THE STANDING SENATE COMMITTEE ON FISHERIES AND OCEANS
EVIDENCE
OTTAWA, Thursday, November 21, 2024
The Standing Senate Committee on Fisheries and Oceans met with videoconference this day at 9:01 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’m a senator from Newfoundland and Labrador, and I have the privilege to serve as chair of this committee. Today, we are conducting a meeting of the Standing Senate Committee on Fisheries and Oceans.
Before we begin, I would ask all senators and other in-person participants to consult the cards on the table for guidelines to prevent audio feedback incidents.
Please make sure to keep your earpiece away from the 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.
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.
Before we begin, 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.
Senator Petten: Iris Petten, Newfoundland and Labrador.
Senator Ravalia: Mohamed Ravalia, Newfoundland and Labrador.
Senator Francis: Brian Francis, Epekwitk, P.E.I.
[Translation]
Senator Aucoin: Réjean Aucoin from Nova Scotia.
[English]
Senator Cuzner: Rodger Cuzner, Nova Scotia.
Senator Busson: Welcome. I’m Bev Busson from British Columbia.
Senator McPhedran: Marilou McPhedran, Manitoba.
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. Kimberly Gilbert, Co‑Founder and Chief Executive Officer of pHathom Technologies; from CarbonRun, Dr. Shannon Sterling, Founder and Associate Professor, Dalhousie University; and from Planetary Technologies, Mike Kelland, Chief Executive Officer, and Dr. William Burt, Chief Ocean Scientist and Adjunct Professor, Department of Oceanography, Dalhousie University.
I would like to take the opportunity to thank Mr. Kelland and others at Planetary Technologies. Senator Deacon and I visited Halifax Harbour and their operation there. To call it impressive would be an understatement. It was very well put together, and the future looks very bright, so hopefully as part of our work here, we can facilitate what these companies are trying to do.
On behalf of the members of the committee, I thank each of you for being here today. I understand that you all have some opening remarks. Following the remarks, members of the committee, I’m sure, will have questions for you. We’re going to go to Dr. Gilbert, who is tuning in virtually, and I will give her the opportunity to have the first opening remarks.
Dr. Gilbert, the floor is yours.
Kimberly Gilbert, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, pHathom Technologies: Honourable members of the Senate, thank you for the opportunity to speak to you today.
My name is Kimberly Gilbert. I’m a carbonate chemist and founder and CEO of pHathom Technologies, a company dedicated to advancing innovative solutions for ocean carbon storage, enabling the widespread deployment of carbon removal technologies. I’m here to discuss the importance of developing a clear regulatory framework that can enable new approaches to fight climate change, especially through ocean-based carbon storage.
Our approach leverages existing biomass power plants, which already produce energy in a relatively carbon-neutral way. Biomass power plants emit CO2 when wood is burned. Our technology captures this CO2 before it enters the atmosphere and uses limestone to convert it into bicarbonate, a stable form of carbon naturally present in the ocean. This bicarbonate can then be safely added to ocean waters, where it permanently sequesters the carbon.
Why is this important? Reducing atmospheric CO2 is essential for mitigating climate change and stabilizing global temperatures. Excess CO2 in the atmosphere traps heat, which raises atmospheric and ocean temperatures and increases acidity. Converting CO2 into bicarbonate for ocean storage offers a promising solution to reduce CO2 levels on a large scale while also addressing ocean acidification, which harms marine ecosystems and communities that rely on them.
However, while the scientific and environmental potential is strong, our ability to secure funding has been hampered by regulatory uncertainty. Investors are hesitant to commit capital to ocean-based carbon storage when it’s unclear what will be allowed, what regulatory steps need to be taken and whether these projects can move forward from pilot stages to full deployment. Canada could lead in this field, but only if it creates a clear regulatory pathway that allows for well-structured and safe experimentation.
Therefore, we are asking for the establishment of a regulatory sandbox specific to advancing the scientific, technical and commercial potential of ocean carbon storage. This sandbox would outline clear, science-based guidelines for conducting experimental-scale carbon storage, such as bicarbonate releases. Such a framework would allow start-ups like ours to conduct small-scale tests, gather data and refine our processes with a clear understanding of what’s required to move to the next stage.
This regulatory sandbox should clarify the acceptable thresholds for experimental releases and lay out a roadmap for moving from pilot testing to commercial deployment.
We are not asking for reduced standards but for clear standards. The development of specific regulatory guidelines for ocean carbon storage would help protect our oceans, provide investors with a more predictable environment for funding and empower Canadian innovators to be at the forefront of the fight against climate change.
Thank you for considering this opportunity to support the responsible development of ocean-based carbon storage.
The Chair: Thank you, Dr. Gilbert.
Dr. Sterling, the floor is yours.
[Translation]
Shannon Sterling, Founder and Associate Professor, Dalhousie University, CarbonRun: Honourable senators, esteemed committee members, thank for giving me an opportunity to speak with you today about ocean carbon sequestration and its profound potential for environmental and economic progress in Canada. As an associate professor of earth and environmental sciences at Dalhousie University, I have spent my career trying to understand the effects of human activity on aquatic systems and finding sustainable solutions to protect and restore our ecosystems and mitigate climate change.
[English]
I have taught Dalhousie students about the science of climate change since 2010. In the first five years, we had considerable hope we could slow global warming. Scientists were producing piles of evidence that showed us what we needed to do to prevent severe climate impacts. In 2015, we committed limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius under the Paris Agreement. Yet, despite knowing what to do, for the next nine years, our global community failed to act. So here we are at the end of 2024. We are on track for 2.6 to 3.1 degrees of warming — dangerous levels unprecedented in human history.
To address this crisis, we must reduce greenhouse gas emissions immediately, and we must also urgently scale carbon dioxide removal technologies.
I believe the only viable path to successfully scale carbon dioxide removal at the pace that we need to is through a healthy, innovative commercial sector. My experience in river restoration taught me this. Despite clear evidence on the rate that salmon populations in Nova Scotia were plummeting and despite clear knowledge of what we needed to do to save them, funding priorities simply favoured roads and schools over rivers. That is why when I saw the potential for the international carbon market to enable restoration projects, I jumped at the opportunity to found CarbonRun.
In the past 20 months, since CarbonRun’s creation, we’ve achieved significant milestones. We developed a new carbon dioxide removal approach, river alkalinity enhancement, and launched a full-scale demonstration in Nova Scotia. Recently, we secured a $35-million Canadian purchase from Frontier backed by international companies like Stripe and Alphabet. This funding will support new projects across Canada, and these facilities will permanently remove CO2, provide fish habitats and help protect our coasts from ocean acidification.
By 2060, we need to be drawing down billions of tonnes of CO2. To put that in perspective, that is when our current high school seniors will be my age. The dream is that they live in a world where emissions have reached net zero; carbon dioxide removal facilities dot Canada’s landscapes and oceans; these facilities are boring, operating like utilities, blending seamlessly with infrastructure like dams and water treatment plants while sharing economic benefits equitably with communities; and transparent data collection measures how these facilities are improving ecosystem health and documents how we are progressing toward our climate goals.
To achieve this vision, we need regulatory frameworks that support the right kinds of companies, those accountable to societies and Indigenous communities yet unburdened by excessive red tape, to foster both innovation and the required stability. Which carbon dioxide removal, or CDR, solutions we choose to develop should be driven by scientific evidence and societal values and not dictated by big industry or oil and gas interests.
Among all CDR technologies, marine CDR is unique in its high potential for permanence, low cost, ability to scale and delivery of environmental benefits. To give our high schoolers a chance of that 2060 possibility, we need to give marine carbon dioxide removal a chance to succeed, and Canada has the opportunity to lead in this transformative effort. Thank you.
The Chair: Thank you, Dr. Sterling.
Mike Kelland, Chief Executive Officer, Planetary Technologies: Good morning. I’m honoured to have been asked to testify to this committee on the unceded lands of the Algonquin Anishinaabeg people.
Planetary’s vision is to restore the ocean and the climate for generations to come. We’re working to safely and responsibly develop a method of carbon removal and ocean sequestration called ocean alkalinity enhancement, or OAE. Our emissions have upset the balance of the earth. OAE aims to help to restore that balance.
The ocean breathes, and if the air that it breathes is too high in CO2, it draws alkalinity from the rocks on land to balance it, but this is a slow process, taking hundreds of thousands of years. By accelerating the weathering of rock, a natural process, we can produce medicine for the ocean essentially identical to the antacids you might take if you had indigestion. That helps restore balance in a local region. Then, the ocean can breathe again, drawing CO2 out of the air and storing it for hundreds of thousands of years.
