THE STANDING SENATE COMMITTEE ON FISHERIES AND OCEANS
EVIDENCE
OTTAWA, Thursday, November 7, 2024
The Standing Senate Committee on Fisheries and Oceans met with videoconference this day at 9 a.m. [ET] to examine and report on ocean carbon sequestration and its use in Canada.
Senator Fabian Manning (Chair) in the chair.
[English]
The Chair: Good morning. My name is Fabian Manning. I am a senator from Newfoundland and Labrador, and I have the pleasure to chair this committee and this meeting. Today, we are conducting a meeting of the Standing Senate Committee on Fisheries and Oceans.
Before we begin, I would like to ask all senators to consult the cards on the table for guidelines to prevent audio feedback incidents. Please make sure to keep your earpiece away from all microphones at all times. When you are not using your earpiece, place it face down on the sticker placed on the table for this purpose. Thank you all for your cooperation, and I’m sure our interpreters do as well.
Should any technical challenges arise, particularly in relation to interpretation, please signal this to the chair or the clerk, and we will work to resolve the issue.
I would like to take a few moments to allow the members of the committee to introduce themselves.
Senator C. Deacon: Colin Deacon, Nova Scotia.
[Translation]
Senator Boudreau: Good morning. Victor Boudreau from New Brunswick.
[English]
Senator Petten: Iris Petten, Newfoundland and Labrador.
Senator Ravalia: Good morning. Mohamed Ravalia, Newfoundland and Labrador.
[Translation]
Senator Aucoin: Réjean Aucoin from Nova Scotia.
Senator Cuzner: Rodger Cuzner, also from Nova Scotia.
[English]
Senator Busson: I’m Bev Busson from British Columbia.
The Chair: Thank you, senators.
On September 24, 2024, the Standing Senate Committee on Fisheries and Oceans was authorized to examine and report on ocean carbon sequestration and its use in Canada.
Today, under this mandate, the committee will be hearing from the following individuals: Dr. Anya Waite, Chief Executive Officer and Scientific Director, Ocean Frontier Institute and Dr. Galen McKinley, Professor, Earth and Environmental Sciences, Columbia University.
On behalf of the committee members, I thank both of you for joining us today. I understand that you both have opening remarks, and following those remarks, members of our committee will have questions for you. Dr. Waite, you have the floor.
Anya Waite, Chief Executive Officer and Scientific Director, Ocean Frontier Institute: Thank you very much, senator. Ladies and gentlemen of the committee, good morning, and thank you very much for the opportunity to talk to you today as CEO and scientific director of the Ocean Frontier Institute.
Our institute builds large ocean research programs with hundreds of researchers. We are focused primarily in Eastern Canada, but we reach across the country, and we include major international research centres in the U.S. and Europe. I’ve been asked to include a little bit of the scope of our institute’s work in my comments today.
Ocean Frontier Institute’s global consortia tackle three big ocean challenges: fisheries and aquaculture, biodiversity and climate change. In the Senate study here, of course, we’re talking about that third challenge, climate change, and the ocean’s role in controlling it. This is an area where Ocean Frontier Institute has been working since 2016 to build critical conversations between researchers, industry and policy-makers. We drive these conversations not just in Canada but in the international arena through UN bodies, and we link with everyone from start-ups to international finance.
I was co-chair of the Global Ocean Observing System, GOOS, under the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission of UNESCO, or IOC/UNESCO, for four years, and currently I lead GOOS’s ocean carbon exemplar that seeks to build global linkages between nations in the UN and the ocean carbon discussion. We’re now turning our attention to how this work can inform and lift Canadian leadership in this area.
You’ve heard about carbon capture, no doubt, and these are technologies that collect carbon at source before they are emitted, essentially catching carbon from the smokestack. What we’re looking for here in our discussion today — what we’re talking about is a carbon removal technology, and that is a process that removes the bulk of long-term carbon accumulation from the atmosphere and stores it safely for centuries. On land, this would be in the form of long-lived trees, potentially, or direct air capture facilities, known as DAC. I’ll go over some of the things you’ve heard already, but I don’t think repetition is necessarily bad in this case. It’s a little technical.
Let’s talk about the oceans’ two big jobs: absorbing and storing carbon and heat. The oceans have absorbed 90% of the heat humans have produced in the industrial era, and they store 80% of the carbon on earth. That equates to 50 times the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, or 40 trillion tonnes. Annually, the oceans continue to absorb about 25% of our carbon emissions and play a critical role in regulating the climate and continue, in fact, to save us from the worst impacts of our carbon dioxide release.
Because of its enormous storage capacity, we are studying the ocean as a possible “storage depot,” where additional carbon might be removed from the atmosphere and stored. We do that through natural processes like chemical absorption and physical mixing of carbon dioxide into the interior of the ocean, and biological growth followed by sinking of biological carbon — that can be plankton or animals — into the deep sea. These processes happen naturally, but they can also be initiated or accelerated by human action, and this is what is known as marine carbon dioxide removal, or mCDR.
