Global warming driven by atmospheric CO2 threatens our livelihood, and ocean acidification driven by natural ocean uptake of this CO2 threatens marine ecosystems. Planetary Tech, a small Dartmouth-based company, teamed with Dalhousie researchers, is leading global efforts to test a potential tool in the fight against both the climate crisis and ocean acidification. In this talk I’ll outline how this tool, called Ocean Alkalinity Enhancement, works, and explain how Nova Scotia has become a well-recognized world leader in the tool’s R&D.
Very lucky to have Dr William Burke the snowstorm could not stop him who is currently the chief ocean scientists of planetary Technologies come speak to us tonight uh planetary Technologies is a local company working to fight climate change by aiding ocean ocean removal of atmospheric carbon dioxide by enhancing ocean
Alkalinity and Dr Burt actually completed his PhD here at delous University back in 2015 where he studied Marine carbon and nutrient Cycles using isotopic tra tracers in the for Basin the scotian shelf and then also the North Sea he completed an endir post-doctoral fellowship at UBC uh studying phytoplank and Dynamics
Using shipboard and satellite based techniques so I’m sure a lot of very stormy days and he was a faculty member at the University of Alaska Fairbanks for over two years uh prior to being pulled back to Canada and getting his job at planetary Technologies in January 2022 where he is conducting some really
Exciting work that he’ll talk to us about today so welcome Dr and I’ll hand it over to you thanks an planetary is a small startup we’re located in Dartmouth um we got about 20 odd people working at the company now and our mission is here on the slide restore the climate heal the
Ocean and I’m going to talk about how we go about doing that uh for the next 40 minutes or so so I want to start by saying that everything I’ve shown I will show Here Comes from a whole lot of work not only from the 20 odd people at planetary but
A really huge network of support that we have and a lot of the support I want to talk about today is is coming from one place which is delous University um which I’ve circled there it’s been um an amazing collaboration with that group and um a lot of the data well some of
The data I’m going to show um and a lot of the work and and has gotten us here because of of dely scientists and the dely oceanography department so um thank you for that this is the basic outline of what I’m going to talk about um I’m going to talk
About the motivation for this work which is pretty obvious um all that horrible stuff in the corner there um the solution or at least what I call a small part of the solution um I’ll go through really fast some of the R&D that we’ve done over the past couple of years I
Call it hypers speed R&D because being a scientist at a startup company is a little different than being an academic uh and then I’ll talk about Halifax and our and our uh trial so I’ll start on my soap box at the beginning which is normal when you talk about
Climate change and then I’ll go down a few rabbit holes when I talk about the science as well just a warning okay so why are we doing this well it’s obvious there’s way too much atmospheric carbon dioxide um like way too much the atmospheric CO2 is up 50% from
Industrial times the global temperatures are going up even with dramatic emissions reductions the the estimates are that temperatures will go up pretty dramatically uh going towards 2100 emissions reductions are being implemented but too slowly uh for a long time now and they won’t be enough so the
IND um the intergovernmental panel on in of for climate change the ipcc in 2022 released this uh to say that we need to start thinking about not only um reducing our emissions but also actively removing them uh at really big scal so this is just showing uh emissions over time this big gray
Blob is the all emissions we have now and over time that’s going to have to come down but this blue color is the addition of of removal Technologies of actually actively taking CO2 out of the air and storing it in various places and what that blue color is
Showing you is that by 2030 we need about two to three billion tons of CO2 to get stored out um and by 2050 that needs to go up to about 10 billion tons so to put whatever a billion tons of carbon dioxide into context for you that means that the industry of carbon
Removal needs to grow to be about the size two to three times the size of the current oil production globally which is ridiculous and and terrifying um that’s that’s my emoji of choice when I think about the scales at which this stuff needs to happen in
Order to sort of avoid um the scariest parts of of the climate crisis now I want to talk really really clearly about this idea of of Net Zero as it relates to carbon dioxide removal and I and we got this slide actually from Dr ccho Fen at fenel Dy
Who I think she likes to hammer this point home and I think it’s really important so here’s what current emissions look like huge huge amounts of emissions CDR stands for carbon dioxide removal it’s shown there as a little slice but it’s microscopic you can’t even see it we’re doing tiny amounts
Right now so the net is all net emission some people think that what our company and other companies like ours is trying to do is grow the carbon dioxide removal so big that um emissions doesn’t need to be reduced you know we’ll just
Suck it all out of the air and we can go on as usual the problem with that is that this is not really feasible or I shouldn’t say not really it’s totally not feasible we won’t be able to go to this length and um that won’t work for