OAE is a high-potential process that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, has cited as having the highest scalability and effectiveness and lowest cost among all methods of carbon removal, both on land and in the ocean. The B.C. Centre for Innovation and Clean Energy has echoed this with an in-depth analysis that shows alkalinity enhancement is the only approach capable of low-cost, multi-gigatonne removals.
This combination of low cost and high scale means that OAE could fulfill up to 90% of the 10 billion tonnes of carbon removal that we need annually by 2050 to avoid the worst impacts of climate change. For a sense of scale, if we achieve this ambitious goal, it means that it will be moving three times the mass of the current oil industry and be worth over $1 trillion a year.
Through the work of scientists, communities, investors and entrepreneurs, Canada is leading in this promising field. Halifax is the only place that net removals using OAE have been delivered to customers, and the facility that Planetary operates in collaboration with Nova Scotia Power, Dalhousie University and countless others is globally unique and is attracting businesses and researchers from around the world to the region.
Planetary is committed to continuing with our inclusive approach, engaging rights holders, communities, NGOs, academia and government stakeholders to ensure transparent, responsible and community-driven deployment of OAE.
To maintain that leadership position and the jobs, exports and innovations that come with it, Canada’s government must match the ambition of its start-ups and their academic collaborators. This means two things: first, supporting community-engaged, responsible development through science-led permitting; and second, providing investor confidence through predictable and inclusive climate policy.
Canada’s climate minister has already shown leadership at the recent International Maritime Organization meeting, supporting the emerging marine carbon dioxide removal, or mCDR, industry by taking a principled and science-led approach to international permitting. Our engagement to date with Environment and Climate Change Canada has been extremely productive, with strong transparency and clear permitting that we can work with under existing permitting.
However, the most powerful lever that governments can use to scale up OAE is predictability. By clearly signalling that this form of carbon removal will be available to industry to fulfill their climate obligations, governments will stimulate investment. Direct purchases and grants are required, but predictability is more powerful and can drive higher investment.
To borrow from Hemingway, technology development happens gradually and then suddenly. OAE and other climate repair technologies delivered only 81,000 tonnes of durable carbon removal across all pathways in 2023, 20,000 times less than will be required by 2030. There is significant work to be done on the effectiveness and safety of OAE at increasing scales. The certified carbon removals we announced on Monday were the first in the world but only represent the removal of about 0.12 seconds of worldwide emissions.
This is no different from any other technology in its early stages. Almost every single forecast of solar power has underestimated its deployment by over five times over the years. To achieve our climate goals, it’s critical that we approach the development of this field with curiosity, diligence and urgency. We must lead with science, data and partnerships rather than with fear, assumptions and division. If we do this correctly, we have a far better chance of building a world in which future generations can thrive.
Thank you very much.
The Chair: Thank you, Mr. Kelland.
William Burt, Chief Ocean Scientist and Adjunct Professor, Department of Oceanography, Dalhousie University, Planetary Technologies: Good morning, members of the committee, and thank you for the opportunity to speak with you today.
My name is Dr. Will Burt, and before joining Planetary Technologies, I spent 15 years in academia.
My research, like that of many in my field, consistently documented the ongoing negative impacts of climate change, specifically the accelerating rates of ocean acidification and declines in the ocean’s productivity at the base of the food chain. In other words, I studied problems, and I relayed these problems through various publications, lectures and seminars. Since joining Planetary in 2022, I’ve turned this work on its head. Now we study solutions, and now my lectures leave my audience with energy, enthusiasm and hope.
This morning, there are three key messages I’d like to convey. First, when considering marine carbon dioxide removal, or mCDR, it’s important to understand how different the specific pathways can be. Second, at this early stage, close collaboration between industry and academic sectors is the key to real success. Third, small teams like Planetary can have big impacts while remaining clear-eyed about our responsibility as trailblazers in a new and growing industry.
First, a critical element when examining ocean carbon sequestration is that techniques for sequestration can and do differ dramatically. My decision to leave a faculty position for a small start-up was not an easy one, but through Planetary, I learned about ocean alkalinity enhancement. As a chemical oceanographer, I found alkalinity enhancement was a remarkably simple, almost obvious win-win concept. If you deacidify seawater just a tiny amount, it will take carbon dioxide out of the air naturally, and that carbon storage in ocean chemistry will be long-lasting. By focusing on these small chemical changes, you’d minimize any biological impacts, and the sheer size of the oceans’ carbon reservoir means immense potential scalability.
Despite all this, attention was seemingly focused on land-based approaches like direct air capture and forestry. In the past three years, however, there’s been an explosion of knowledge generated that is confirming my expectations, particularly biological impacts being generally neutral and in some cases positive, like coral restoration and increased fish biomass.
Other mCDR approaches drive ocean carbon uptake in fundamentally different ways and thus have very different risk profiles, scale potential, co-benefits, and trade-offs. This was well summarized by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, in a recently published CDR fact sheet.
At this time, according to all of our climate models, we know we must act, and I’ve chosen to focus all my scientific energy not on CDR generally, but on the pathway that I believe maximizes climate benefit while minimizing environmental risk.
Second, I’d like to highlight the critical role of academic-industry collaboration. This collaboration accelerates learning that we desperately need. We cannot afford to study climate solutions at the same decades-long pace that we’ve studied the climate crisis. Nimble start-ups with ambitious timelines can push progress and create environments that facilitate rapid academic discovery. This is happening right now in Halifax.
Planetary’s pilot project in Halifax Harbour allows Dalhousie scientists to develop their own assessments of the viability and safety of this kind of approach. Given our limited resources and the logistical and scientific complexity of this work, our respective science teams must work closely together to maximize learning.
This collaboration also fosters transparency. Academic findings must be made publicly available, and, in my experience, our academic partners expect the same from us. Planetary’s code of conduct is published online, and there we state that our scientific findings are shared no matter what. At these early stages, we can only make progress if we establish trust both with our collaborators and across the communities we work with.
This brings me to my final point. Planetary is a small team, and, in a short time, we’ve taken big strides toward proving the viability and safety of this approach. We’ve transformed Halifax into the global hub for R&D in ocean alkalinity, and we’re already removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere on a net basis. We understand that as the climate crisis deepens, interest in CDR will continue to grow, especially for ocean-based approaches that could truly get to gigatonnes.
As leaders, we stay focused on cultivating responsible and equitable practices for an industry seemingly destined to scale. If done right, we believe we can make a meaningful positive impact.
Thank you very much.
The Deputy Chair: Thank you very much, Dr. Burt. For those watching us on the screen or who may be visiting on the internet, I’m taking over for Senator Manning, who’s been called away. Thank you very much.
We’ll continue now. As you can imagine with your interesting presentations, we have a lot of questions.
Senator McPhedran: Thank you for being with us, both online and in person. I feel as if I’m on a very intense learning journey with you this morning.
I have a two-part question. The first part is for whoever wishes to respond. I’ve heard from each of you about benefits to and engagement with community, and those are wonderful principles. But could you tell us more about what that actually looks like?
The second part of the question is also to help me understand. We have the water-based sequestration, and then there is also — and I realize it’s not your field of expertise — biological sequestration. I think, Dr. Sterling, I heard reference to the emphasis on rivers, and from Dr. Burt and Dr. Kelland, I heard about oceans.
Could we hear more about how your methodology is clearly — if it is — responsible economic development?
Ms. Sterling: Regarding the benefits to community, to walk you through the process, it takes time. Community engagement is vital, as is listening to the communities where companies are thinking about operating. It needs to happen 12 to 18 months ahead of time at least. That involves community stakeholder mapping or rights-holder mapping. Who are the members of this community? Are they all present, or are they spread out over the province, for example? Then begins a listening and engagement process, engaging the community to share in the decisions of, perhaps, where we should be siting and maybe where previous environmental injustices have occurred so that we make sure we don’t exacerbate those.
That is a long process. That’s what it looks like for us, and it is ongoing, involving continued communication, listening, responding to feedback, open houses, sharing data and listening to, for example, how the data that we collect could help them manage their problems and help inform them.
That’s how we’ve been experiencing it in the first few years, and that will be ongoing with each project. It takes a lot of time and money. If we can be creative on how, perhaps, federal governments can help streamline our process, that would be great.
Senator McPhedran: Is it essential, or is it a nice thing to do?
Ms. Sterling: It’s essential. If you have a goal of just transition, it is an ethical decision.
Mr. Kelland: For our part, I would echo what Dr. Sterling said very strongly. It is essential to do appropriate community engagement and deep community engagement in this space in particular. In general, it’s a good idea, but we’re working the global commons. There are issues that communities need to be involved in.