Let’s think about what carbon removal on land can do versus the world’s current emissions, and then let’s think about an annual emission for the whole world, so how much we are currently, as humans, releasing of carbon into the atmosphere. If you planted 100 million trees, they would take up 34 minutes of our annual global carbon dioxide release. All of the Panama mangroves that have been beautifully set aside for conservation — that’s 8,500 hectares — will give 24 seconds of relief on carbon dioxide emissions, whereas 18 direct air capture units give you 8 seconds. Now, we hope that direct air capture will scale up, but that hasn’t happened to date. The ocean, in its natural state, gives us already three months of uptake. A 1% increase in ocean carbon uptake gives you a full day of total net‑zero sequestration.
How do we get this action right? The ocean can do this work for us, and we want to save the world from extreme impacts of climate change, but we want to do that effectively and with ecologically sound work.
Marine carbon dioxide removal is now a nascent industry in Canada. Innovators and entrepreneurs — and you’ve heard from some of them in the earlier sessions — are developing tools and techniques to enable mCDR, presenting an outstanding opportunity for Canada to demonstrate science, innovation and climate and policy leadership and, ultimately, more economic development opportunities. These four areas are critical pieces of a conjoined framework for mCDR in Canada, and it is critical that this sector is developed through expert support and regulatory structures that are grounded in world-class ocean science, policy and engagement, and free of any conflicts of interest.
The Ocean Frontier Institute works regionally, nationally and in the intergovernmental policy arena to inform leadership in mCDR, to support the public good and to enable a nimble and environmentally sound mCDR sector.
We need a few things to get this right. We need good scientific leadership to coordinate and lead the science, modeling, instrumentation and so on. This will develop an understanding of the ocean baseline, which we know is already changing, but we don’t know quite how fast. We also need to build collaboration with partners, including international research experts such as Dr. McKinley, who is on the call today.
We then need regulatory leadership to inform regulators at all levels and start-ups on the best available science to evaluate these changing technologies and to reflect current business challenges and opportunities.
We need, thirdly, to engage with communities, particularly Indigenous communities, to understand their core concerns and co-create effective strategies to build trust and partnerships, again, for the broadest public good and benefits.
Ultimately, we need an economic strategy to help build the necessary financial ecosystem, project financing and procurement to build a thriving and sustainable mCDR market.
So mCDR represents a range of ocean climate interventions that, in combination with emissions reductions, can help save us from the most extreme impacts of climate change. If they are enabled with the correct science, regulation, public engagement and economic strategy, this could be the foundation of a whole new research focus and a vibrant new industry, while protecting people and communities in Canada.
Thank you.
The Chair: Thank you, Dr. Waite.
Galen McKinley, Professor, Earth and Environmental Sciences, Columbia University, as an individual: Thank you to the committee members for having me. Good morning. I really appreciate this opportunity to speak with you. I am an oceanographer and carbon cycle scientist with almost 30 years of research experience. I am a Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University in the city of New York in the U.S.
I’m here to speak about the ocean’s cycling of carbon. The key points I wish to make are, one, that the ocean currently absorbs about one quarter of annual carbon dioxide emissions; two, that there are significant uncertainties in how this natural ocean carbon sink is changing; three, that engineering to accelerate ocean carbon uptake is in its infancy, and it is unclear how much scale-up is possible; and four, I want to emphasize that the primary approach to addressing climate change must be the mitigation of carbon emissions. If at least 90% of our current emissions are not mitigated, even a massive scale-up of carbon dioxide removal technologies will not make a significant dent in the climate change problem.
The ocean naturally has an enormous capacity to hold carbon, including the majority of all historical and future emissions from burning fossil fuels. However, realizing this total capacity will take many thousands of years.
Ocean chemistry allows for enormous quantities of carbon to dissolve in sea water. As the atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration rises, additional carbon is dissolved into surface waters, but this excess uptake due to our activities is overlain on a vigorous natural cycling that I will describe next.
The first component of the natural cycle is biological. Ocean phytoplankton remove carbon from surface waters when they have enough nutrients and sunlight. Much of this plant matter is consumed by upper ocean ecosystems, but a small portion sinks to the deep ocean. There, it nourishes deep ocean ecosystems and returns carbon to the water. So this is a “biological pump,” moving carbon that was previously in the atmosphere into the deep ocean.
The second component of the natural cycle is physical. As surface waters move from lower to higher latitudes, they cool down and increase their capacity to hold carbon. In the North Atlantic and in the Southern Ocean, some waters become very cold and dense enough to sink into the deep ocean, carrying waters laden with carbon to the abyss.
Multiple independent approaches confirm that the global ocean is absorbing about one quarter of our annual carbon dioxide emissions, but there remains much we do not know. Uncertainties are about 30% for the global annual uptake and increase to greater than 100% at local to regional scales. We need enhanced monitoring and scientific research to resolve these significant uncertainties.
We do know that the ocean processes removing carbon from the atmosphere operate much more slowly than anthropogenic climate change. The ocean takes about 2,000 years to mix once from top to bottom; thus, for its total capacity to hold our excess carbon to be realized, it will take at least 10,000 years.
The intent of marine carbon dioxide removal, or mCDR, is to engineer a speed-up to these natural ocean processes by modifying ocean chemistry or biology. If we could get carbon more rapidly to the deep ocean, it is true that it would help to take a bite out of climate change, but we do not know if this can work. We do know that the ocean is massive, fierce and difficult to engineer. We know that to have a meaningful global impact, large swaths of the ocean would need to be used. We know that some proposed mCDR approaches would require massive amounts of mining, transportation and energy to spread minerals or to achieve other goals in the open ocean. We do not know how ocean ecosystems would respond to widespread mCDR.
