eSign Alumni Chapter Annual Report Made Easy

Esign alumni chapter annual report

WHITNEY ESPICH: Hi. I'm Whitney Espich, the CEO of the MIT Alumni Association. And I hope you enjoy this digital production created for alumni and friends like you. SARAH SIMON: --folks out there ready to listen to our seaweed for carbon drawdown webinar from the Energy, Environment, and Sustainability Network of the MIT Alumni. We're delighted to be here today. Our network itself is designed to inform, connect, and have alumni act together on environment, energy, and sustainability issues, many of which come together in our pursuit of climate change solutions and challenges. We have many groups around EESN. We try to stay flexible with that. The Palm Beach MIT club has a subgroup that is involved with climate issues. Claude Gerstle who I believe will be on today-- but not talking-- as a listener, mentioned to us that we haven't covered oceans and drawdown previously. And so here we are with his advisor on one ocean project, Peter Dreher, and with Geoff Chapin, who also is involved in seaweed drawdown. So we welcome you. And we hope you'll enjoy this webinar. We have disabled-- and my cat decided to come visit. We have disabled the chat for this webinar. However, we ask you to please put questions on what is being said in the question and answer section of the Zoom site. We do not see you. You can see us. We will be using the chat if we have something to tell you. For example, I've put the EESN website in there already. So that's most of the logistics, I think. We're going to have approximately 20-minute presentations by our two panelists. And then at the end, we will have questions and answers. And Ramon and I, who are the committee for EESN-- the webinar committee, excuse me-- will do our best to try and cover the questions. The slides from the presentations will be available afterwards at our website. It may take a day or two to get that posted. The recording will probably be posted on the MIT Alumni Association website in about a week to be shared with other people. Geoff Chapin, who received his MBA in 2002, is CEO and founder of C-Combinator, which is a for-profit public benefit corporation, a B Corp. Company is developing a process to make high value products from seaweed, initially with sargassum seaweed washing up on Caribbean shores. And this is, in fact, on the registration page if you want to go back and check some of this later or look Geoff up on LinkedIn or something. They plan to license marine permaculture tech from climate foundation, laying the groundwork to grow kelp forests to replenish fish stocks, deacidify the ocean, and eventually draw down large amounts of CO2 for a negative cost, for benefit. Geoff has founded and been CEO of many other ventures, some of which have provided energy efficiency and solar to homes across New England. They have worked on-- his companies have worked on the caste of reverse osmosis using solar power, et cetera. He has won various awards, among them Ernst & Young's Young Entrepreneur of the Year in New England. He also has a climate champion designation. He is a Chapter Director of the Environmental Entrepreneurs, often known as E2. And that's a business voice for the environment that pursues policy change at the state and federal level. Briefly, Peter, who will be our second speaker today, is a four-degree MIT alum. And then he went out and did various enterprises, educational activities, and keeps inventing things. So today he's here to talk to us about a project he's working on, which is not quite ready for prime time in terms of all of its information but certainly is a business and a venture that is about to get going to use parts of the ocean that have very little life to them and try to fertilize them with iron. It has been studied at MIT in a couple of ways, and many people have done research, et cetera. He believes that toilets, for example-- he wants to spend his life working on ways to save lives and make people healthier. One of his former ventures was Toilets for Africa, which is a dry toilet system that sanitizes waste, gets rid of all the disease, germs, and pathogens. And they are being used around the world today. Another invention that he made was an improvement for lithium-ion batteries, which is now being adopted by Tesla. The Air Force, I believe, has already made use of it. So with that, I'm going to turn it over to Geoff to talk about how seaweed can help us cool the earth and be a part of our sustainable future. Thank you. GEOFF CHAPIN: Thanks to EESN for having me on. I really appreciate the opportunity. It's exciting to be here to talk about what is a pretty big opportunity for climate and for sustainability in general. C-Combinator is a public benefit corporation, which really only means that we take into account our mission when we have board meetings, et cetera. But our entire business model is aligned towards the environment. We're following the principles of drawdown, the sustainable development