How Fiora Mara Is Using Seaweed To Combat Climate Change
| Original Substack post: 600 Seconds With: Adam Ornstein, Founder & CEO at Fiora Mara |
My name is Ed Thomas, with the Climate Innovator, and I’m joined this morning by Adam Ornstein, Founder & CEO at Fiora Mara. Fiora Mara is an early stage startup in the carbon removal and storage space that has an exciting new nature-based solution.
Adam, do you want to take a second to introduce your company?
Adam: Sure. My company is Fiora Mara. Our goals are to utilize a nature-based solution to absorb massive amounts of carbon on the open ocean. My background is, just at my core, I’m an innovator. I’ve been hired at technology companies who work on the hard projects, the projects that you wouldn’t really expect somebody to take on. I’ve worked as a product manager in that regard, and I have an engineering degree in computer science, so what I bring to teams is some great algorithmic knowledge. I love to tackle any hard problem in technology, whether that’s an algorithm or a complex sales initiative.
Ed: Adam, obviously you guys are early stage and still refining things. But could you tell me more about the solution that you’re envisioning and how you’re approaching the nature-based carbon removal market?
Adam: Sure. Our goal is to utilize seaweed as a method of carbon capture.
Seaweed is known to absorb carbon at 20 times the rate of land-based equivalents. What we like about it is that overall the solution we’ve come up with we believe is simple, scalable and sustainable. We’re currently identifying areas of the ocean that would be most fitting for our project. We know that there’s some risks in certain areas, so we’re trying to decide where to launch our prototype. But the plan is we’re going to have various barges go along those different routes and release small self-growing and self-sinking seaweed farms along the route. These farms will be small in size to avoid issues in the marine environment. But at the same time, it’s going to absorb massive amounts of carbon on each journey across the ocean.
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And that’s our goal—to grow and sink seaweed on the open ocean. In sinking it, you’re going to sink it to a depth far enough down where it will remain captured for the long term and hopefully be reintegrated back into the soil.
Ed: You’re a seaweed farmer, effectively, is what this turns into. Should we envision this as like an ocean pen with buoys around it that sets up an area that gets seeded?
Adam: I’d say that I’m a carbon farmer, and seaweed is just an intermediary.Our goal is to create a 100% bio-friendly seaweed farm that we can launch.
Seaweed farms, in and of themselves, we don’t expect to be incredible in size—we want to keep it, again, suitable to the environment. The way that we have our vision right now is that we are looking to use bamboo poles and a biodegradable rope to keep things together, as well as seeded lines going across it and into the water, and then just release that from the vessel.
The farm, before it’s released, is already seeded, and our goal is to use gametophytes as seeds and rely less on spores. Gametophytes are actually a more mature version of seaweed seeds, essentially, a little bit more mature, and then measure growth on the water.
In the various areas of the world that we’re trying to target, we’ll find the optimal places for us to grow that seaweed and have it all at the same time. The goal is to do it a lot. Release a lot of these little farms, and by releasing a lot of little things, we’re going to make a real big impact.
Small plant, big impact.
Ed: Adam, one the challenges that I know Running Tide and some early precursors in this space have run into is the issue of monitoring and verification of the carbon they’re capturing and sinking. How are you guys thinking about the monitoring and verification challenge?
Adam: Running Tide was an excellent company, but they were a bit early.
In terms of what we’re looking to do, we are looking to partner with these carbon sequestering verification organizations. There’s a number of them out there—Gold Standard, Verra—and we want to work closely with them.
In addition, the marine biologists, marine scientists and marine engineers that we’re going to have on our team are going to be creating a way for us to monitor the growth and the sinking of the seaweed on the water to the best of our abilities. We’re trying to do everything right, and do it the way that it’s supposed to be done.
Ed: So, why the oceans? With all the different opportunities to capture carbon you could go after, why the ocean?
Adam: That’s going to be a little bit of a story followed by my reasoning.
Back near the tail end of the Coronavirus, I was getting frustrated with the fact that climate change was still a disaster and I was still waiting for it to come and kill us all. I decided, look, let me just pretend I had all the resources in the world to fight climate change and I could build anything I wanted to. What would I do?
What I started to focus in on is that I love the idea of creating a nature-based solution. What if I could just take 100,000 square miles of land and build a forest on it? What kind of forest combination would I do? What combination of shrubs and trees would I put on that land to absorb the most carbon?
At the time, I was reaching out to experts in the field. I reached out to people on LinkedIn, experts, and they were happy to have a conversation with me. I read their studies. I read various studies online.
Then finally, somebody turned to me and said, “I think you should look into seaweed. If you’re looking to absorb the most carbon, seaweed does it.”
I’m like… okay. And I looked at seaweed, and I started doing that research. As I mentioned before, seaweed absorbs carbon at 20 times the rate of a forest of the same size.
But the real benefit that I see is that it doesn’t require land. What’s the problem with land that we have? Tell me. What’s the problem?
Ed: There’s only so much of it and we have to live on it.
Adam: The problem is that we’re humans!
As humans, we want to have as much land as possible. And just because I do something good on land doesn’t mean that somebody in the next generation or in the next couple of years isn’t going to come by and bulldoze it. Anything I do on land is unmaintainable throughout my lifetime and minimally when I die. I want to do something that can’t be reversed.