Net Zero now what might work whoops what might work is reducing our emissions really dramatically and then the last bit that we can’t remove um or we can’t reduce sorry we remove it and that gets us to Net Zero so this idea of the good and bad Net Zero is is really important
To drive home now maybe there’s a world in which we do scale CDR really big and we end up being net negative which is kind of what we need to do we need to take the Legacy emissions out of the air that are already up there um in the long
Long term but you know let’s one step at a time let’s just uh reduce our emissions grow CDR to cancel out the rest and the really important driving message here is that emissions reduction is still by far the most important lever we have in the fight against climate
Crisis so hopefully that resonates but the point is also that we need to reduce and we need to remove carbon pollution and companies like mine think the ocean is the place to do and I I think that’s pretty obvious um carbon dioxide removal can look like growing trees anyone who
Follows sort of carbon credit markets in the past know that growing trees is not the best way to permanently remove remove carbon in Nova Scotia where forest fires are are raging these days I would argue that’s that’s a good point too about tree growing trees you can
Also develop giant fans to to suck air out of the uh suck CO2 out of the air that’s happening now as well now we need all these things we need all the tools we can get but the oceans is by far the biggest Reservoir in contact with the atmosphere for
Carbon so we need a portfolio of solutions but it must include the oceans because look at how big the oceans are relative to everything else in terms of storage capacity now another way of looking at this is just the sheer amount of carbon in in these reservoirs so if
You took all the carbon in the atmosphere it would fit in 3/4 of a milk jug the equivalent in the ocean is basically a full bathtub that’s how much stored carbon U capacity there is in the oceans so to meaningfully reduce the amount of atmospheric CO2 so pouring out
Some of that milk jug into the bath you know you’d see a noticeable change in the amount of carbon in that milk jug but you wouldn’t notice much of anything in that bathtub in terms of the level so all we need to do is increase the ocean’s carbon content by a fraction of
1% and we can make a dent in the atmospheric CO2 levels now another reason why I like the type of removals that we do at planetary is that they can get really big and if you looked at that plot I showed of um the ipcc we need these solutions to get
Really big like that’s the scale of the challenge in front of us so um it’s well known that this type of of removal is is the most scalable and that’s one of the reasons it’s appealing okay so how do we increase the ocean’s carbon content by a fraction of a percent
The way in which we do that is mimicking a natural process essentially the geological carbon cycle so when rain falls on Earth it takes a little bit of CO2 out of the air with it on its way down becomes slightly acidic it uh dissolves the rocks on land those rocks
Make their way into rivers and flow down into the ocean and that dissolved rock material goes into the ocean as stored carbon and that process has been going on for billions of years and it’s actually the process that most drives our climate over long time periods so this whole burning climate problem we
Have will be taken care of by the Earth um in like 10 million years or 100 million years that that will you know find balance problem is we don’t have that much time not even close so we’re aiming to speed this up and we do that using something called ocean alkalinity
Enhancement which is an acronym don’t like but it’s not mine so I’m stuck with it um the ocean and the atmosphere are more or less in equilibrium when it comes the carbon dioxide carbon dioxide can move from the ocean to the atmosphere back and forth
If you add an Anta acid or uh the ground up rock material I mentioned in the previous slide you actually reduce the acidity of the ocean and that’s a really important point that I I don’t actually have a slide for it but you know folks here who have heard of ocean acidification
It is a really big problem all around the world and um the nice you know co- benefit of this process is that you are actually adding an antacid you’re adding a material that reduces acidity so I’ll I’ll speak about it a little bit more in a minute but by doing that you actually
Reduce the amount of carbon dioxide gas in the ocean you reduce the amount of acidity with the Anta acid so now you’ve got this sort of imbalance and what happens the CO2 in the air naturally invades into the ocean to fill that void and you reestablish equilibrium and that has driven CO2 out
Of the air and pushed it into the ocean um there’s a big fancy chemical equation for that down here but the simplified version of it is that you’re taking carbon dioxide you’re adding what’s called a hydroxide which is a base or that’s what’s in the anti acid and you’re combining that to form
Something called bicarbonate which is just essentially a salt and um that salt that bicarbonate ion is stable in the ocean for 10 to 100,000 years so it’s a very very stable and permanent form of carbon storage which is also a really important point so you don’t want things
That are going to reverse themselves in 10 50 100 200 years these things need to be permanent okay so I’ll get off my soap box now um and answer one of the questions you may have already which is um what is this guy talking about is this
Really going to work and is it going to be safe it’s kind of the killer question here right that’s the the million billion trillion dollar question and back in 2021 um delazy a a group of professors at dhy wrote a grant to study this it was very very very new at that time