goals, 1% for the Planet, and as a public benefit corporation. We're trying to address several drawdown solutions. And if you've ever seen the movie "Kiss the Ground" or also the movie "A Life on a Planet" by David Attenborough, we're very much in line with what has been proposed there. And so what we do is, at a high level, we take products from-- we make products from sargassum that go into bioplastics. Sargassum is a seaweed that has been accumulating over time in the Caribbean and globally. But with the advent of more and more fertilizer coming out of the Amazon rainforest where that's been converted to farmland, all of that fertilizer and nutrient runoff has collided with warmer oceans and an existing sargassum floating seaweed. And it's really magnified it into a massive issue. At least one study points to almost 100 gigatons-- 100 million gigatons of carbon and of sargassum floating around. So what we do is we take that sargassum in the Caribbean, we create these bioplastics, biochar, and biostimulants, as well as even power our own-- we're going to be powering our own biochar plant with that biomass. And it enables regenerative annual cropping, conservation, agricultural, perennial biomass production, and nutrient management. So here's, really, what we're doing. And all of this contributes to a lot of drawdown that will also be applied to marine permaculture. This is the problem in the Caribbean. Around the Caribbean, massive amounts are piling up on beaches, hurting tourism, eliminating jobs, creating an ecological disaster in the bays, and leaking a bit of arsenic into the environment. Now, it's important to note that sargassum, when in the open sea, is terribly important to the ecology. And it's part of the biological pump of the ocean. But once it gets here, it just sits on the beaches and starts to rot into methane and hydrogen sulfide. It stinks and has terrible side effects. And so up until now, due to the variable nature, the seasonal nature of this, which is really about 9 or 10 months out of the year, there hasn't been solutions that have been scaled up to really deal with this problem that is here to stay. It's only getting worse. And we're not going to cool the oceans any time soon. And the Amazon runoff is not likely to stop. So we have to find a way to deal with it. What we have is we have a facility in Mexico and Puerto Morales that collects and processes, at scale, this sargassum. So we're, if you will, blessed by the Mexican government to do this. We're, in fact, writing their collection criteria for how to collect sargassum. We are supported by the government. The Mexican Navy is even bringing us their sargassum. And we have our own facility to collect and process. And what we do is we are able to collect up to a million tons a year with our capacity. Now, next year we'll only process about 50,000 tons. But we could do up to a million tons. And so we have massive scalability. There's plenty of supply. That's not the issue. The question then becomes, what do you do with the sargassum? In our case, we found ways to do the basics, which others have found. In green here there's the biostimulant you see, which has use cases in farming. It is a way to increase crop yields and actually protect a bit from drought. People have also produced nano cellulose in some capacity, which has a range of possibilities in packaging, composite plastics, et cetera. And [INAUDIBLE] can be used in pharmaceuticals. Up top on the hydrogels and alginate in green there, that's where we have our proprietary processes that really add a lot of value to what we're doing. So hydrogels are absorbants that can absorb water when it rains, say, on a field and then hold it and then release it back slowly over time. So you can imagine the tremendous benefit when combined with biostimulant of these agricultural hydrogels that can really manage flash rainfalls and help drought situations. And so we're working with companies in India that are bringing this to fields there. And then we're also producing-- that's a proprietary process, allows us to create hydrogels in a very efficient way from sargassum, which is key. Sargassum is not an easy seaweed to deal with. It's got arsenic. It's got, obviously, salt. But we've got to deal with several factors. So we have filed IP on the hydrogel extraction technique. And then from there, we can also make aerogels from the hydrogels. And so aerogels are highly insulative, lightweight materials. So you can imagine them being used in Patagonia jackets. In fact, we have a big retailer in Europe who wants to put them in their clothing next year for the sustainability story but also, frankly, it does really outperform. Highly insulative material can be used in textiles and it can be used in batteries in high-tech applications and appliances where you want to seal heat from one side to the next and protect the system. So our process is a biorefinery. We start with a sargassum. I'm going to create, as I've said, the biostimulant, biopolymer, which