There is a lot we do not know and need to study, but one thing is abundantly clear: In order for mCDR to have an impact on climate, an unprecedented technological scale-up would be required. Everyone knows humanity’s carbon dioxide emissions have grown rapidly since the Industrial Revolution, but most do not know that today’s emissions are only 4,000 times the annual rate of the 1750s. To meaningfully impact climate, CDR, both on land and in the ocean, would need to be scaled up by at least 25 times this amount — about 100,000 times — in only a few decades. That would be an engineering feat never before accomplished by humanity.
As heroic as a 100,000 times CDR scale-up would be, it would still remove only 3% of annual carbon dioxide emissions if they continue at current rates. In other words, even the most optimistic and unprecedented scale-up of CDR would not meaningfully impact climate unless emissions are dramatically reduced at the same time.
To close, I would like to review the most critical next steps, in order of importance. One: mitigate carbon emissions, two: reduce uncertainty in the natural ocean carbon sink; and three, research mCDR technologies to determine if they are feasible, environmentally benign and have the potential for rapid scale-up.
Thank you.
The Chair: Thanks to both of you for your opening remarks. I’m going to go to our deputy chair for the first question.
Senator Busson: Thank you very much to both of our witnesses. This is, indeed, interesting and new-age information that we’re dealing with.
My question would go to Anya Waite to begin with. It’s interesting and certainly gratifying to hear that Dalhousie University and the Ocean Front Institute — you described it as the global leader in ocean research, specifically around issues of carbon removal, mCDR, if I’ve gotten that right. Could you tell me whether or not the Ocean Frontier Institute is the only institute of its kind in Canada that conducts this kind of research around carbon removal? If not, is there a way to link the other organizations that may be dealing with the same research? Are there any partnerships that exist?
Ms. Waite: Thanks very much for that question, Senator Busson.
The Ocean Frontier Institute works across groups of universities. We’re headquartered at Dalhousie, but we work across Canada. We currently work with Newfoundland, two universities in Quebec — Rimouski and Laval, and we also have collaborations with the University of New Brunswick and University of Victoria. So while it’s not absolute coverage, I would say it’s six or seven of the bigger ocean-research-focused universities in Canada.
It’s not a complete set, so any action in Canada would have to make sure that we adequately engage the West Coast, for example. There is work being done off the coast of Vancouver that is of huge interest here, particularly if they are sequestering carbon in the sea floor — in rock basalt below the sea floor. That’s a very interesting action. Right now, although there is a lot of discussion, we really haven’t dealt with the Arctic at all in terms of that. We work in northern Labrador, but I wouldn’t say in the Arctic, broadly.
I’d say we have a good foundation. We’re the only institute of our kind that operates across multiple universities and multiple provinces, but there is always work to do in making sure we are inclusive and that all the researchers who have work to bring to this question have the opportunity to do so.
Senator Busson: I noticed you used the words “global leader.” I’m assuming there are other academic institutes doing this kind of research around the world. Do you have outreach or connections with those in your work?
Ms. Waite: Yes, indeed. Our slogan is “global leaders in ocean research,” meaning that the researchers who work within our consortia are the global leaders. We have many who work at Dalhousie, but we also work with a number of American institutions. We have a formal partnership with Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in the U.S., as well as with Stanford University and MIT. We work with groups of French universities and institutes, as well as Germany, the U.K. and Norway. We’re building relationships with Portugal and Spain.
It’s really a North Atlantic consortium right now; I wouldn’t say we have very much reach into the tropics. But because of our international activities, we do connect. The Global Ocean Observing System, for example, is the global network of networks in ocean observing that is convened under IOC/UNESCO. We communicate with and hear from many nations, I would say, in the global sphere.
Senator Busson: Thank you very much.
Ms. Waite: Thank you for the question.
Senator C. Deacon: Thank you both for being with us today.
I will start with Dr. Waite and then include Dr. McKinley, if I could. Help us get a sense of the areas of research where there are risks and opportunities that need to be identified and then managed or understood, just in the various areas of research. It would be good for us to understand as best we can where you’re looking in all of your networks of researchers. It sounds very remarkable, indeed. Could you just give us an overview? We understood, last week, sedimentation and phytoplankton, but you would be able to provide a better summary than any of us could get.
Ms. Waite: I’m happy to jump in, and Galen could give you more technical details.
There are a few risks. One is that it simply doesn’t work, that the time scales and the effort that we put into mCDR don’t effectively draw down the carbon from the atmosphere. That has to be tested first and foremost. The very first tests that have been done — and I think you talked to some of the proponents of those, or you were supposed to talk to them, but it might have been cancelled. The ocean alkalinity enhancement has a huge potential to ultimately allow more carbon to be drawn out of the atmosphere than is currently possible.
However, scale-up is one of the big questions, as Galen suggested. We don’t know how much carbon and how much energy it’s going to cost to scale these processes up effectively. If you can take as much carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere as you can — if you’re spending most of that getting to sea, deploying the work, doing the mining that brings the minerals, et cetera, then the math doesn’t work. So we need to get the math right, at least, first, theoretically and then in field tests. I would say that’s probably the single biggest question mark in my mind, because I think everyone is in denial about exactly how well scale-up is going to work. Most of the companies are dealing with very small patches right now. We need to essentially accelerate that work to make sure we can understand what the potential for scale-up is.