Dr. Sterling mentioned environmental justice issues, which I think are very important. But I think on top of that, we have to understand that, as the space is new and developing and we’re doing this in the world for the first time, it’s required that we hear the voices but also respect the history.
One of the things that I could point to as a very specific example of that is an ongoing conversation around atmospheric rights. So when we look at it, we often talk about treaty rights to lands, fisheries and waters, but there are fundamental conversations as well about the atmosphere. Who owns the CO2 we’ve put up there, and if that has a value, how do you value that? I think that is also an ongoing conversation.
When we work in the ocean, in particular, nothing stays static. Where we do a project is not necessarily where, ultimately, the potential benefits or impacts of that project could extend to. The ocean moves around a lot.
We have to make sure that we are engaging deeply in order to understand all of those benefits and impacts, and how we can progress those things.
We also see community engagement as a huge opportunity in a lot of ways. Ultimately, as companies developing early-stage technology, our goal is to develop that tool set in order to enable this pathway, but we know that we alone will not be the ones to deploy it everywhere. If we’re able to provide communities with a tool that not only can restore their local oceans, as Dr. Burt mentioned, increasing biomass for fisheries or restoring shell fisheries are key benefits of this approach. If we can provide that tool where it can provide a business model or investment model to communities that can leverage that to do restorative economic development, both from a restoration perspective and a carbon-removal perspective, there is a lot of value to us as a company in that because it provides scalability and enhanced reach.
For all of those reasons, deep community engagement is absolutely required.
Mr. Burt: I’ll add a couple of examples and then a couple more examples for the second part of your question.
For my part, a lot of my work in community is at the university level and the public level through lectures and seminars.
The part that I think is best about these seminars, whether they be for students or for the public, is they look very different from the types of lectures people usually get about climate, and you really see the change in the energy in the room. I think there is value to giving that message of hope and optimism instead of the message we usually give around this topic.
The other thing we do — and I think this is really good — is bringing people to the actual site. I know Dr. Sterling’s team does this too. People want to actually see it in action. They see how simple it is and how innocuous but exciting it is. I think that also generates a lot of excitement.
In terms of the second part of your question about economic impacts — I think that’s what you were driving at — there are a few examples I can give, but I’m sure others can too. There are a number of partners we’ve had to work in Halifax, for example, to get that site operating. There have been local engineering firms, as well as a local containerizing company in Dartmouth. We hired drive teams to do the diving work we can’t do ourselves and boat operators in the harbour. You can pick any number you would like, but there are at least tens of millions of dollars of academic funding that has been catalyzed by the emergence of ocean alkalinity in Halifax for Dalhousie University and trickling out to other institutions as well. Those are some examples, but I’ll let others weigh in.
Ms. Gilbert: I think the answers that you’ve heard so far are excellent, and I agree with them.
I’d like to add that transparency and education, as Dr. Burt said, are important to us as well. Because we’re working at power plants that already exist, our stakeholder mapping might look a little bit different. We’re very interested in the impacts on the lobster fishermen, who are offshore, and we’re seeing that some of the power plants are in jeopardy of shutting down. We’re interested in those stakeholders as well. What do their jobs look like? By implementing carbon capture and storage technologies for the biomass power plants, we can help keep them open and help keep renewable power in Nova Scotia.
So, just to add to all of the things that they’ve said, there are economic interests for the fisheries and for the local communities as well.
Senator Ravalia: Thank you very much to our witnesses for being here this morning.
My question will focus on Newfoundland and Labrador. Given our vast marine resources around the province, how can local industries — in particular fisheries, and the oil and gas industry — be integrated into or benefit from carbon sequestration? Have you begun to commence partnerships and discussions? Regarding the other impacts, including shifting ocean currents, climate warming and pollution, to what extent to do they impact alkalinization?
Mr. Kelland: From our perspective, those are two different industries, obviously: the oil and gas industry and the fisheries industry.
On the fisheries side, I often show this picture of my kids running down a winter beach in Nova Scotia. They’re having lots of fun and it’s a grey day, and I say, “The thing you can’t see is the industrial waste being dumped in the ocean right behind them.” We are putting 27 million tonnes a day of acidic CO2 into our oceans with our emissions, and that has impacts that we can’t understand. We don’t know what the impact of that 200-year-long industrial experiment is, but we’re starting to see it and understand that damage happening as a result of that acidification. Our ocean is about 30% too acidic right now.
By looking at an approach like this, ocean alkalinity enhancement, and reversing some of that damage in a local area, we are able to see positive impacts on traditional livelihoods like fishing. This is something that we’re still developing. There is still science happening, but the results are looking very positive. The study that Dr. Burt mentioned came out a couple of weeks ago, and it was saying that alkalinity enhancement can increase the biomass of cod and halibut fisheries. When you see that restoration, it stands to reason, but it’s still something that, experimentally, we’re proving in the field and showing. Supporting those livelihoods is very important from the perspective of alkalinity enhancement.
From an oil and gas perspective, there are a few things we look at. If this industry will scale the way it is anticipated to — and we look at it as a trillion-dollar industry by 2050, which is what we need to stay within lower risk limits to climate — that is going to be a very large industry that has a lot of opportunities for employment. So during a clean and just transition away from an emitting economy toward a clean economy, that’s where the jobs have to come from, these industries. As a leader in this space in Canada, I think we have a lot of opportunities to bring and keep those jobs within Canada’s ocean regions on all three of our coasts.
The scale of this opportunity is absolutely massive, and I think that when we’re looking to potentially transition some of those jobs, this is going to be a really good opportunity for that.
Senator Ravalia: Thank you very much for that. I’m wondering to what extent you are using technologies like AI and digitization to address challenges like scalability, efficiency and minimizing environmental factors as your work progresses.
Mr. Kelland: It’s interesting. When you look at this technology, as Dr. Burt mentioned in his opening comments, this is actually a very simple approach. We are basically doing what anyone does in the case of an acid spill of any kind. You add a base, and you neutralize it. The chemistry is incredibly simple.
As we prove that in the complex environment of the ocean, which is the core focus for us, the challenge of deploying and scaling this technology becomes twofold. One is actually a data management problem, which is where digitalization and AI come in, and the other is a logistics problem. When we have to remove 10 billion tonnes of carbon a year from the atmosphere, that’s moving a lot of mass in one way or another, whether you’re moving rocks or the CO2 itself. One way or another, it’s moving a lot of mass, so the logistics challenge is a very big part of this at scale once we get past developing the science of it.
But the other half of it is we have to be confident in the fact that we are, in fact, making the impact we plan to. That is turning out to be an absolutely giant data management problem. In our company of 25 people, two of those are full-time software developers who are working on data management and those kinds of things. We’re looking at numerical modelling. We also have a couple of modellers, on top of those software developers, and we are moving into machine learning approaches for reducing the complexity of those models while maintaining the integrity of the carbon measurement.
It’s definitely a big part of the work that we’re doing.
Ms. Sterling: One of the points I would like to convey is that we could proceed with exploring CDR without a lot of information monitoring, or we could have a lot of information on the baseline of our ecosystems. Unfortunately, we’ve cut back in the past 20 years on a lot of our water quality monitoring and water chemistry monitoring, so we need to beef that up again, and the government has a key role to play in that.
This information can be used to reduce the costs of these carbon dioxide removal projects and reduce another bottleneck we have as a company. What delays our deployment time is baseline monitoring information, so we want to support companies by helping them reduce that bottleneck by having existing monitoring systems in place, and it will reduce times of deployment and costs.
AI plays a part in this. The AI can take these point measurements and integrate them into a bigger network and find out where we need to put the monitoring stations and help us really gain valuable information. This information not just reduces the costs of the carbon dioxide removal projects but also builds trust with society.
If we go ahead and develop CDR and society thinks the government is not paying attention and not monitoring things, that’s a really different feeling of trust than if we know we have confidence we are monitoring for the unexpected.
And to enable the regulatory systems to hold the companies accountable, I would say AI would play a big role in that.
Mr. Burt: I would like to return to your first question about fisheries. One good example is that as we progress with this technology, we’re going to get better at deploying it. That’s one of our key goals for the next year. So you can imagine a situation very soon where a shellfish farm in P.E.I., or certainly in British Columbia, where acidification is a much more immediate problem, because this technology is so simple in terms of what it’s doing, you could set up a facility there, and in that facility, you could be making the waters less acidic. That is one of the reasons why these shellfish farms struggle, so a small facility that not only creates revenue for that shellfish farm but also makes for a healthier product and a healthier ecosystem for those shellfish is not that far off in the future if we continue on this path.