goes into bioplastics. So it's a huge application to actually create biodegradable plastic that does not require high temperatures et cetera to degrade. It will degrade in the ocean. We're talking with some major players in Europe about packaging for both takeout and fast food applications, plastic bags, coffee mugs, et cetera that can be used for bioplastic. So we hope to take what the ocean has given us and create something very useful out of it. The alginate and cellulose-- I mentioned the hydrogels. You have those use cases. But the key point here is, hydrogels and aerogels-- that's our proprietary process. So we're the first to be able to get such value out of seaweeds at any scale. And what that does is allow us to do a lot more things in terms of collection, and actually what I'll talk about in the future, which is marine permaculture, growing the seaweed itself. But it's key that we have the proprietary processes there and can get a product that's worth $200 a kilogram. Because that makes all the difference when you think about the economics behind all of this. And the process does use 1/10 of water, half the energy, and none of the chemicals of traditional alginate extraction technology. So it is better for the environment in that way as well. So these are the applications that our [? stack ?] [INAUDIBLE] value as we grow this out over the next 18 months. We're starting with biostimulants. We think we have a pretty good bead on a big federal government in Mexico contract for biostimulants. They really want to take a national liability and turn it into an asset. So their farmer buying cooperative is looking at us from that perspective because we have the volume. The same volume is really important for our other customers. So we have LOIs from customers in the fibers market, the hydrogels and aerogels market that really have come to us because of the volume. So as regulations in Europe eliminate microplastics and single-use plastics, many of the companies there are really struggling to figure out where they're going to get their supply next, whether it's from forestry or, in our case, we want them to take it from seaweed. And yet they have not found enough supply in terms of large suppliers. One of the reasons for this is that seaweed generally is grown near shore and is used for human consumption in Asia, obviously. But there are only so many places where seaweed grows naturally. Sargassum is the exception to that in that we have an inundation. And so it makes absolute sense to take care of this inundation, to use it, and put it to productive use that also helps the environment. It helps the environment in two ways. One, it avoids future emissions, of course, from products that would have been created using other processes and have a much higher carbon footprint. So for example, the biostimulants piece-- one kilogram of our biostimulant is somewhere between 7 and 30 times less harmful in terms of carbon footprint than a stimulant made from petrochemicals. Most of the products we're producing originally come from petrochemicals, polymers, et cetera. So we have an effective avoidance piece on carbon. But then also, we're looking-- so we're going to be creating hydrochar and biochar out of the waste sargassum. So it's important to realize that the fresh we can create products with. But there's a lot of rotted sargassum too that you're just not going to be able to use. And so we're going to be turning that into biochar to be put on fields, et cetera, alongside biostimulants and these agricultural hydrogels, which expand with water and contract. We can actually enrich the soils, turn dirt into soil, and increase farmer yields using all of that. We have LOIs from customers across many of these product lines. Each of these represents a specific LOI of a type of customer. Those hydrogels I mentioned are used in cosmetics as well as can be applied to the field, in the bottom left there, where they help seeds survive drought and manage rain flash floods. As I mentioned, the packaging, plastic cups and bags, and then hydroponic as well as fields' stimulants. All of these are getting a lot of attention. We do not have contracts yet. But that's because we only got the samples from the sargassum in about October, November. They're all being analyzed now by these LOI customers. We do have IP for all of this, as I mentioned, in terms of the extraction methods. And we're developing new products. One example of a new product is a spray-on nano cellulose film that you could spray on corrugated cardboard and make it water and fat impermeable. So you could carry fish in it. So in the fish industry, one big problem is Styrofoam. But when you have lipids and water, it's one of the few materials that works. But we're working on ways to create regular corrugated cardboard sprayed with this. So we're filing IP on products like that as we work in joint development with other companies. Now, that's one source of what we're doing from the biorefinery perspective. We take the