The second one is the environmental impacts. I think you heard some of those last week. It’s very important that we understand exactly how changing the chemistry and potentially some of the biology of the ocean will impact the ocean in the short, medium and long term.
The other thing to remember here is that, if we don’t do anything, the ocean will have huge impacts.
We talk a lot about the precautionary principle, do no harm, but the problem is that pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere is doing huge harm already, so we need to somehow balance out our arguments. We want to understand the impacts. We want to understand whether those impacts, in fact, would be worse in doing mCDR than in not doing it. The danger of not doing it is that we get to 3 degrees or 4 degrees warming. That would be catastrophic, not just for the ocean but the world.
Galen McKinley: Thank you very much for the question, senator.
I would say that I think the biggest risk here is that we pretend that this is something that’s going to make a difference to the atmosphere and that we do it instead of mitigation. If we are going to invest billions of dollars in the mCDR industry and think that mitigating emissions is hard, so instead of doing that, let’s just do some tech fix and make it easy on ourselves, then we have the potential to waste a lot of time not doing what we know we really need to do and instead focusing on a tech fix that will not really do anything. I think that is the biggest risk here. We have to do mitigation, first and foremost. Any CDR, whether in the ocean or on the land, will be something additional that we do to try to take out additional carbon from the atmosphere and get ourselves closer to the climate goals we need to get to. But the main thing we have to do, 90% of what we have to do, is mitigate our emissions.
There is also a risk that someone goes out and engineers something, and they say, “Oh, look. I took up carbon because the carbon concentration of the ocean changed. I would like to be paid a good bit of money for that.” But in fact, what they are selling you is something that would have happened naturally even if they had not been there at all, so additionality is a real question. We know the ocean is already taking up all this carbon naturally. We don’t fully understand how that works or how that changes with space and time as climate changes and as the atmospheric CO2 concentration goes up, so there is the potential that people will be selling us what would have happened already naturally.
Then the last thing I would say is that background sink, as I said, is already taking up 25% of our emissions, or, as Anya said, three months of our annual emissions. That’s a ton, right? So much. If we don’t pay attention to that sink, we have the potential to lose sight of it and not be able to understand how it is changing and evolving because we’re so focused on these engineered solutions that we just stop measuring adequately the background sink that has already happened. We lose that big picture either because we’re not investing in that observing system or because there is actually interference in the observations of that background system by engineered approaches, and we kind of lose sight.
Those would be the things that I worry about in this area, and I’m happy to talk more about specific technologies to the extent that I know about them, if you would like me to. I’ll take a break here and see what you think.
Senator C. Deacon: Thanks very much. It was really important for you to emphasize the need for us to continue the path of reductions. This is not a substitute for that. Thank you.
Senator Ravalia: Thank you very much to both of our witnesses for their compelling testimony.
Professor McKinley, this is in context of the ocean carbon sink. Are there any international geographic variations in carbon capture based on ocean temperatures?
Galen McKinley: Definitely the background state of the ocean would have to be considered in terms of understanding the potential for a particular methodology to work in a particular location. And yes, there are efforts, such as with simulation models, to really understand how, if you added alkaline materials to the ocean, for example, that would impact the ocean sink. It would vary depending on where you are both in terms of the residence time of water in the surface of the ocean and the physical state, the temperature and the mixing regime, which would all impact that. So yes, it is definitely not the same everywhere across the ocean, the effectiveness of any particular kind of engineering that people are thinking about.
Senator Ravalia: To follow up, if I could pose this question to Dr. Waite, have you studied at all the impact of current global warming on carbon capture and other factors including pollution, ocean billage and waste products in the ocean, and to what extent do you think these may have a long-term effect on the ocean carbon sink as it currently exists?
Ms. Waite: That’s an excellent question.
The ocean carbon sink is changing, and as the climate warms, there are two ways that climate warming is changing carbon dioxide uptake.
One is simply the absorption rate changes. Galen, if I’m right, colder water absorbs more carbon dioxide. If we warm the ocean, it has a lower capacity to absorb that carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. That’s one thing.
The other really big thing happening is the change in ocean circulation. I’ll use the example of the North Atlantic since it’s sort of in our backyard, as it were. In the North Atlantic, east and west of Greenland, warm water moves north and cools, absorbs a large amount of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and then sinks down into what they call chimneys. They are like a vertical piece where the water cools, and it sinks down to 2,000 or 3,000 metres in the North Atlantic and slowly works its way to the south. This is one of the world’s big ocean carbon sinks in these areas east and west of Greenland.
What is happening with the melting Arctic is you’re getting this — I’ll use a Canadian term — Zamboni of fresh water going over the North Atlantic, and what that is doing is potentially interfering with the sinking capacity of those areas east and west of Greenland because they have a lens of fresh water on them that makes them lighter and makes them stay closer to the surface. Those dynamics are complex, but there have been a number of studies suggesting there have been some changes — it may in the short term, might be in the long term, and there’s a bit of sensational discussion about it — in the capacity of the North Atlantic circulation to absorb carbon and store it in the deep sea.