The Deputy Chair: Dr. Gilbert, do you have any further comments on this particular question?
Ms. Gilbert: Yes. I’d like to say a few things about the first part of the question about fisheries and oil and gas.
I agree with what Dr. Burt said about fisheries. In speaking with fishermen in Atlantic Canada, we’re learning about reduced lobster growth and increased predation on young lobsters because they don’t have the carbonates in the water to build their shells. This technology can help buffer and increase their growth rates.
With respect to the oil and gas industry, so many of our processes are on a massive scale, moving water and integrating it with the gas and the limestone. It’s something that process engineers, people who work in large industries like the oil and gas industry, know and understand well. In fact, one of our key hires worked in the oil and gas industry for more than 30 years, and she naturally understands what it means to move this amount of water, so the people who are working in those industries will be essential for integrating this with existing industries.
The Deputy Chair: Thank you very much.
Senator Petten: What I’m hearing as a theme is around funding, and as a former entrepreneur, I’m always interested in that side of things. What I’m wondering is this: Do you need the regulatory sandbox to access the funding? I guess it was Ms. Sterling who mentioned the regulatory sandbox. Those comments triggered the question for me.
Ms. Sterling: I think it was Dr. Gilbert who mentioned that. Do you want to take it first, Dr. Gilbert, and then I can follow?
Ms. Gilbert: Sure. From an investor standpoint, what we hear over and over are two or three things. What is your regulatory pathway? How can you be sure when you develop all of this technology, even when you prove it out, that you’ll be able to deploy it? So we’ve talked to individuals, but we get slightly different answers when talking to different individuals and different provinces. Having a clear answer for that would help them get confidence in that commercializability of the technology. The second piece we hear all the time is about community engagement. Will the communities buy into this?
For us, those two pieces are essential even before we get our first pilot on the ground. Do we have a clear regulatory pathway to ensure that what we do at the experimental phase has a pathway for full deployment, and can we bring the communities along so that not only do we have their permission, but we also have their buy-in and the pull into their communities? We want them to want us there. Those are the two pieces.
Ms. Sterling: If I understand, while there is funding, the question regards the long-term sustainable goals for profitability. And that brings up what Senator McPhedran asked about, so really, it’s about providing mechanisms so that we can get a better return on investment and reduce our costs. There are many ways to be creative about this, like tax incentives, for example, or supporting foreign investors to support these Canadian tech companies, or supporting the carbon market and working toward the voluntary to support the compliance market. Those market signals really help companies like ours get those costs down.
Mr. Kelland: If I can add to those great points, and I fully agree with all of them, I think it comes back to the conversation around community and comes together with regulation.
In our experience, we can have a regulatory framework. We can have something that is predictable. Our pathway uniquely uses existing permitting frameworks that are used for waste water around the world and things like that. About a quarter of the alkalinity that is produced around the world is already used in wastewater processing. This is a familiar pathway for regulators, and that’s one of the reasons we’ve had good engagement and been able to permit under those permitting schemes. But we know well that the regulatory environment is really a reflection of our societal appetite to do things right at the end of the day.
From a community engagement perspective, what we need from government is not only clarity around regulatory frameworks here, but also to make sure that the way that the government works on this issue doesn’t bias communities against it. This is something that actually came up very recently. I mentioned that Minister Guilbeault took a leadership position at the International Maritime Organization meeting in London at the end of the October, and what was at stake there was that this field, as it has emerged, has drawn a certain amount of controversy.
The controversy usually, I’ve found, comes from a debate about the benefits rather than a debate about the risks, if we really dig into it. There are a lot of people who think that we should not develop these technologies because it would take attention away from emissions reductions. At this point, there may be some validity to that, but we’re past the point where we have that choice. We know from the science, from the pathways, that we need to be removing massive amounts of carbon on top of reducing emissions, and we have to develop this industry very quickly. So we can’t wait until we’re done on the emissions reduction side of things, but that is still a pervasive narrative.
What has happened is the international community took a look at marine geoengineering and took a whole bunch of things that have very little do with each other. As Dr. Burt mentioned, these biological pathways and our chemical pathways — things that have to happen in the ocean versus things that can happen on shore, things that have existing permits and things that don’t — all have different risk profiles, potential for scale, cost points and all these things, and they were all lumped, at that international level, under one umbrella, which made it impossible to really do anything but say this looks risky because we had to go to the lowest common denominator.
What Environment and Climate Change Canada, or ECCC, has committed to do at this point is pause that conversation — and they led on this at the international level — so that we can engage collectively in a cross-country stakeholder discussion about how we should be progressing and how we should be thinking about these various technologies against their own merits and risks.
I think that’s a really important step because if we go to the international community and they say, “There is all this risk, and we don’t know what the benefits will be” — things you could say about an early-stage technology at that level — then broadcast that out, it’s going to pre-bias those conversations at the community level. It’s very difficult to then have a productive conversation that’s led by the science and the stage of the industry and where we — whether it be us, anyone around this table or anyone from the academic community — are trusted actors in that sense.
That is really critical from a regulatory perspective, and I don’t want to lose track of the fact that regulatory is technical, but it is really that reflection of the community, and we have made sure that’s incorporated into the conversation.
[Translation]
Senator Aucoin: My first question is for Mr. Burt. I think I understand your phrase.
[English]
“removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere on a net basis” in Halifax.
[Translation]
Could you explain a bit further and tell us how you did it? Which technologies or procedures did you use?
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Mr. Burt: I’d be happy to, yes, thank you.
The first thing I’ll say about it is that before this announcement came out last week, we recognized that this question would be the first to come up, so we posted a video on our website where we walked through it. I invite anyone listening to find that video. I’ll do my best to replicate it in a shorter version, but it is relatively straightforward.
We add an alkaline mineral, and we know how much we’ve added. We can understand the mass of the material we’ve added; we can monitor that very closely. That’s the obvious first step.
Then we can measure how much of the hydroxide or the material that does the neutralizing is in that mineral, because it’s not 100% pure. There is a purity concept, and you measure the material over and over again and get an estimate of that purity.
Now you know how much reactive alkaline material you’ve put in the ocean, and we have what we call a time series. We know how much we added every minute for the full three months last year.
Then you can put that time series into a series of ocean models, and these models range from a very high-resolution scale of Halifax Harbour, and the model I’m speaking about is run by a group at the Dalhousie Department of Oceanography, Dr. Katja Fennel. We worked with that team to understand where this material is going in the harbour and how much carbon uptake it is achieving there.
Then you can take the output of that model and put it into a global model, because this material, of course, will leave the harbour and enter the greater ocean landscape, but you can track it there as well using a global model. So you understand the uptake in the regional space and the global space, and that gives you an estimate of the total uptake you’ve achieved.
The next step is calculating the emissions footprint of the project, and that is a very complicated thing to do. I’m glad to say I don’t do that work myself, but my colleague Omar does that work, and he counts every nut, bolt and screw of the system we build on-site, the transport of the material to the site and the emissions that are involved in creating that material, whether it’s mined or coming from a byproduct pile. You add that all together and you have an estimate, and you take that off the uptake that you’ve achieved, and that goes from a gross to a net carbon removal.
Every step along the way, there is uncertainty. There is an uncertainty in your mass estimate, emissions estimate — everything. You compile all those estimates, you propagate them according to general equations, and you have an uncertainty estimate. What we do at Planetary, which is unique, is we say that we know that uncertainty. We’re actually going to discount that from our net removal because we are not 100% sure that we’ve done that amount of removal. We kind of take that haircut at the end, and that moves us from a net carbon removal to what we call a creditable carbon renewal, and that gets you to the finish line.
On top of that, we have this huge suite of ocean data we have collected that we use to validate the approach and the proof of concept. Some of those measurements end up validating the models that are used, and we bring that all together.
That’s the short version. I hope that answers your question.
Senator Aucoin: I’m glad I didn’t ask for the long version, but it’s very interesting.
[Translation]
Are you saying that the model could be used over a larger territory or ultimately in the oceans? Is that correct?
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Mr. Burt: Absolutely. We have projects in the United States, and we’re developing a project on the West Coast, in Vancouver, and it follows the same general approach. These types of models exist locally, and the global model, of course, can be applied anywhere. As I said earlier, the real goal now is to take that very complex and time-consuming approach, replicate it and make it something we can deploy faster and more efficiently. We’ve made remarkable strides on that. When I see you next year, I’ll describe the process, and it will be similar, but the speed at which we can run that whole system will be much faster, and that will get us closer to being an economically viable company.