Still fairly new but growing quickly and that was um our first grant in 2021 um since then it’s really taken off so there’s now four different grants all run through dely including the one you may have heard of last year the transforming climate action Grant which
Is 153 million dollar um not all focused on this work obviously but um a significant you know piece of the work is focused on climate Solutions in the ocean um and and it’s it’s incredible so there’s an amazing amount of momentum now to study this we’ve now moved onto
The West Coast where we’re working with my old colleagues at UBC in a very similar way to sort of study this in a different environment and who knows what’s coming next but I can say that you know climate Solutions is is a very very exciting topic to um philanthropic funders
Government funders you know um this is the sort of science that people are excited to do so I’ll start by talking about that first grant because those were our initial sort of first experiments right when I joined the company we started doing carbon removal in beakers and this is kind of what it
Looks like in Doug Wallace’s lab at dely um where we just added this sort of um called magnesium hydroxide um Anta acid to seawater beers and really what you’re seeing when you do that over and over again is that you do reduce the acidity in that Beaker so you actually
Increase the pH um you bring the alkalinity of the seawater up because you are enhancing alkalinity hence that acronym and then you see over a slower time period that the carbon content of that seawater goes up and that’s the proof in the pudding um when it comes to
You know that carbon dioxide from the air invading uh into the seawater and the beaker some colleagues at the University of Alaska sorry University of Miami slightly different place um reproduced a similar experiment you know we were in collaboration with them when we started this up um but they’ve
Published that paper a couple of years ago showing more or less the same thing and that is that this does work in in a beaker important point right it’s it’s very easy to prove things out in beers uh I’m a marine chemist that’s why I love chemistry so much it’s easy
Relative to some other things um but there’s a long way to go from there so next we went to the delazy aquatron so sort of cool scale ocean alkalinity enhancement and what you’re going to see when I play this is that there’s like a whole flurry of activity and that’s a
Nice visual for kind of the chaos that I am proud to say I brought on when I came into DAL to do this work a whole bunch of people all sort of swarming around helping out with various techniques various uh instruments put in the pool there there’s me filling up the the tank
I’m stirring it with a kayak paddle in case You’ noticed that the alkindi went zooming into the pool there for a second and then um and then we studied it for a couple of weeks we put lots of tools in we we had a a model of the aquatron done
By Dr GR Dr Ruth Musgrave and that was all that was all very fun and exciting in 2022 so the other big part of that work was starting to look at the safety right so this is um something called a mesocosm set up in Halifax Harbor uh
This was Dr Hugh McIntyre’s lab that did this work and his student Michaela um this is they have sort of control mesocosms and alkalized ones and um that work was done in 2022 and will be going in to this um this new Journal uh issue that’s coming out that’s all
About environmental impacts of ocean alkalinity it’s going to be out in a couple of months there’s going to be a whole swap of papers in there a lot of work from uh Dr McIntyre’s group including I think one of the people on this call uh Jess if if you can hear me
So um a lot of the early dedicated Research into this is super encouraging I wouldn’t say it’s surprising and I’ll talk about why that is in a minute it but you know the negative impacts of this type of thing only seems to show up when you do it at really extreme levels
And I think we can all agree that doing anything at extreme levels is not a great idea and this is another one of those examples so we gota we know some of the bars we need to stay well well below and that’s really really useful um but it’s very encouraging to know that
You know at at the more moderate concentrations things are looking pretty safe um it’s also really important to note that adding alkaline materials to Natural systems is not a new thing um and that’s particularly the case in Nova Scotia um an experiment to study the feasibility of rehabilitating acidified
Salmon habitat so we’re we’re putting alkaline material into our Rivers here in Nova Scotia uh we’ve been doing that for decades um to keep those habitats less acidic and and it’s actually a very effective way to restore salmon populations um they’re putting lime in the forests in Nova Scotia helicopter
Lming didn’t know about that a year ago but this is another way in which you can help an ecosystem by adding sort of an anti-acid material so using alkaline material to restore and heal which is kind of fun that the word um uh restore restoration
Is in these titles um is not a new thing and in wastewater treatment we’ve been putting alkaline material um in for decades and decades to treat that water before it enters the ocean okay so let’s move to what uh we actually did in the field which started in late
2022 uh in a place called Cornwall in the UK I’m not going to talk much about that work simply because I don’t have time and I think folks here probably want to focus more on what we did this past fall in Halifax um so that’s what