The two big changes are, first, the changing temperature where the increase in temperature reduces the ocean’s capacity to absorb the carbon dioxide and, second, the changes in the circulation. That is called the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation, or AMOC for the technical term. If that circulation failed, for example, if it stopped, then that would have big impacts on the climate of the North Atlantic. For example, Europe would cool. There would be higher sea levels on the eastern seaboard of the United States and Canada. That circulation has a big impact, and our climate change is changing that circulation.
In terms of pollution, I think it’s a very interesting question. Carbon dioxide has recently been identified by the intergovernmental system as a key pollutant in the ocean, and I think that is something that is helpful in the sense that we have a lot of discussion in the open ocean about how to make sure the biodiversity is okay. We have the Agreement on Marine Biodiversity of Areas beyond National Jurisdiction, which says that we have to preserve the ocean biodiversity. If we can consider carbon dioxide as a pollutant, it allows us to have a more intelligent discussion between the different international treaties. We just had a big discussion on the London Protocol. They were trying to close down some aspects of adding carbon dioxide to the surface of the ocean. I think it’s important to think of carbon dioxide as a pollutant so that we can manage it better in the international treaties.
Galen may have a different view on this, but it’s not clear to me that pollution per se will necessarily have a direct impact on how the ocean absorbs carbon. I’m sure that the pollution from coastlines and from our wastewater, for example, changes the biological pump in a number of ways. It exaggerates the growth of some plankton and downgrades the growth of the other. In some cases, that pollution can actually increase the growth of plankton that don’t sink. So it’s possible that pollution from land can actually reduce the ability of the ocean biology of carrying carbon into the deep sea.
Senator Ravalia: Thank you.
[Translation]
Senator Aucoin: Thank you for your extremely interesting testimony. We’re learning a great deal, so much so that the more I learn, the less I understand. To try and summarize, we have to keep developing the technology and running tests to capture carbon in the oceans, because if we don’t, we’ll have to reduce our carbon emissions into the atmosphere anyway. All kinds of tests are being done, but I ask myself this: In terms of international regulations, have there been any discussions to develop the necessary regulations to do this research and have a regulatory framework later on as needed, since the research and tests are positive?
[English]
Ms. Waite: I’m happy to jump into this, if that’s okay.
Great question. You’re absolutely right. We are behind on the international regulatory framework for marine carbon dioxide removal. It was really only a theoretical sideline until maybe five years ago, so I think the international systems are struggling to get their heads around what is going on.
There has been a recent discussion at the IMO, the International Maritime Organization, which regulates ocean dumping. There is something called the London Protocol, which has basically prohibited ocean dumping. There is a caveat of sorts that it is okay to test-run marine carbon dioxide removals using specific technologies, such as using antacid addition to the ocean, adding iron as a nutrient to the ocean, kelp sinking — so the carbon from kelp — and a few other things. That’s good, because it opens the window for research to occur at the scale it needs to occur.
Just recently, there was a significant discussion about shutting that down somewhat and preventing — particularly there was an important concern around the involvement of industry in this work. Of course, right now, it needs to be a collaboration with industry, because industry is pulling the funding in and is getting excited about the work and the verification that needs to happen.
The danger — and I think it was Greenpeace that was particularly concerned — is that if you have industry driving something, is it really going to be environmentally sound? Is it going to be well regulated and carefully done? There was a push to add something to the London Protocol to slow that down. Canada and other nations have supported not slowing things down. That was a very good outcome of that discussion, but it just shows some of the challenges that happened in that conversation. Developing nations were really looking for information, leadership and clarity. They certainly didn’t have clarity on what they should be doing in the regulatory framework.
So there is some tension between the environmental protocols and treaties like the Agreement under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea on the Conservation and Sustainable Use of Marine Biological Diversity of Areas beyond National Jurisdiction, BBNJ Agreement; the Convention on Biological Diversity; and the Paris Agreement, which says to us that we have to reach our climate goals. We’re not there yet in terms of the conversation. That’s a place Canada could lead in some aspects of that conversation.
Certainly within Canada, we have been talking about what needs to happen in the regulatory sphere. We have got our government departments that are set like a donut around the core issue of mCDR. For example, DFO works more on fisheries than oceans. ECCC works primarily on climate with a tiny consideration of oceans. NRCan, which has done amazing work in carbon sequestration and clean energy, doesn’t deal with ocean very much. Marine carbon dioxide removal is the hole in the donut of the Canadian government system. That makes it challenging for us to have the right conversations in the right places. That’s one of the things we want to be thinking about: How do we bring Canada into discussions regarding a regulatory framework that is appropriate and inform the international discussions?
I hope I haven’t said too much. There is a lot to that question.
Senator Aucoin: Dr. McKinley, do you want to comment?
Galen McKinley: Yes, thank you very much.
I don’t have as much insight into the regulatory regime as Anya does, so I won’t get into that. However, I do want to mention that what the ocean is doing for us naturally — no one owns that. If the ocean is taking up two and a half gigatonnes of carbon each year, and a tonne of carbon is $100 per tonne, as an example, that’s a $250 billion per year service that the ocean is doing for us, and nobody owns that. This is something that we all get; thank you Mother Earth. But then one has to ask: Who is responsible for understanding this, monitoring this and taking care of it going forward? That leaves those questions, because no one is getting those $250 billion a year except for all of us in the value to our environment.