Mr. Kelland: To add to what Will said, the way this process works from a chemical perspective is simple. In the ocean, there is a direct linear relationship between the amount of alkalinity and the amount of carbon that the ocean holds. When we add alkalinity to the ocean, when we neutralize the CO2 in the waters with that antacid, and we increase the alkalinity of the ocean, the chemistry is straightforward. It’s just going to happen.
Where the complexity of the measurement comes in, as Dr. Burt mentioned, is understanding where the water goes; that is the big deal. As the water moves around physically in the ocean, it can subduct. It can go deep in the ocean, it can stay on the surface, and if it has not reacted with the atmosphere before it subducts, that’s where we start to get efficiency losses within the system. That’s why the models are so critical. A piece of the equation is that modelling piece.
What we’re seeing as a proof of concept right now, which is really exciting for us, is that the explosion of knowledge in this space is not an underestimate. There were 10 times as many peer-reviewed studies on ocean alkalinity enhancement published last year versus five years ago, so there is an exponential growth in knowledge in this space as we explore it as a viable climate solution.
Halifax is leading the way on that. One of the things that we’ve seen that we didn’t expect is that we’re now able to do direct measurements of some of these factors in terms of the carbon being removed from the atmosphere. This is something that we’re continuing to evolve with our academic partners, but that adds a lot of confidence within that measurement over time. We can actually say whether the model is correct or not based on looking at some of these points of measurement that are coming out of the system.
Ms. Gilbert: Our methods are a little different in that we’re not doing ocean alkalinity enhancement exactly, but the result is very similar. We are adding the mineral to the water on shore, and then we’re adding the CO2 directly to the water. So we’re collecting the CO2 from the flue gas that comes from the biomass power plant, integrating it into the water and mixing it with the mineral, so we’re neutralizing before it goes into the water.
We do measurements on shore. We haven’t done a deployment yet, so I’m cheering on Planetary who are the ones to actually collect the CO2 out of the atmosphere.
Our system looks a little different, but, in the end, we both end up with added bicarbonate into the ocean.
The Deputy Chair: Thank you very much.
Senator C. Deacon: Thank you all for being here. This is just mind-blowing.
I want to start with you, Dr. Gilbert, because you raised it first, and then I will work through the panel.
The importance of a regulatory sandbox has been underscored well, but I also want to think about the risk of that not being done properly.
I’ve started to see a regulatory hole that could be filled by any number of groups in combination, and that worries me because I see the risk of no progress being made because the layers just start emerging, and everybody puts their hat in the ring and says, “No, I need to. I need to.”
I started to see the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, with which we have our own challenges in this committee, Environment and Climate Change Canada, or ECCC, Article 6 of the Paris Agreement — and all the different ways to work internationally to make us a leader here — Natural Resources Canada and Transport Canada because of their responsibility in harbours and whatever else. I’m not asking them to become involved, but I can see them wanting to become involved, as well as provinces and territories at different levels. The Treasury Board just did a great thing: They announced a procurement issue. The Treasury Board is becoming involved.
It really underscores for me, Dr. Gilbert, the need for this hole to be filled by an entirely new group and some responsibility devolved to that group for a sandbox that starts to say, “We’re taking care of the issues that you’re concerned about but in a collective manner.”
Could you speak about this a little bit? I’m seeing the risks of inaction on the sandbox. The first sign of sandboxes being mentioned in Canada was in Budget 2024. This is a new thing for our country, but the risk of inaction worries me because every time we have a meeting about it, the opportunity gets bigger in my mind. I see government truly wanting to do the right thing, but I can see problems emerging. Over to you, Dr. Gilbert.
Ms. Gilbert: As I said, it’s not only a challenge for us in these initial phases, in which we’re raising money and talking to investors, but each time we speak to a new potential customer or biomass power plant, we may be working in a different region. We spoke with a biomass plant in New Brunswick and another in Nova Scotia, and we’re reaching out to those in Prince Edward Island. Each time we speak with them, we are asked the same question.
The industries we’re working with are especially concerned because they don’t want us touching their existing permits. They’ve been through a significant process in establishing the permits, so they don’t want to have to modify them. The fact that the industries are terrified of the regulatory processes is significant for us. We’re trying to be very proactive about it. For us, having that clarity at a higher level is important. What do we need to do as we move from region to region? What do we need to do to build the trust of the communities and the government and to demonstrate to the communities — as Mr. Kelland said — that we have the full support and vetting of the government? That would be very useful. It would be very powerful and would clear the pathway to let us focus on how we remove the carbon from the atmosphere and safely into the ocean.
Mr. Kelland: I agree completely with what Dr. Gilbert said. We have a cautionary tale to tell, and it is a tale of two countries, neither of which are Canada. Planetary Technologies originally started our work, which was a trial in 2022, in the ocean in the southwest of the U.K. In fact, it’s right outside the town of Kelland, which, as you mentioned, is where my family comes from. Despite that, coming in with something brand-new to that region, and despite some very intense community engagement locally, we had a lot of community pushback. It’s the first time I had a protest against me, and it was an interesting experience. The objection was due to the fact that people didn’t understand what we were doing. We did a poor job at the time of explaining it to them. I think we’ve learned an awful lot from that experience.
From a regulatory standpoint, in the first trial we did, we were told by the Environmental Agency, or EA, there — and this was incredibly tiny; it was in a waste water plant within their existing permits — to just go ahead and do it. They said it was a three-day trial and not a big deal, and that we weren’t breaking any of the permits that exist. They noted we were partnered with a waste water plant. They said everything was fine and to go ahead and do it.
So, we did. Then we went to talk to the community after that, which turned out to be a bad idea. There was a lot of pushback from the community. What it meant was that the EA, who were very supportive of our work, ended up having to take us through a year-long independent review of all our science to answer the community concerns. It became a very large thing. The report that came out at the end confirmed everything we had said. It was an independent review. They asked us 150 questions over the course of a year, pulling in all the relevant scientists. This was for something that was intended to be a two-week trial or campaign.
In contrast, in the U.S. right now, you can go to the website of the Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA, and look up “mCDR,” and it will say on there that if you’re operating within an existing facility’s permit, you’re good to go. You send them a letter and do whatever you would like within the scope of that existing permit because it’s an existing permit. They understand those limits are safe and understood for that facility.
The risk, Senator Deacon, as you point to, is exactly that: This sort of lack of clarity on understanding that the government stands behind the permits that we have in place today, or that there are pathways toward that, can cause a lot of nervousness across our communities, and that risk is going to be reflected directly in our ability to do things that are appropriately scaled, safe and understood, and our ability to productively engage in conversations that don’t devolve into sort of fear and division. I think that that is critical.
To me, that is a very visceral and direct reflection of the potential risk of not having clarity on regulatory frameworks.
Senator C. Deacon: Dr. Sterling and Dr. Burt, I’ve certainly picked up from your comments that this is an emerging area of science, knowledge and understanding, and it’s growing rapidly. No disrespect to our regulators, but our regulators are not at that cutting edge. Could you speak to the risks of that knowledge gap — that if we don’t have a separate structure that is integrated with that cutting-edge work and leading research, we won’t be able to stay in a leadership position in Canada? That’s what I’m feeling. Could you speak to that, Dr. Sterling and Dr. Burt?
Ms. Sterling: Sure. First, from the hat of a company — the risk for companies is increased costs and instability from delayed deployment from complicated permits. If we can’t have a regulatory sandbox, how do we de-risk that? Working within the system, how can we not only streamline communication, but improve communication between the local and provincial regulators who make the decisions on the permits, who also need to liaison — as you referred to — with Fisheries and Oceans Canada, or DFO, and Environment and Climate Change Canada, or ECCC. We have to find a way to streamline that and then mitigate those costs because the bottom line for companies is just going to increase costs and timelines. If we can’t speed up permits, maybe we can speed up the other bottlenecks like baseline monitoring and community engagement — or not speed up, but make those more efficient and find ways to save costs elsewhere.
You talked about universities. That is a key message that we should be communicating, and we are. For example, we are telling the Ocean Frontier Institute at Dalhousie University that we need to have this communication and outreach to permitters. We need to make an active effort on that. We could do more.
Mr. Burt: Yes, thanks. I echo the other comments here. From my experience here, you’re absolutely right in terms of the knowledge gap. There are good examples, actually, of how we’ve worked collaboratively with certain branches that you listed, and some have been less fruitful. I like the idea of there being a group where someone like me or Dr. Sterling can come in and give this explanation — or the long version maybe — once and have that disseminated throughout these very disparate groups. Maybe I’m kidding myself, but that would be very nice because we’ve spoken to the provincial regulator. We send reports regularly. We put a ton of energy into generating those reports because we feel they’re very important, but it’s one-way traffic. We don’t hear back; we don’t hear feedback, saying, “We want to see this. We are not seeing this. We love this.” That’s challenging, because we’re operating in the dark in terms of how our regulators feel about how we’re doing.
