The US Department of Energy (DOE) Advanced Research Projects Agency - Energy (ARPA-E) will award up to $45 million in funding to support a new program aimed at facilitating the development of the marine carbon dioxide removal (mCDR) industry through scalable Measurement, Reporting and Validation (MRV) technologies.

Quantifying and validating ocean carbon capture enables the identification of mCDR techniques that are the most effective and energy efficient in carbon removal, increasing their value in carbon markets.

mCDR techniques take advantage of the ocean’s natural carbon removal processes. These take place across large surfaces or volumes of the ocean over comparatively long periods of time. The Sensing Exports of Anthropogenic Carbon Through Ocean Observation (SEA CO2) program recognizes that scalable, cost-effective technologies to measure, report, and validate various mCDR approaches are needed in this still developing industry.

SEA CO2 projects will provide the tools to create data-driven, model-based marine carbon accounting frameworks by developing:

• Sensor technologies that can operate at greater spatial and temporal scales sufficient to understand ocean carbon fluxes arising from mCDR, quantify efficiency, and reduce or eliminate uncertainty concerns that limit carbon credit quality; and

• Regional-scale ocean carbon transport and storage models that integrate and estimate the combined major carbon cycles likely to be impacted by one or more mCDR approaches for selected regions.

ARPA-E held a workshop on this topic last year.