I understand why people would be concerned about companies going out and being responsible for figuring out how to modify this sink, because there is the potential that we now start paying companies for these things that Mother Earth is doing for us naturally when we have not really figured out how to hold that value for the people of the planet. When it’s somebody’s land — a natural park or something like that, a national park owned by the Government of Canada — then it is clear who owns that land. If someone is doing something there, there is some understanding of how that money should be shared between the company and the people. But when it’s the open ocean, that’s just completely unclear.
That’s a fundamental issue here that makes ocean CDR really different from land CDR, which has been going on for 20 years or so. We have never put real value on it, and no one really owns that background sink that is doing so much for us already. I don’t think the regulatory system, as I understand it, is really able to deal with that yet.
[Translation]
Senator Aucoin: I have a question for Ms. Waite.
Ms. Waite, you talked about regulation in Canada. You said that no department was dealing with it and that there would be an opportunity to improve regulation. That’s what we’re here for.
If you had a recommendation for the Canadian government to ensure the future of this regulation for carbon capture on the ocean floor, what would it be? What can you tell us about that, or what’s your dream in relation to that?
[English]
Ms. Waite: That’s a great question, because we have been thinking about that intensely over the last little while. We have been having conversations with communities, industry and our policy-makers in Canada to brainstorm on this.
Four critical elements need to come together in a conversation. First of all, we need that scientific leadership. When you grow a tree or when you capture carbon in a direct air capture facility, you know exactly where that carbon is. It’s sitting in the facility or sitting in the tree. When you capture carbon in the ocean, the carbon moves. That means you can’t do marine carbon dioxide removal effectively without tracking the carbon to its ultimate destination. That’s hard. It means you need to keep oceanographers and ocean observers embedded in the conversations in a way you don’t when you’re creating a direct air capture or with a forest. So one thing is making sure we build that.
Galen eloquently talked about the changing ocean baseline. Getting that ocean baseline properly observed is absolutely critical if we’re going to support a good industry, because industries will want to say that they took up carbon and, therefore, they have a carbon credit. That ocean baseline is important. Scientific leadership will be a critical aspect of this work.
We also then need to have that science inform regulatory leadership. The science needs to evaluate the changing technologies and needs to reflect current business practices, challenges and opportunities. That work is actually work to be done — that regulatory leadership piece.
The third one, as I mentioned, is that the social licence in Canada is absolutely critical. I don’t think we’re there yet. In Nova Scotia, where I work, we’re very lucky that we have a public that is generally very supportive of ocean science. They have lived with it in their communities for a long time. But if we don’t properly do that work of listening to the public, understanding their concerns and communicating effectively about what we’re doing, it could be a huge drag. It could, in fact, shut down the industry before it even happens. So that third thing is engagement with communities.
The fourth is really building the necessary financial ecosystem. If you zoom out, that’s something we haven’t really talked about, and that needs to go hand in hand with the regulatory system. Not all this work on the baseline, for example, can necessarily come from nations. Some of this will come through profits from industry, for example. How do we create a proper public-private partnership that can enable this industry while at the same time leaning heavily on the best possible science and making sure we pull the public along with us?
Those are the four things for me — the economic strategy, social licence and community engagement, the regulatory leadership, and then the scientific leadership, which really — the science, in a way, sadly for the industry, permeates all four of those conversations in a way that it doesn’t with carbon capture on land.
The Chair: Thank you.
Senator Petten: Maybe Dr. McKinley would like to start on this one. How far away do you think we are from scaling up to bring to fruition and to have an impact on climate change?
Galen McKinley: I think we are many, many orders of magnitude away in terms of scale-up, about five orders of magnitude. Some people say a million times, right? So there is a massive need to scale up. That said, as Professor Waite said, about five years ago, no one was even really thinking about marine carbon dioxide removal in a serious way. We have seen a big evolution in the past several years both in terms of students from our labs going to companies that didn’t exist a few years ago and the amount of money and the number of meetings. It’s really growing quickly.
But how far away I do think really depends on the points that were just made. What is the scientific basis? How much investment can we get to really establish that basis? Under the Biden administration here in the U.S., the government invested about $100 million in research projects to do some of that scale‑up work, both from Department of Energy and from other agencies in the U.S. That community is growing, but it needs sustained support. We need that regulatory environment, as was mentioned. We need to understand in the U.S. — I don’t know the Canadian system so well — is it the Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA, that will give a licence, or is it the National Oceanographic Atmospheric Administration, NOAA, that is going to give a permit, or is it a state? Figuring out who is giving a licence to even go do an experiment remains questioned. We need to work with the people, so the social licence, and work with Indigenous communities all the way to fishermen and recreational folks to help people understand what is going on.
That financial piece is really critical, because in order for solid carbon credits to exist that are verified that we know are additional, there needs to be a system by which the information flows from people who understand how much carbon was actually taken up there up to the people who understand the economic system and how we sell and buy credits. Right now, we kind of have scientists who are trying to do all of that. We haven’t developed the ecosystems like you might think of like in a mortgage world. In a mortgage world, you are going to get a mortgage on your house, so somebody goes and assesses your house and says, yes, it’s worth this. Then there is a system by which that information works its way up to an investment product that somebody can then go and sell to a pension fund. That doesn’t exist for carbon in general, whether on the land or in the ocean, and that integrated system where there are experts on the ground moving up logically to verified credits that have a more stable price — all that also needs to be worked out.