sargassum. That's low hanging fruit. It's right there. Why wouldn't we pick it up and do something meaningful with it? And we're pulling that from all over the Caribbean, not just Mexico but Puerto Rico. And we're franchising it out to Trinidad and some other places where they can collect, they can press the biostimulant right there just like we do in Mexico, get the water out, and ship the dried pulp to Puerto Rico to be processed. And that's where our processing plant is. That's one source. We're also, in the future, excited about the opportunity to work with marine permaculture, which is another drawdown solution developed by Brian Von Herzen of the Climate Foundation. And we would like to make it worthwhile to scale those systems, to create those systems in the ocean that farm seaweed and apply our same, or similar, extraction methods, and similar customers, to that supply. So I'll tell you a little bit about what marine permaculture is. And then I can explain it better. Marine permaculture has been around for a little while. And we're looking forward to scaling it by licensing it in the future. So what it does is it-- basically, I described how seaweed is really a near-term, nearshore piece of production method. And that is because seaweed needs three things. It needs upwelled nutrient-rich water where it naturally happens. Like off the coast of California, it hits the shelf and comes up. It needs the nutrients from the [? deep. ?] It needs a place to attach. And it needs sunlight, most seaweeds. So that's what this is. So this marine permaculture frees us up from the limited space where naturally occurring currents bring nutrients to the surface near rocks where it can exist near the surface and the sunlight. And it frees up the rest of the ocean to be doing this. It uses renewable energy to pump up large amounts of water and, essentially, hydroponically farms kelp, which is an even more valuable seaweed at scale. And so that's what we're working towards in the partnership. We will be licensing for the Climate Foundation as they develop their product. Marine permaculture was featured in the movie "2040," which is an Australian film now available on Prime or Netflix. They featured five solutions that exist today that could make a difference by 2040. Paul Hawken we're privileged to have [? him ?] said about marine permaculture that you can feed billions of people, regenerate life in the ocean because this creates literally rainforests of the sea. So small fish stock can live in there and thrive. It creates a little bit of a coral reef environment in terms of the biodiversity. It pulls carbon out of the upper ocean. And then it is also a way to feed [INAUDIBLE] and then sequester. So you can measure the amount of carbon that's sequestered by the kelp. And we're looking at ways to either sink it if it makes sense-- and there's a lot of ecological thought going into that area of work. But when you look at Carlos Duerte's work and others, if you were to sink some of that kelp right there, it drops to the bottom of the ocean. If it goes deep enough, it stays sequestered away for hundreds or thousands of years. And that wouldn't really be economically feasible to do if we didn't have the bio-- sorry, if we didn't have the biorefinery creating all this product. So we can apply and create product from the marine permaculture harvest, use half of it to create product and earn money and make a scalable financial solution for a relatively-- even though it's a relatively expensive Capex cost to do these arrays. But now it makes sense because we can get up to $6,000 a ton instead of $1,100 a ton out of a ton of seaweed. So we're excited to be partnering with them in the future to do this. They have had incredible credibility wins being featured in drawdown, the movie "2040," et cetera. There's a recent "Washington Post" editorial done by the Foundation for Climate Restoration touting the benefits of marine permaculture. And so we're really excited to work with them in the future. It's also a way for island nations to both combat climate change, create jobs, increase export GDP numbers, and it's a lever in the fight against poverty and the sustainability. Islands, as you know, have a tremendous amount of energy and difficulty sourcing product. So to have something as diverse as seaweed in terms of energy, possibly, usage, farming usage, and products-- everything from plastic to high-tech products-- if you can really create that biorefinery and have them have these arrays off their shores in deeper water, it really empowers and enables islands to take even a more leading role in both climate change and sustainability. And it really creates a range of benefits for these island nations. So there's plenty of interest from the Pacific and the Atlantic and the Caribbean in doing something like this at scale. The last thing I'll leave you with is that this is the key point. We've had conversations with some potential future buyers of carbon credits like the Microsoft Shopifys/Amazons