I’ll focus on here so how we go about doing this in the field is shown in this image we add this ugin material through an existing uh pipe structure or what I call what we call an outfall there’s a bunch of reasons for doing that one you
Don’t have to build new things um and less infrastructure means less carbon emissions there’s clear permit limits on on these pipes on these outfalls it’s you know well regulated to how much material and what kind of material and um how to monitor that in these pipes um
It’s also a lot easier to monitor things in a closed system in a pipe and um in the near term because the ocean is an incredible diluter of everything it’s actually super scalable just when you’re talking about adding it through outfalls so a lot of pipes going into the ocean a
Lot of water flowing through them so we add the antd into the pipe at a certain location we have um monitoring systems set up upstream and downstream of that addition point so we can see how we’re changing the chemistry in the pipe then of course we’ve got a system of ocean
Monitoring uh apparati water sampling M systems Vehicles then we go into the sediments as well and measure using cores and grabs and imagery to make sure that um nothing’s going on that shouldn’t be down seabed and that brings me back to my title slide so this is what it looked
Like last fall at the tus Cove power generation station um the antacid went in right here and I’ll show a whole bunch of slides about that um transform that CO2 into bicarbonate somewhere Downstream of where we do that addition the CO2 will invade into the ocean and do what it needs to do
So what you may recall if you followed this project at all last year is that in August and September uh we turned the harbor pink and I shouldn’t say we it was a a team effort in fact the delazy researching research team was leading the effort to do the die tracing study
And the reason we did that is well a whole bunch of reasons if you see the image down here you can see the Dy really moving its way down through the harbor and you can’t really see it but there was a boat sort of transecting in
And out of that out of that D die patch and so we were trying to learn how best to sample the water once you’ve put the alkaline material in because when you put the alkaline material in you can’t see it so when you put this die in you
Get a sense of where the stuff’s going to go and how you might be able to sample it now it also helps that uh Dr CA fennel at delazy is building a really amazing ocean model and she did little die Tracer studies to show where is this
Die going to go and her model is actually now able to forecast where things go in the harbor which is a a skill that very few Ocean Models actually have and so she’s basically testing the ability of that model to predict by adding that die and watching
It Go um so that was what we did in August and September that was sort of the the kickoff and I’m going to share a couple of things that came from that the first one was a bunch of Barbie references which is not surprising it was right around the time that movie
Came out so that that was pretty great but the part I thought was particularly hilarious is somebody with young children and have um heard never done one but heard of them is that somebody went and said these gender reveals are getting out of hand which is something
We all took great pleasure um in terms of just the the coverage of that dieet Tracer study so that was pretty fun just wanted to share that but in all seriousness this what we did last fall here was a really really big deal for the company um what you see in that
Picture is our sort of monitoring box coming down onto the spill burm in uh in late August and it’s got our you know Mission painted on the side and this idea of actually going out and doing it for the first time um was was a really
Really big deal and also so um this type of ocean oing enhancement hasn’t really been done anywhere else um so Not only was it a really big step for planetary but it was a really big step for the field because we were going out and and
You know trying to test this and and trying to advance scientific research and things like that so all super exciting stuff so the container went down everything went down soon thereafter and this is what it looked like and I’ll kind of go through what these different
Things did um this is just the the computer system that helped us keep an eye on all the different tanks and levels and things like that but it’s easier to look at from bird’s eye so you’ve got like a batch tank here which is where we add seaw waterer to alkaline dry alkaline
Material Stir It Up really well pump it into a storage tank keep it there um you know so that we have enough in the tank to part of me to dose at our leisure and then it gets pumped into this outfall so this is where the novas scoia Power
Cooling water comes out of the plant and goes back into the harbor and you can see it comes out of the outfall very frothy because it comes down kind of like a waterfall here in the outfall so naturally it’s very frothy and bubbly which actually ended up being quite a
Pain because a lot of ocean instruments don’t like it when you push bubbles through them um so that’s a whole other thing but in the middle here is our brain is our planetary box that sort of controls everything all the pumps all the Computing systems and all the dosing
Equipment I put this little flowchart up here not so much to sort of take you through it in great detail but just to show how things move from one tank to the next and more importantly all the different things we do to sample it on