There are many things that need to happen. Ultimately, it depends on how much we invest from the science side and in setting up these structures, and how much we can do that and invest in that at the same time as managing the response to existing climate impacts, and managing the mitigation challenge is something we need to really work on.
Senator Petten: Thank you. Dr. Waite, I wonder, based on that, and because I’m thinking about the economics of this as well, how does that impact investors in Canada to financially contribute? Obviously, we understand the potential of this opportunity, but how do we try to bring it to a point where investors can say it is a return on investment?
Ms. Waite: That’s a great question.
I think that’s work that has to be done. We have talked to a number of different international banks, reinsurance companies and others about what would be their trigger for investment. In most cases, what they said is they need a pilot system. They need to see that the pilot system is delivering what they need. In some cases, they want simply ocean information to understand climate better. Reinsurance really cares about climate because their livelihood ultimately depends on it. For other investors, it’s making sure that they have something to invest in.
Right now, there are a lot of small companies doing what I call testing things in a teacup. They are in the lab doing something, and they realize, “Oh, this could work.” Then they take it to a tank. They take it to an embayment. Most of them are still at the scale of a small embayment, not into the open ocean. So it’s getting the work to a scale where an investor can say, “Oh, I see it’s working, I see that the carbon is going where it’s supposed to be going, and it’s well verified under a good regulatory framework so that I’m secure in my investment. I know that if we can measure that carbon, it can then be sold as a carbon credit.”
There is work to be done. There has been some discussion about what we might call a regulatory sandbox. I know there is a bunch of different definitions about how those are supposed to work, and there might be different terms for it, but I do think that putting some intense work into discussing exactly how that could be brought together in a crisp set of regulations would enable the first pilots to deliver on expectations so that the industry can become investable.
[Translation]
Senator Boudreau: Thank you, witnesses. I’m going to risk sparking a debate among researchers. Last week, we had four different witnesses who often mentioned that the oceans naturally take care of 50% of emissions. Today, two witnesses told us it’s 25%. Obviously, that 25% difference is a sizable number. I’m curious to know how you determined that it was 25% when last week’s witnesses were talking about 50%. That’s quite a discrepancy.
[English]
Ms. Waite: I’ll hand it over to Galen. That’s a great question. It depends entirely on how you count. For example, there is a number of 40%. If we count fossil fuel emissions only and not all the other emissions that humans have had, the ocean takes up 40% of fossil fuel emissions because that same number of uptake is equal to 40% of our fossil fuel emissions. If you add all the other emissions, it becomes a smaller fraction. It’s really a back-of-the-envelope exercise. It’s why those questions are important. Perfect question, and that’s why it’s critical to get this right.
Galen McKinley: I was going to say something very similar. It really depends on what you put in the denominator, whether you’re including land-use emissions, for example, which right now are about 15% of our emissions in that denominator. The other thing it depends on is how long you sum up. If we take all of the industrial era and divide by the fossil emissions, then it’s 40 or 50%, but if we only think about last year or the last several years, it’s closer to that 25% of all anthropogenic emissions. So, yes, deciding how we will count that and being clear is very important. Some people choose one way and some people choose another. But however you count, the ocean is a very important sink. I do agree we need to be consistent in the numbers and be clear.
Senator Boudreau: Whether we settle on 25% or 40% or 50%, again, it would be a mathematical calculation, I guess. But based on all the technologies being tested currently and the degree of success that each one of these new technologies would have, are we able to put a number on it? If all the technologies that are being tested were successful, how much of an increase would that be? I know someone said a 1% increase equals one extra day. How much of an increase could we expect with all this testing of new technologies going on? Is it a 5% increase? Is it a 10% increase? At one point, you need to calculate as well if it’s worth the investment and if it’s worth the time if you’re only going to get a 3% or a 5% increase. I’m just curious to hear from you on that.
Galen McKinley: Our colleague Dr. David Ho, a professor in Hawaii and also a member and founder of a company working on mCDR, calculated that even with a five order of magnitude increase in our ability to remove carbon from the atmosphere, we would still only be removing 3% of today’s emissions. Even if we could scale up by five orders of magnitude, that would still only increase that 25% to 28%, based on how he was calculating.
When we look at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change or the kind of reports that say we need carbon dioxide removal, they first premise it with that we have cut about 90% of our emissions in order for mCDR to make a real difference. But if we are not going to cut our emissions, I would say that it is not a good investment to work on mCDR because we should be investing our money in moving communities and adapting to the significant impacts of climate change that we’re going to be dealing with. If we’re thinking about marine carbon dioxide removal as a way to help us really reach those 1.5-degree or 2‑degree targets when we’ve already done all this mitigation, then it is a good investment. But I think we have to connect those two dots and recognize that mCDR is not going to solve the problem, nor will any carbon dioxide removal, if we do not significantly mitigate.
Ms. Waite: I totally agree with Galen’s point. For mCDR, the global estimate for what could be achieved is around 4 to 5 gigatonnes a year. When scaled with other approaches, I think the chemistry approaches have a much higher ability to do that work than the biological ones, at least currently, in the estimates. It’s 4 to 5 gigatonnes a year across all pathways.
