As you said, this is a huge undertaking in terms of trying to capture all the carbon emissions that are out there. Appreciate you joining us today, Marty. Marty Odlin, the CEO of Running Tide.