Investment is pouring into companies promising to geoengineer a rapid change in the pH of our waters – but critics are concerned at the speed at which unproven methods are being adopted
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n October 2024, a US company called Ebb Carbon announced the world’s largest marine carbon removal deal to date, signing a multimillion-dollar agreement with Microsoft to try to help fix a very real problem in the world’s seas: ocean acidification.
Ebb plans to use a method called electrochemical ocean alkalinity enhancement (OAE) to mimic the natural process of ocean alkalisation – in other words, it wants to add huge amounts of alkaline materials to ocean waters that scientists now know are acidifying at an alarming rate.
Ebb is not alone. In September 2024, Canada’s Planetary Technologies raised just over $11m (£8m) from companies including Evok Innovations and BDC Capital to enhance ocean alkalinity, while in 2025, another firm, Equatic, sold 60,000 carbon removal credits to Boeing, to enable it to do the same.