I think the issue is that for that same amount of carbon uptake, if we reduce our emissions, that carbon uptake becomes a much higher percentage. We can go from 3 to 30 if we do proper carbon emissions reductions. Essentially, what we’re doing is trying to use multiple ways to save ourselves from climate change. We have to decarbonize, we want to use mCDR, we want to use direct air capture and we want grow our forests back. We’re not doing one thing; we have to build them up together. I think that’s the general understanding of the scientific community. When we’re investing in mCDR, it’s investing in an industry that is a series or an environment with multiple carbon‑removing industries, all of whom together can have a big heavy lift and an impact on the global climate.
Ultimately, we need to rely on organizations like the World Meteorological Organization who pull together the big numbers globally and say, “Have we made an impact or not?” The atmosphere itself is the ultimate arbiter. How much carbon is in the atmosphere will tell us whether we’ve been successful or not.
Senator Cuzner: I don’t know if this is right in your backyard, but it should be in your neighbourhood at least. When the chair, Senator Manning, and myself were young bucks, we ventured out to Fort McMurray, Alberta. It wasn’t yesterday. If you visited the great Canadian oil sands or Syncrude at the time, you wouldn’t recognize the plants now and how the technology has evolved over those decades.
Just recently, the government announced draft regulations to put a cap on greenhouse gases. It’s a reduction of 35% as related to the 2019 emissions. This stems from Dr. McKinley’s strong statement earlier about how aggressive we should be on mitigation. Having an appreciation for the science available and how dire the situation is, is 35% a reasonable target to work toward? That would be the question. Is it attainable?
Galen McKinley: I am not an expert in the decarbonization side of the Canadian economy, of course, but what I understand broadly is that a lot of governments are setting these targets and are making good progress toward them. For example, in the United States, the Inflation Reduction Act that was passed in 2022 is making a big impact by promoting the use of renewables and promoting that transition to electric vehicles and such. That is on top of the fact that natural gas became cheaper than coal. So all those transitions that were already happening also helped out. Still, if we look globally, these kinds of commitments are totally in the right direction, and we need to do them, but they’re not enough to achieve 1.5 to 2 degrees. We’re going to need more to take that next step.
That said, whether they are achievable really depends on our level of ambition and our willingness to invest, but all the economic evidence suggests that it’s much better to mitigate than to deal with the impacts of climate change. It’s a good investment to mitigate as much as possible economically because the costs of wildfires and sea-level rise are just so many, and we need to really be taking this seriously.
Senator C. Deacon: Again, thanks to our witnesses. This has been really important.
I completely agree, Dr. McKinley, with the need to keep focused on the reduction of emissions, but as an entrepreneur, I never like to bet on one race or one horse. I believe in innovation, and I believe in innovation to overcome orders-of-magnitude challenges and in scaling new opportunities and new technologies.
What I would like to focus on is the non-carbon dioxide, the non-climate-change–specific elements of mCDR and ocean alkalinity enhancement. In Nova Scotia, this technology comes from years of trying to reverse the effects of acid rain on salmon rivers, so it was an ecology-enhancing process that led to the discovery of a CO2 removal process and all that quantification and a study that is required there. Could you speak to — and I’ll maybe start with Dr. McKinley, if I could — the non-carbon-removal elements of these processes and any benefits or risks that you see there? Thank you.
Galen McKinley: Yes, absolutely. For example, ocean acidification is a real concern in the ocean, and if we add alkalinity to the ocean, we will help to mitigate ocean acidification, so that is a clear potential co-benefit that can happen with marine carbon dioxide removal efforts. Those need to be quantified. Of course, there are also co-benefits such as job creation and other things like that, as well as the potential to enhance phytoplankton communities and potentially enhance food for the fish. But we really don’t understand it all very well except in this very theoretical way. As Professor Waite said, in a tank or in a teacup, you can say that you added alkalinity and the pH went up, so that is a reduction of acidification. But is this going to work? What are the other impacts if those minerals adding alkalinity also have heavy metals in them? Am I now adding a toxic substance at the same time that I’m adding the alkalinity?
Those are the key reasons, as Professor Waite said, that we need to have the scientists directly involved with this decision making and have ways of doing that science that are supported by third parties, not by the company — for example, independent arbitration to really determine if you really did have a positive ecosystem impact. Did you really net improve the ecological health? Did you mitigate the acidification? Did you, for example, remove nutrients and help with eutrophication by taking out nutrients that were causing a problem otherwise? That would be great if we can accomplish all of that, and we need to consider that as part of this, but you can’t make a blanket statement. The science certainly does not support a blanket statement there.
Senator C. Deacon: Just to add to that, emphasizing the need for continued and growing scientific research to run in parallel with this work is just crucial. I don’t think you will get any disagreement from what we’ve heard so far.
Ms. Waite: I would like to say that, specifically in Nova Scotia, we’ve had acid rain coming from Ontario and the various industrial heartlands of the U.S. for decades. That has really decimated Nova Scotia fish populations. For example, in some cases, watersheds have lost 90% of their native fish. When you put antacid in these rivers, the fish come back, so there are significant potential co-benefits. That’s what is being discovered. You can do multiple good things, but those have to be quantified and checked to make sure they are what we think they are.
The Chair: On behalf of committee members, I thank our witnesses for the great discussion and for assisting us with our study. Thank you for taking the time. Thank you also to the members of the committee.
(The committee adjourned.)