The great thing about the ocean is that the world is 71% ocean. The scary thing is that the ocean is 71% of our world. As humans, that’s not a place for us to live. It’s a place for us to explore, for us to travel through.
That’s where the idea comes into play. The ocean is phenomenal.
It is also particularly sensitive to the changing carbon levels in our world. If you really want to go back in time for history, we used to be a carbon planet billions of years ago. The way that we got out of that [stage] is that algae—seaweed is a form of algae—began to form. It absorbed so much CO2 and released so much oxygen that other oxygen-based lifeforms were able to come into play and live.
The way that I see our solution is that we’re going back to basics in terms of how the Earth formed and how it became an oxygen and water planet and utilizing the method that the earth used to restore order that there is today. That’s why I’m looking at the ocean as a big solution.
In addition, if you were to grow seaweed and sink it down below 2,000 meters, 96% of that carbon is sequestered for the long term. Once you sink it down below 2,000 meters, I’m going to tell you one thing that’s less likely to happen: Humans are less likely to go down there and destroy what it is that we’ve done, at least over the next 100 or so odd years, to the point where it would be reintegrated into the ocean bed. That’s why the ocean is attractive to me as a natural solution.
Ed: You’re really approaching this entirely from what’s the efficacy of the solution compared to all the other solutions that are potentially out there.
Adam: I’m looking at not only the efficacy but also the long-lasting possibility of what we’re trying to do.
We sink seaweed once, nobody’s going to go down there and go, “Okay, we’ve got to pick this up and bring it back up to the surface and release the carbon back.” I think that’s a low risk. If you were to build a forest, you get a new government in office and they tell the paper company to go use that forest for their paper and to eliminate it [as a carbon sink].
I see anything done land-based as risky. I know that there’s some machines that are coming out that are trying to do carbon capture, but that’s at its infancy. It’s going to take a generation for [industrial carbon removal] to become more efficient.
We need to get started. It’s the way that I see it.
Ed: I think that makes a tremendous amount of sense.
If you’re a Chief Sustainability Officer at a Coke or a GE or some large or mid-sized corporation, and you’re looking at innovation as a potential solution to decarbonizing your products and your business operations, how does the carbon removal services that your firm offers fit into that set of options? How should sustainability leaders think about carbon removal?
Adam: The way that I see it Ed is there’s a lot that you can do to reduce the amount of carbon that you emit—from within your factories, within your transport on land—but you’re not going to get to zero. That’s the hurdle that we have as a culture, as a world, as a climate-fighting set of people. You can get it down, but you can’t get it to zero. That’s where the carbon capture market comes into play.
You need to capture carbon to offset the fact that you’re releasing some additional carbon into the atmosphere that you can’t account for. The decarbonization impact is phenomenal. I love to see organizations chasing after it. But nobody’s going to get to zero because you always have to ship your product to somebody at home. Even if you have it down to zero, if you’re shipping Coke to a store, for example, you’re going to have that transportation from where you made the Coke, you made it in Mexico, and you’re transporting it up to California. In that whole transition, you’re going to be wasting carbon into the atmosphere. That’s what we have today.
There’s electric vehicles. Even electric vehicles, you need to fill back up with electricity. You still will have to offset something today and in the near future, as I see. That’s where we come to play.
Ed: This isn’t a quick fix solution where I don’t have to change any of my operations.
Adam: You can do it that way. You want to hack it? Let’s talk!
But in terms of being a responsible company, you probably want to make headway on both [reducing emissions and purchasing carbon removal] because at the end of the day, if you decarbonize your [operations], you’re going to spend less on carbon removal, which will impact your bottom line in the long term.
Ed: It’s part of that menu, that combined solution, really.
Adam: Yeah, I don’t think there’s one answer to climate change. The answer to climate change is in having many different solutions.
My solution is not going to reduce the cost that we have on carbon for electricity. It’s not going to reduce the cost that we have on carbon for gas at this point. What it will do is it will offset [what we can’t easily eliminate].
If we go after electric vehicles, we significantly reduce the amount of carbon we release into the atmosphere. If we go after heating systems, we get rid of coal altogether. These are all big things that can make a giant impact. Alone, carbon capture will have a limit in which it can function. Once it gets into the trillion mark, you probably can’t do that every year. You’re going to need to make adjustments to make sure that the marine environment, any environment where you’re capturing carbon, is still kept well.
Ed: Final two questions for you. One is, if folks are interested in getting in touch with you to learn more, how can people get in touch with you?
Adan: You can go to our website, Fioramara.com, go to the contact form there, and that goes right to me. Or, you can find me on LinkedIn. If you reach out to me on LinkedIn, I’d love to talk.
Ed: Fantastic. Final question then for you: What is a book or podcast you’d recommend to folks?
Adam: There are a couple of books that I like. One’s called Eat Like A Fish, written by Bren Smith. He started Green Wave, a nonprofit that’s promoting seaweed farming as not only a climate solution, but also as a way to make a living. I will mention that in my conversation with them has shown that the demand for seaweed from seaweed farming is lower than expected currently, but we’ll see where that goes.
In terms of other reading, I look to Al Gore and the Climate Reality Leadership Corps. If you have further interest, I would probably see what the Climate Reality Leadership Corps is pointing you to and read up on it.
Ed: Fantastic. Adam, thank you so much for your time, I really appreciate it!
Adam: You bet!