of the world. When you combine our biorefinery and being able to create up to $6,000 of value from seaweed with marine permaculture, you can actually, at scale, sequester enough carbon to really make a difference. And the thing that's different about this type of sequestration is we're talking about a negative cost to sink a ton of carbon. So if we grow a square kilometer, say, of seaweed, we harvest half of it with this biorefinery and high-value products and sell those into the market places. We can then create a 9% return for the company that finances those arrays and, at the same time, sink the other half into the depths. And when you do that, you sequester away for thousands of years. We're working with 2050 and Alexandra Cousteau-- the other groups are trying to verify these credits. But what it turns into is you earn money, and you sequester tons of carbon. And that is turning the whole carbon sequestration game on its head. So a negative cost to sink a ton of carbon while we're producing products that avoid future emissions, plastics, biostimulants, et cetera with massive circular economy benefits to it. So that's a conversation. And I just want to be clear that there's plenty of work going on to understand any ecological harm from dumping some-- not dumping, but really from sequestering away some of that kelp to the bottom of the ocean. We have to worry about the ecological systems down below, international law, et cetera. But Carlos Duerte and others have pointed out that this really could be a massive carbon sink. And it's one of the reasons why it's on the drawdown list of up-and-coming solutions. So we're excited about that. And we're working towards that. Right now we're focused almost entirely on sargassum and working through that. We have traditional [? hockey ?] sticks, et cetera. We can show you more if you want. We are doing an investment round if people do have interests. We've raised about 2 and 1/2 million so far. We have an LOI for eight million to build out our facility in Puerto Rico. And we're closing a $5 million round early next year to build out other product line productions, aerogels and hydrogels, et cetera. So I'll finish up by just saying we have a team focused on this, on innovation, CFO, obviously we have business dev, and then a team of scientists and other folks in Puerto Rico and in Mexico currently running this operation, which [? will ?] start collecting large amounts starting in February. So we're also partnering with the Pacific Clean Energy Partners for financing of these arrays in future work. So we're excited about that. And thanks to Rob Pratt, whom I'm imaging many of you know. He's been a real help to us in various ways. So that's it. RAMON BUENO: Thank you, Geoff. GEOFF CHAPIN: Thank you for your time. Appreciate it. RAMON BUENO: Very interesting. Many dimensions to your [? presented. ?] We're going to hold off on questions until the end of the second speaker. So without any further delay, Peter, you're on. PETER DREHER: Ocean fertilization. Well, to feed the world healthier and cheaper food and to sequester gigatons of carbon. What, me worry? That phrase from Alfred E Neuman-- back in the day in the last century, they had these things called comic books. And that was his phrase. Now, it turns out that humans, a couple million years ago-- two guys were sitting around a campfire in Africa. And they heard some rustling in the weeds and the grasses. And one guy said, that's probably just the wind. And the other guy said, no, I think that's some lions. I'm getting out of here. And he runs away. Anyway, the guy who sat there was eaten by a lion, and he never had any children. So as a result, as humans, we're all bred to be worrywarts. So if you're worried about climate change, join the-- you're normal. Now, I want to tell you about-- so another thing I'm becoming an expert in his biochemistry, particularly the biochemistry of aging and diseases of aging because, far and away, diseases of aging kill 80% to 90% of humans, and obviously cancer, dementia heart disease. Now, it turns out there is a chemical called Neu5Gc. Used to be in humans a couple of million years ago. And then we switched it out for a new-- and is a neuraminic acid five Ac, which made us immune to the malaria of the day. Now, malaria has evolved to now kill us again. But humans are [? Neu5Ac. ?] But pork, beef, lamb, and goats are still the Gc. And the Gc is implicated in aging in a big way. In particular, it's in every cancer cell and it wears down your epithelium, causes heart disease and inflammation that leads to dementia. So we want to get rid of that from the diet. So we want to get rid of pork and beef worldwide. That's my goal. And the solution is deep ocean fish because the fish do not have Neu5Gc. And we can raise the catch enough to displace 180 megatons of pork and beef produced worldwide. Now, that is a practical solution because there's 150, believe it or not, megatons of fish produced each year. Now, those of us who don't live