Its way through so for most of the rest of the talk I’m going to talk about um all the different you know data that we collected as planetary but it’s really important to note that that um most of the stuff that happened in the ocean was
Done uh or I shouldn’t say most of but a lot more than what I’m going to show here was done by the delh Housey team so the delous team was not out there sort of monitoring our work they were out there taking advantage of the fact that
There was a world sort of the world’s first ocean alkalinity experiment happening you know in their Harbor and they’re they took the opportunity to collect an immense amount of data now we did that in close collaboration but it’s important to distin to distinguish what the two different roles were but our
Role was to make sure what we monit what we put in the ocean at that site was really really well monitored okay so the first step sorry going back is to test the actual material that we’re putting in before we put it in so I call that feed stock
Sampling this stuff is called Bru site it’s the natural mineral of of magnesium hydroxide again the hydroxide is the part that does all the heavy lifting it as a chemical has a very low toxicity to Aquatic animals and doesn’t persist or bioaccumulate but we still went through the uh toxicity testing that
Was uh was it required no it wasn’t required but was an obvious thing to do um we went out to the Harris Industrial in Waverly they do uh stickleback testing and we gave them some of this material they ran it through sort of the the very classic test that environment
Canada does in any situation like this and they came back saying you know the lethal dose of this stuff is more than 10 grams more than 10 grams because they didn’t test anything higher than 10 grams they didn’t test anything higher than 10 grams because we were adding a
Tenth of a gram at our highest maximum concentration so this was all very positive not anything that we didn’t expect but um we also take this feet stock material and we test the elemental makeup of it right because it’s not just pure magnesium hydroxide there’s other
Stuff in there too and we have to have a really close understanding of how much of the impurities are there as well so that’s another uh important part of the feed stock testing quick shout out to Peter Wells um who’s a part of nsis and
Don’t know if he’s here right now but um he gave me a a crash course in ecotoxicity back in September uh so Peter thank you so much uh for your help and I’m glad that you were able to link me in with this group as
Well okay so then it goes into a tank and gets stirred up in that little blue batch tank it looks like this in the tank it looks blue because the tank is blue it’s actually white and we take some of that slurry and we put it um in through various different machines to
Test the chemical composition the physical composition of that slurry to make sure that the recipe we use to make it that it has the right stuff in it so it’s just a a verification of of what we did so the red line is sort of what we
Expected the material to have in terms of the weight of alkaline material per weight of C water and then we have little validation points all along the way so this is all during the trial we tested the ph and the carbon content of the slurry as well pretty important in this to
Actually monitor the amount you put in so the dosing records are obviously super important we have a dosing pump that pumps at a known rate but then there’s also level sensors in the tanks and flow meters set up as well so a really really close eye on the addition
Rate and this is showing the cumulative amount of material we put in over the course of two months um of the trial so we sort of split this up into three phases the first one was just the learning phase you know just one step at a time very small amounts of release on
Off on off for about three weeks time then we had the ramping phase we wanted to understand what was this going to look like you know at the next level for short periods of time we added it two times the dosing rate two and a half three times the dosing rate that we
Started to see what what we would see and the exciting thing about that ramping phase is that the max rate we hit we only hit it for a day uh two days was equivalent to about 12,000 tons of carbon removal per year if you were to
Do it at that rate all year long and that’s just really important because 12,000 is a big number and you know we’re not going to get there this year anything like that but it’s it’s an exciting thing to think that that maybe you know given what we saw at that rate
That we might be ble to get there pretty soon um in terms of you know taking CO2 out of the air then we ran a 247 addition period because there’s modeling implications to doing it at a continuous rate and we wanted to test our sort of capabilities on
Site okay so the next thing is that we measure took these measurements upstream and downstream of where we dosed and um there’s a lot of data in there but the thing I really want to hammer on for this is that it’s very very important to have your eyes on the
Receiving Waters and that’s really mostly for Regulatory Compliance so um Nova Scotia environment climate change uh Environment Canada um was very you know clear with us that you know there are these limits that you cannot um exceed pH of nine in the ocean would be unacceptable you’d have to turn off your
Instrumentation we knew we’d never get anywhere close to that um level of increase but that doesn’t mean we can’t that doesn’t mean we we didn’t have to be checking so just showed this little table this is the kind of stuff we would submit to The Regulators to show them