On the flip side, we’ve worked with ECCC very productively. We have had multiple conversations and gone deep on the topic. It has been wonderful but also very time-consuming.
Then there are other groups we talk to separately. There is obviously a time constraint in having this conversation half a dozen or a dozen times. The idea of having it once in a group focused on this that can pass that information on, and maybe get others in the know that this is actually happening and they might want to get engaged, that could be very helpful to us.
Senator C. Deacon: If Canada were to do this, do you see that putting Canada in a globally competitive position in attracting other organizations to Canada that are doing similar work to you internationally?
Ms. Gilbert: I would be happy to go first.
I absolutely feel that way. I’m coming to you from Austin, Texas. My partner is in Halifax, and we are headquartered in Halifax because we see Nova Scotia and Atlantic Canada as leading the way. I think this would go a long way in bringing others in to develop these technologies.
Ms. Sterling: I agree we are well positioned to be leaders in this field due to our natural resources, the talent and the expert leadership, scientifically and with the companies; we really are a hot spot with carbon dioxide removal innovation here. That potential is there, and I would love to see it happen.
Mr. Burt: My answer would be, “Yes, we’re already there.” In Halifax, we have something called the Joint Learning Opportunity, where companies from around the world are invited to come to Halifax — and they are coming to Halifax currently — to deploy their sensors and technology, and, in some cases, their social science. That’s all centred around our work in Halifax.
So it really is happening.
I think it’s also important to note that the U.S. is making some really big strides toward this. The federal government is jumping in with two feet, and that’s really going to take off there as well.
I think we now hold the position as leaders, but the rest of the world is waking up quickly to the opportunities.
Senator Cuzner: My questions and thinking were pretty much the same as Senator Deacon’s, which should probably cause him some concern.
Not to get ahead of the researchers or presuppose, but the suggestion of a regulatory sandbox — I’m sure the table sort of said that would probably go straight to recommendations from the report. The way you’ve sort of sourced it out here makes a great deal of sense.
Could you elaborate on what’s going on in some other jurisdictions? We sense we’re in the lead now. You spoke a bit about the swing and the miss in the U.K. Is there still a fair amount of activity there? Where else is there activity? You had indicated some good work coming out of the United States.
What we have been taken by — I think I can speak on behalf of the committee — is that everyone seems to be in this together in the publication of your findings. We see that as a very positive thing. There seems to be a sense that everyone is cheering each other on here.
Could you elaborate on what is going on in other jurisdictions and if there are any steps being taken toward regulatory development there?
Ms. Sterling: I will start by talking globally.
Mission Innovation was created as part of the Paris Agreement. It’s an international coalition of signatory countries. To demonstrate our role in potential leadership on the world stage, I was invited to deliver an intervention to ministers of environment and energy from multiple nations, such as Saudi Arabia, the U.K. and the U.S. We have that world stage.
In Brazil a month ago, they committed to a gigatonne of carbon dioxide removal commitments by 2030. So there is that energy; the ministers have signed onto that at that stage.
Regarding the Nordic countries, including Norway — Dr. Halfyard, in a previous session, described the innovations they are working on.
Mr. Kelland: There are two sides to this coin: regulatory and markets. Both are really important policy perspectives on this. I often say that carbon dioxide is not part of anybody’s supply chain. It is an externality to our economy, largely, that is only starting to become incorporated. For these technologies to truly scale, they need to be represented within those structures and things.
From a regulated market and regulatory perspective on the market side, there are two jurisdictions that are truly leading on this right now. One of them is Japan. Japan is the only country in the world with a regulatory framework that includes ocean-based carbon removal. That structure is a biological pathway — a kelp-based carbon removal pathway — but it is a step. Those are the kinds of steps we need to be including within policy if we truly want to be leaders in this space.
The second place that is starting to incorporate removals more writ large is the EU. Last year, the EU put together the carbon removal and carbon farming components of the EU Emissions Trading System, or EU ETS. That aims to include carbon removal, including carbon that is stored within oceanic reservoirs, into the largest compliance-trading network in the world. That is a very important policy structure that is happening in the EU that we should be looking to either emulate or build a made-in-Canada solution that looks similar.
On the licence-to-operate side of things, I mentioned that the U.S. has put together a very simple framework. If you are working within existing permits, then you can go ahead and do this. That’s really important. One of the things I often say is that Canada does not have a permitting structure for a power plant. There is a whole set of permitting. I think this idea of regulatory framework is a good one, because there are a lot of these different pieces that have to come together, and the more a regulator understands what it is you’re trying to accomplish, the better that is going to be. Ultimately, we have permitting structures for building buildings and tanks and for what we’re allowed to put in the ocean.
Those frameworks exist, so it’s not a matter of building a net new permit specifically for this. It’s a matter of bringing together the regulators in a way that’s productive to be able to apply the permitting structures that exist today. That’s also an important sort of step forward.
I wouldn’t want to pause the industry for five or six years while we try to figure out what the permit is for OAE, for example, because I don’t think that’s what we’re looking to do here.
As Dr. Burt and Dr. Sterling mentioned, there is a lot of interest right now in growing this industry around the world. The IMO meeting, in particular, was quite interesting in that the U.K. was very interested in ensuring they had the potential to grow this industry at that international meeting. The international regulatory framework was, as a result, focused on a science-led rather than what I would call a philosophically led approach to the industry.
With their recent announcement of an 81% reduction from 1990 levels by 2035, you can imagine they’re looking at this as an important pathway for them to meet those climate goals and that very strong ambition they’re putting out there with the new government.
There is a lot of motion around the world on this. However, it remains that we are still the only place in the world where this has ever been done. We have that leadership position and can maintain that leadership position.
As Dr. Sterling mentioned, these Canadian companies are sought-after. We’re asked to go to all of these other places and speak on behalf of this industry and talk about our successes. That is a reflection of Canada’s strength on the academic side and the innovation we’ve been able to bring as to how to progress this industry in a safe and responsible way. In cases, it’s a reflection of the engagement of our regulatory environment that has been more challenging in some other places.
So it’s evolving, but I think we have a massive opportunity here to lead.
The Deputy Chair: Thank you very much.
I have a question myself. I think it was Dr. Burt who made a comment, and I may have written it down wrong or heard it wrong. It was something about the fact that British Columbia has a much more urgent need to deal with this kind of issue. Could you explain that comment to me, please?
Mr. Burt: Sure. As we spoke about before the meeting started, I’m actually from Vancouver, born and raised. I studied at the University of Victoria and the University of British Columbia, so I’ve developed a fair network of scientists on that coast as well. Unsurprisingly, I was very keen to launch a project on the West Coast for professional and selfish reasons. In doing that research — and I’ll get this wrong because I wrote the proposal a year and a half ago — I found B.C. announced that acidification was in its top three most critical climate emergencies. I believe it was number two behind forest fires, and that’s because in what we call the Strait of Georgia, you’ve got a system where the bottom waters — and this is where acidification is typically most pronounced, certainly in coastal areas — have become essentially corrosive to shell-forming species already. That is exacerbated in certain seasons, but it’s already the case. The issue there is, of course, that ocean alkalinity enhancement does its best work at the surface, in contact with the atmosphere, so it is a challenge to get at that most difficult area while also having the climate benefit. We’ve been working through that.
Certainly, there are also shallow areas where shellfish farms exist where the bottom waters, at some stages, get very corrosive and acidic. That is why this acidification problem is front and centre in that province.
The Deputy Chair: In addition to that, it seems to me, after listening to you talk about this whole issue and that of the regulatory barriers you’re all facing, that the analogy is watching a forest fire burn and people worrying about the quality of the water being put on the fire.
I think Senator Deacon and a number of my other colleagues are sort of hinting at the same thing. It sounds like a pie in the sky, but rather than a regulatory sandbox, are we talking more of an enabling organization, something that would be tasked with enabling this kind of work rather than creating less of a bottleneck? Would an enabler organization within government be something we’re talking about in terms of moving this forward?
I’m just throwing that out there because we all know what it’s like when people try to — as I think Senator Deacon said — build a better sandbox. It’s still a sandbox.