That we’re not increasing the pH in any negative way we’re not increasing the amount of solids in the ocean which is another important thing you need to keep your eye on you can’t just be adding tons and tons of particles to the ocean either so we kept a really close eye on
That and um and kept in touch with the regulator now we did that uh using a very crude system here uh and this is actually well taken on the day we did the die Trace in work just because you can see it a lot better but um you know
Just a multi-parameter probe set up um pumping water up from right outside the outfall um we collected samples um from that system as well and and sent them to various Labs next year we’re hoping to go to a much more sort of robust um piece of equipment with more sensors um
Built-in line automatic data acquisition feedback loops lots of exciting you know additions to that system um this year we can move ahead okay moving on to the mor system so now um there’s everything on the on the site and moving off to this float that Nova Scotia Power uses to tie large
Ships to and we asked them in the summer well hey can we use that to put some sensors on it and they said sure So here’s our team and actually it’s not just our team that the delazy team is on the float too um adding a a set of
Oceanographic sensors and you can sort of see see them blurry under the water there um measuring all the time and the data that we got from that was actually super valuable um this is a bit of a messy plot so I’ll walk you through it slowly um really important to point out
Before I say anything about it that this is very preliminary data so there’s calibrations that need to be done on the samples we took every time we visited the system um there’s all kinds of different things that need to be done to Quality Control this data so very
Preliminary it’s being looked at most closely by the group at delazy um but it’s it’s very interesting nonetheless just at this rate at at at this time so um the blue line is the pH okay so the acidity levels in the water um higher acidity means lower pH so you
See these these big cycles and the Temptation is to think oh this must have to do with with you know what we’re doing at planetary because um the shaded areas are when we’re adding alkaline material in the non-shaded areas of when we weren’t but of course what you’re seeing is that there these
Huge natural swings in PH in this area due to Tides due to solar radiation uh due to growth of Plankton all sorts of natural processes that change the pH of the system pretty dramatically in this kind of Nearshore environment and the red line is um the tidal cycle which
Might be a really important driver so we plug on there but um the point is two things first the natural variability here is really high and that poses a big challenge okay because we need to detect a really clear signal on top of that natural variability and that inherently
Is going to be challenging but on the flip side it also means that the local marine life is really well adjusted to Big swings in acidity and big swings in everything really when it comes to the harbor um so you know in terms of uh biological impact it’s very good to see
That that natural variability is high but in terms of proving out the technology in the ocean um we’re probably going to need to be going at higher rates before we start to see really clear signals or at least consistently and that’s really unsurprising we kind of knew that going
In um we knew we had to start at a really conservative rate um and um and so you know that is what it is okay um this is a bit of a weird sidebar but I think it’s kind of fun the delazy team also had this amazing autonomous boat so there’s their actual
Boat and then you see here look at that little thing him’s driving onto the screen and then just sits there for a minute that thing is called a blue boat or at least that’s what I call it it’s not a very exciting name but um it’s an autonomous little mini platform that
It’s like a remote control boat and they started piloting this thing um during our trial you know you can buy these things off the shelf but what the Dy team can do is kit it out with all kinds of amazing sensors and so they did that
Over the course of the summer and the fall and they drove it in and out of our pilot plume well the plume of of alkal alkalized waters and what you’re seeing in this plot is kind of the result of that right so temperature goes up um when the boat drives into the plume
Because this is a cooling water loop so the water that comes out of the power plant is warmer than when it came in and so you’re seeing that increased temperature you’re also seeing an increase in PH when it drives in and out of the plume and so that is the signal
Right that’s a much clearer not it’s not you know Smoking Gun or anything but it’s a much clearer way to detect change in PH by driving this boat in and out of the plume so this sort of technology which kind of came into the trial very
Late is is a really exciting uh way to go about monitoring this and we’re now scrambling to try and put together our own system like this with help from the delosi team they’re also building a bigger and better version of it and so this is the kind of Step that comes out
Of deploying in the field this new Innovative Tech that um that the sort of D team is really at the tip of the spear to develop okay so what else did we do we we monitor the biology again through Dr McIntyre’s group um his master student Marie edgert who’s also now um working
As an intern planetary was doing um these photosynthetic efficiency measurements and this is not an easy plot to understand but really what you need to know is that this metric here on the Y AIS is what she doesn’t even call it photosynthetic efficiency but that’s
My way of saying it and it’s you could also call it the phytoplancton happiness index if you’re me um but sampling that every single day um both upstream and downstream of where we add the alkalinity and you know doing statistics on this to see well what’s changing between upstream and downstream
Communities in terms of their ability to photosynthesize and again not unexpected but not seeing any discernable change day after day after day I should note that there’s a ton of work that has to go in to building a plot like this so um you know the amount of effort put
Forward by a whole heap of students at Dal but also our team at planetary is is um is important to point out we also as I said before kept a close eye on the sediments right so we built a drop camera system and there’s a patch of um muddy sediment just kind of
Off the dock from from the pooling plant and we dropped our camera down there every chance we got to take imagery of the seabed because we wanted to make sure we’re not accumulating this alkaline material on the seafloor for obvious reasons so we built this drop
Camera system to do that an even better way was to take the dely team’s setup cores that they were collecting for a variety of reasons and just look at the imagery right because you’ve got this cross-section of the muddy mud here and the water over top of it if you’re
Seeing a white film forming on the top that would be a pretty good indication that you’re accumulating stuff on the seabed which is of course we don’t want to do so this is the kind of stuff we need to keep a close eye on the last thing we’ve done is scraped the top
Layer off off those cores and running them through an elemental analyzer to see you we don’t see anything visually pardon me but are we seeing an increase in some in magnesium for example because the stuff is magnesium hydroxide so this is the the next level of testing and and those analyses are still
Ongoing okay so I’m almost done what about the carbon emissions another really important question everything we showed everything I showed you there has a carbon footprint to it every boat ride every truck driver that brings the material on site we actually just got our emissions report back from
A third party called Long Trail sustainability they knock through every single piece of the process to tell you what the emissions footprint is and it turns out for this particular trial that it was about 150 tons of CO2 used to do it and a huge part of that footprint
Which is again not surprising we had done our homework is the transport of the material now we also this material was mined out of the ground and there’s a carbon footprint to that as well we had to be ground it had to be transported so all these things um are
Really important to see the data so we know what are the components of this process that we need to trim down because everything we want to do in terms of net removal of carbon of course has an emmissions um as the as the negative so um to do about 100 tons of
Removal which is the the number that we were aiming for um for this trial we we think we may have gotten close to that that’s like a th000 11,000 gallons of gasoline you know in terms of the amount of emissions that that relates to so
What do we need to do going forward we need to have material we need a different material because you can see it’s a pretty big footprint emissions footprint we need to do better but that’s that wasn’t the major um goal of the trial was to you know use a material
With a low footprint so um moving forward 2024 we’re not going to get this material we’re not going to mine it out of the ground we’re not going to transport it nearly as far we’re going to do even more rigorous toxicity testing because that’s just the right
Thing to do we’re going to implement new monitoring systems I mentioned some of that before but the delaz team is also um putting forth these really cool new systems um that you’re probably going to see out in the harbor this summer um new different ways of of um monitoring for
Biology we’re trying to put together this really really cool muscle monitoring system that sort of monitors the way they open and close their shelves um environmental DNA is a very powerful tool that we’re um we’re working with the Dow team to to implement and um we’ve got some trials
Going hopefully later this year in Vancouver which is where uh which is where I grew up uh as well as Virginia and in the UK as well so um that’s what 2024 has in store and so the takeaways I have for you tonight are the following we need
Carbon removal um but we also need everything else um the biggest lever we have the biggest tool in the toolbox by far is emissions reduction um but we’re going to need more on top of that uh ocean alalon is one of those tools it’s probably the biggest one um that if it
Works um planetary is a world leader in the R&D of ocean Elin enhancement uh delazy is also a world leader in R&D and Halifax is a world leader and that to me is really exciting as someone who’s um spent much of their life here the early results are really encouraging got a
Long way to go it’s not going to be easy but this really is a story about Hope um in the fight against climate crisis and I hope that this has given you a sense of hope and a sense of Pride um as as folks as many of us probably here are from Nova
Scotia so with that uh thanks so much for listening um please do get in touch if you have questions Beyond this talk go on our website check out the Nova Scotia page um contact me directly that’s my email down there um or just contact the company we are hiring um if
There are any um people out there looking for a gig not only in Halifax but in in Vancouver as well um and we’re hoping to grow a lot in 2024 so hope you’re interested and um thanks again