Ms. Sterling: Yes, and I think the federal government can provide important leadership in charting the path forward. How do we scale by 2060 to a billion? We shouldn’t be saying this isn’t a decision we’re making today. It should be a sequence of stages with milestones and clear oversight, accountability and evaluation. Should we scale to 100,000 tonnes per year, then to a million and then a billion by 2060? Having that path and the leadership of an agency would help us there. How do the regulations get us there? What kind of companies do we want there? What type of carbon dioxide removal do we want there?
The Deputy Chair: Does anyone else want to comment? If not, we’ll move on to round two — oh, Dr. Gilbert. I’m sorry. I missed you. I didn’t see your hand up there.
Ms. Gilbert: Oh no, that’s okay. I’m sorry.
I wanted to add that often when we are talking to potential customers or the biomass power plants, they’re hearing about ocean CDR for the first time through us. Having an advocate or an enabling organization could be very helpful, and just getting the word out that these technologies are available and that they’re generally supported, rather than there being apprehension that it won’t be acceptable, could be very helpful.
The Deputy Chair: Thank you very much.
Senator McPhedran: I’m going to preface this by saying that this question is being asked with the greatest of respect and appreciation for the work that you’re doing. I might be a little bit more direct than my colleagues, but I think part of what you’re hearing from us — and this is on us, not on you — is a real concern about what we’ve seen go wrong with regulatory processes.
I’ll just give a specific example that I think was very troubling to many of us: That is the U.K.-based sustainable marine energy, the green energy, developer that received more than $28 million from the federal government and ended up declaring bankruptcy, allegedly because of the lack of regulatory coordination, naming specifically Fisheries and Oceans Canada, or DFO, as allegedly the cause of this. We know that a regulatory environment is essential, and we know that a regulatory environment should be welcoming, supportive and facilitating, especially when we have new and exciting technology that’s going to address the climate crisis.
Without speaking for my colleagues, we have good reasons to press you a little bit on this and to, I guess in some ways, call an alert.
My question actually has two parts to it. What do you see currently and prospectively as the major barriers you’re going to have to get over in order to get to the level of success that clearly is important to all of us? The second part of my question goes back to your really helpful response on community engagement: What about specific communities within communities? In particular, what about Indigenous communities?
Adding to that, is there any contemplation of taking this kind of technology to the Arctic Ocean, which is, of course, the ocean that Manitoba touches? Thank you.
Mr. Kelland: This is a really important conversation. We talk about a sandbox or an enabling organization. A coordination across government to echo what’s embedded in the question is essential. We need to understand both the opportunity and the risks together. That becomes a critical component of how we can get through a regulatory framework that not only ensures the protection of our natural environment and that we’re working in a science-led and appropriate risk framework but also supports the need to look at things at the level of the need for these technologies and the benefits of these technologies, both economically and for the natural environment.
One example at the international level is quite interesting. There are a number of different organizations at the international level that work on these issues separately. What you run into is actually a kind of dissonance due to that.
To give you an example, there are actually two different definitions of the precautionary principle used at the international level. One of those definitions is under the Rio Declaration, which talks about the fact that if there is an unknown risk of harm, you shouldn’t proceed. Whereas the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, or UNFCCC, has a precautionary principle that says the impacts of climate change are such a large risk that if we want to take proper precautions, we have to take risks and explore technologies if they could have a major impact on climate. Balancing those risks appropriately is difficult.
The London Convention under the IMO is the convention on dumping at sea. Currently, the conversation internationally about these technologies is happening within that forum. However, in a lot of ways, that’s not the appropriate forum because that regulates pollution into the ocean, and it has no way to truly represent the benefits of repairing that pollution. Using a framework that is intended to prevent pollution to regulate the repair of pollution or the cleanup of pollution is inappropriate, but that’s where it sits right how — whereas the UNFCCC, which is responsible for climate change and could talk about the benefits of that, won’t have as much of a view on risk to the marine environment and how the science is progressing.
In Canada, if we are able to bring together an enabling body that can talk about these various things, the benefits, the ways we embed it within and grow that industry in a way that is productive and how we regulate and ensure that the risks are well managed is how we can get to cohesiveness around that. I loved your example around the energy thing because that could absolutely happen.
One of the things I would love to see is, for example, under Canada’s Clean Electricity Regulations, in the maritime provinces we have some of the electricity systems that will have to bear the highest costs of getting to our net-zero grid goals. These technologies are some of the very few that can enable those systems to achieve those goals in an economically viable way. I’m talking about all the technologies you’re seeing here at the table and their various approaches.
A body tasked with developing this industry as a single point of contact within the government should be able to say what the potentials of these technologies are under our permitting frameworks are, and, therefore, what scale we could expect to get to and how we could integrate that into the compliance schemes for industries attempting to decarbonize under Canada’s regulatory frameworks, like the Clean Electricity Regulations. If we can match those things, we can apply the appropriate resources to scale this in an integrated way, and I think that would be very valuable.
Ms. Sterling: Our approach to de-risking the permitting conundrum is working in rivers upstream, similarly to the technology that Dr. Gilbert described. The reactions take place outside the ocean, so they fall quite neatly into existing permitting regimes.
It has been our strategy to operate there as long as fear isn’t created and there is not a clampdown in the regulatory system. So how do we mitigate against that?
Another strategy we’ve been using, as you mentioned, is community engagement. I think there is a direct parallel. If the communities want this technology and they’re getting the data, then that puts less pressure on the regulators wondering if they’ve made a big mistake. The ability to monitor in real time reduces fear and illustrates that there are clear benefits to the communities.
Senator McPhedran: I had a question about Indigenous communities.
Ms. Sterling: We’ve been listening. In engaging the Indigenous communities, we need to make a separate effort. I’d love to see some of your ideas on how to make engaging First Nations communities even more effective.
In our efforts, we’ve done a lot of listening, and what we’ve heard is they need more careers, not just jobs, and to ensure that the economic benefits are returning to the communities. Also, they want to be involved in the control early on and benefit from these new technologies.
Our obligation to involve as much as we can First Nations communities is ethically paramount.
Ms. Gilbert: I have one thing to add about Indigenous communities. I see it as very important to have meaningful conversations, but I also see that there is a line of people who want to have meaningful conversations. Meanwhile, the Indigenous communities have a lot of other things going on — economic challenges and mental health challenges.
Streamlining the conversation so there aren’t 10 groups simultaneously trying to talk to the same groups could be very helpful.
Senator Petten: You’re here before this committee, and I’m just wondering, as parliamentarians, what would be your ask of us?
Ms. Sterling: You talked about it a bit before, but illuminating there are the different risks and options of geoengineering. The term is scary to my students. They think of something that you launch into the earth system, and it has this uncontrolled chain of reactions as in the Snowpiercer movies.
I would like the committee, if it could, to help illuminate the different choices. I like to think of it in terms of time and space scales. If we’re looking at processes with small time scales and small space scales, they’re controllable and demonstrable, and that is the safe way to go. We can scale up incrementally from there with safety checks.
To distinguish that from the large space, if you’re trying to shoot sulphur dioxide into the stratosphere, that will be up there for years and have global impacts. That’s a different question.
Illuminating those differences and how to operate in the safe zone would go a long way.
Mr. Burt: I will mention a few quick things, the first being education. It’s not a company coming in and being the first one to say, “Hey, it’s ocean alkalinity enhancement.” We need independent voices to come into communities and talk about it. We’re not the best messengers.
I’ll do my academic colleagues a favour by saying that funding those groups is essential. Obviously, Planetary is not going to fund those academics; that wouldn’t make any sense. I’ve been on the other side of that table. They scrounge for funding, it’s a challenge, so if we can keep those groups funded, it will be critical.
There is also a very powerful group of government scientists both at the Bedford Institute and the Institute of Ocean Sciences in Sidney, British Columbia that I know well, who I think are excited about this and, at this point, are not mobilized in any capacity to jump in. But they could be.
Those are the things that come to mind for me.
Mr. Kelland: I think Dr. Sterling and Dr. Burt said it very well.
Ms. Gilbert: I agree. I think we’ve covered a lot of the things that would be beneficial.
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Senator Aucoin: Ms. Sterling, you mentioned that the day of reckoning is in 2060. Do you, as a scientist, really believe it can be avoided? Can governments be convinced to do what they need to do? A few years ago, people were talking about global warming of 1.5°C. We’re now at 2.6°C, from what you’ve said. Do you think we can realistically meet the objectives and not end up with a planet in much worse shape than it is now?
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Ms. Sterling: First, I have a lot of hope and think it’s possible. We have mechanisms and technologies that are scalable; we just need to find a safe, responsible pathway forward to scale them. It is possible through innovation, industry and effort to scale up to hundreds of millions of tonnes — gigatonnes — per year.
And 2060 isn’t a doomsday. It’s just clear that by then, we need to be well under way on the carbon dioxide removal scaling and at net zero.
It’s physically possible, and I think it’s going to be a question of economic reality, economically healthy companies and finding the kind of future we want to carve out to get there.
Ms. Gilbert: I like the discussion around hope.
Educating the public on what can be done generates a lot of hope, and we can get a lot of support through that.
I’d also like to go back to what the other panellists have talked about. Fundamentally, what we’re doing isn’t cutting-edge chemistry; it’s well-understood chemistry. We need to deploy these systems at a massive scale so we can capture massive amounts of CO2. Anything that helps facilitate the massive deployment of these — understanding that we still need a science-led approach and to do it cautiously, with ocean health in mind — is how we’re going to get there, and we can, as long as we don’t have artificial barriers in place.
Mr. Kelland: I believe it is possible. Dr. Gilbert and Dr. Sterling said it well: There is nothing fundamentally preventing these systems from hitting the scales that we require from a physical perspective; it’s about ambition, focus, urgency and all of those things that are going to really drive this.
It’s going to be about community engagement, too. I think that’s the biggest risk to deployment here. As Dr. Gilbert says, these aren’t complex systems. If we accept the need for it, the potential of it and can communicate it well, then we can scale it.
The interesting thing is that I think we get lost in these conversations about 1.5 degrees or 2 degrees and so on. If you miss 1.5, then 1.6 is worse. If you miss 1.6, then 1.7 is worse. You don’t stop; you don’t give up and declare that we’ve lost the climate fight and need to move on.
A key thing to keep in mind is that we have to try everything right now because we don’t really have much of a choice. When things have very high potential, like these pathways do, and the potential for a combination of low risk, high scale and low cost, that’s where we have to be investing and what we have to be investigating. That’s where we have to keep that urgency, and we have to keep trying. There is no losing this; we don’t get to lose. We just keep fighting and keep going.
Senator C. Deacon: Thank you again, everyone, for being with us today.
I want to build from that hope. Hope is essential in the climate fight, because people give up otherwise.
I want to get at the tension between reduction and removal. I have heard a lot of pushback from people saying that we must focus on reduction — it’s the only way to go — and removal is too far in the future, but maybe we can get to that later.
I believe we have to back every race and every horse in this fight — there is no debate about that — but we also have to do it on an international scale. We need those purchases of carbon credits to fuel this industry. We have to value those carbon removal credits in a way that has international marketability.
Could you speak about the importance of our policy and regulatory alignment with Article 6 of the Paris Agreement and the need for Canada to show leadership there? I think there is a chance we will, but could you talk about the importance of that in order to create the opportunity for a market to sell what you produce, which is carbon removal, that allows you to get investment to keep scaling and improving the technology?
I’ll start with Dr. Gilbert and move to the others.
Ms. Gilbert: Thank you.
We have selected to start at biomass power plants, because by capturing the CO2 at biomass power plants and storing that carbon in the ocean, we can collect the voluntary credits through groups like Frontier and Microsoft. If we capture CO2 from coal or natural gas power plants, we can’t collect those voluntary credits, so having better regulatory support for capturing CO2 from other fossil emitters would be very helpful for us in terms of expanding to a more massive scale.
I see there is a tension between reducing the amount we emit versus doing CDR. It has to be “and”; we have to do both, and we have to do them now. I don’t think that doing carbon dioxide removal now precludes any action to reduce the amount that we’re producing.
We’ve added up the amount of CO2 that will be produced from the coal-fire power plants in Asia alone. Those are legacy plants that will continue to be in operation for the next 20 years. If we don’t abate those emissions and capture them somehow, those emissions will account for another 1.5-degree increase. We can’t ignore the CO2 that will continue to be in the atmosphere from these plants.
So we have to address both capture and reduction.
Ms. Sterling: I fully agree with Dr. Gilbert. I want to remind everyone, and we might be too young to remember this personally, but during the acid rain days, that moral hazard argument was also raised: We should not be adding alkalinity to rivers because that would dissuade the emitters from reducing their coal burning.
We have been through that before, and maybe we can use that as a model. It worked; we were successful, for the most part.
Mr. Kelland: The reduction versus removal debate was something that we could have had 30 years ago, but I think it’s very inappropriate to bring it up at this point. Frankly, we’re past that. There is no scientific basis under which we can reasonably say that we can hit climate goals without massive amounts of removal on top of emissions reductions.
We also have to think in terms of how we bring together our ability to thrive as a species on a planet from the perspective of advancement as well as from the perspective of climate. Climate change is going to be way more expensive than decarbonization. There are many studies coming out around that now. The ways in which we decarbonize are going to be important as well.
When you look at emissions around the world, emissions are not all created equal. There is the idea of the abatement curve: A lot of emissions in the system can be abated for fewer costs than continuing to emit, and those are the low-hanging fruit. The vast majority of our emissions around the world have abatement costs that are below the costs of permanently removing carbon from the atmosphere. So if you’re just looking at it logically as to how we solve for this climate change thing, we have to be reducing emissions for the majority of our emissions.
But there are emissions in the system that are either impossible or very expensive to abate, where permanent carbon removal becomes a really important tool to actually hit our climate outcomes. I think we have to look at it from that perspective across the world.
From a policy perspective, in Article 6 and all these things at the international level, there are three phases in the removals market. Right now, we’re primarily in a voluntary market where companies are choosing to purchase for various reasons but aren’t forced to do so. That has a very limited scale, as you might imagine; there is only a certain amount we can do with that. We then move into regulatory markets, which are things like the EU, CRCF, Article 6 and things like that. The key thing we need to do in those spaces from a policy perspective is speed up the understanding and integration of removal-based protocols. A protocol is what Dr. Burt described in response to Senator Aucoin’s question as to how you count the carbon at the end of the day. What counts, and how do you count it in a scientifically valid way?
Enhancing the government’s pace on integrating protocols for these pathways is absolutely critical for the predictability we’re talking about.
Ultimately, I see our industry in the 2050s and beyond as being focused on legacy removals. Permanent removals are unique in that they can permanently remove emissions that are already in the atmosphere. That requirement is going to be a requirement for procurement from governments. No industry owns those emissions. They’re already out there.
We have to look at this industry eventually looking like waste management. It’s something we fund in order to clean up the mess we’ve made in the atmosphere, and that is going to be an essential part of this. That is where this carbon removal industry is unique. You can’t reduce your way out of that. You can’t plant trees to get out of that. It must be permanent removal from the atmosphere, and that’s going to be a big part of that. About half of those emissions that we’re talking about in the middle of the century are going to have to be removed as legacy emissions from the atmosphere, rather than from abating emissions today.
Senator Cuzner: I’d just like clarification on something that was said earlier. Mr. Kelland, you indicated that the acidity in the oceans is 30% too high. You would think that would have set off an alarm bell. That is something we should address regardless, and we’re looking at it as a benefit to be able to address that.
I think it had been mentioned that it’s having an impact on lobster growth. What other ways would that sort of manifest itself within the marine ecosystem, if you could elaborate on that with that high acidity rate?
Mr. Burt: There are a lot of different ways that is coming through. Lobsters are certainly one of them. Of the shell-forming organisms, take your pick. Our project down in the U.S. is really focused on the benefit for the oysters because that’s what the folks down there care about the most.
There are also shell-forming organisms at the base of the food chain. In the High Arctic, where we’re seeing acidification rates accelerate, there are certain species there that will collapse under acidification, and that, like any sort of species collapse, will have cascading effects across the ecosystem. It may result in a shift, so it may not be necessarily a collapse, but it certainly shifts.
I think it’s actually an important point. One thing people talk about in terms of carbon removal is if adding nutrients to the water will shift the ecosystem to something different. That could happen at very high scales, but the fact of the matter is that what we’re doing now is already shifting these ecosystems and, in fact, what we’re proposing to do is shift them back to where they once were. Globally, we’re seeing the alkalinity of the oceans go up, and we can detect that now because these shell-forming organisms are dissolving across the world and causing that to happen, so we are trying to slow down this shift that’s already taking place from activities in the past and trying to take them back to a pre-industrial state.
The Deputy Chair: With that, I would like to thank you all. You can tell by the time we spent and the engagement that you experienced from the members of this committee that it was an incredibly informative and helpful group. If you have anything else you want to add, we are able to accept any other briefs or anything else that you might want to supply to us.
I want to thank you so much for taking the time. It was indeed a very fruitful, enjoyable and informative session. Thank you so much.
(The committee adjourned.)