near the shore, we think, what? We don't get fish that much. But if you've ever been to Hawaii, all it is fish and rice, fish and rice, fish and rice. And Japan and England-- same thing. Now, the neat thing is the cost of feeding ocean fish is a lot cheaper than corn and soybeans you feed chickens and turkeys and other animals. In fact, one kiloton iron dust, which is a couple bucks, can create one megaton of fish, which is worth billions of dollars. So we're starting with small fishing fertilization areas of only 100 kilometers by 100 kilometers. The only problem with our fishing project is that it causes global cooling. It sinks about a gigaton of carbon dioxide per year. And it's believed that fossil fuels add 20 gigatons of carbon dioxide per year. And so we want to do 50 projects in the North Pacific, which would sink 50 gigatons of carbon dioxide per year. And so according to Peter [INAUDIBLE] and others, if we do that for the next 30 years, by 2050 we'll be back below 300 parts per million, and the planet will start cooling again like it was before 1800. So if we get too cold, we're going to blame it on electric cars and not our fish defecating. So what's the science of ocean iron fertilization? Most oceans have enough sufficient primary fertilizers-- nitrates, phosphates, and potassium, things that you would use to fertilizer your lawn or your terrestrial crops. But some oceans lack trace fertilizers, particularly iron. And as a result, in those oceans, the climate is a desert. There's no animal life, no plant life, no seaweed, nothing. It's just salt water. So if you just sprinkle in a little bit of iron, and I'm talking trace amounts-- some guys have done it. Some of the early experimenters have done it off the back of luxury yachts in Hawaii. There was a singer-- I'm trying to remember-- it was either George Harrison or some singer did it off the back of his yacht and caused a plankton bloom off Hawaii. Now, a lot of the plankton-- they are single-cell animals. They do photosynthesis. They absorb a lot of carbon dioxide. And a lot of them make calcium carbonate shells. The calcium carbonate that goes into the chalks Cliffs of Dover. The white Cliffs of Dover are these little calcium carbonate animals. And after they're eaten, the fish don't dissolve the calcium carbonate. And it comes out in the feces, and it sinks down to the deep ocean. Now, larger multi-cell animals eat the planktons. And of course, about on average, three to four times the body weight of those fish and larger animals is defecated each year and ends up going down deep some 7,000 feet where the pressure and temperature and darkness preserve them. And as a result, the Earth gets cold. What you can see here is some iron dust being dropped off the back of a boat. Now, these algae blooms, these plankton blooms show up on satellite. When you're out in the ocean you don't see this white. But at a certain frequency of light spectrophotometer through the satellites, they show up very brightly. So you can tell exactly where you fertilized or not. Now, how does that global cooling happen naturally? Well, iron dust makes plankton. Now, in addition, some of the plankton that iron dust stimulates, they actually fix nitrogen from the air, the cyanobacteria bloom. And as a result, if you look at the picture here, when those photosynthetic algae get going, they suck excess amounts of carbon dioxide out of the air. But also, they create excess oxygen in the water. And that excess oxygen causes the pH to go up. That increases the formation of calcium carbonate. It increases the amount of fish in the water. It makes it clean and healthy for fish. Now, if you are not have enough iron, you end up with a dirty, high acidic carbonic acid ocean like you see in the right half of that picture. And as a result, you get this slimy water and a bunch of anaerobic jellyfish. So if you have jellyfish coming on the beach-- here in Florida sometimes it happens. Or in Connecticut there was always jellyfish on the beach-- it means that your water doesn't have enough iron dust in it and enough oxygen. Now, curiously, what eats those jellyfish are turtles. And turtles don't breathe water. They breathe air. And so there is a natural cycle. And so unfortunately, although our fish go up with iron fertilization, the turtles and the jellyfish go down. Now, what's also happening when we fertilize with iron is there are these pelagic fish that start having a healthy meal at the surface. And the pelagic fish, during the day, they go down to stay cool. They go down 3,000 feet. And at night they come up and they feed on the sardines. And when they come up, they bring up cold water with them and nutrients with them. And they make the ocean even more intensely alive. So global warming causes hotter, drier desert. So how does this happen? So what's happening now? And bigger winds and storms. There are more iron dust storms-- in fact, in 2020 this past summer, everybody was worried, and you see the photographs to the right there, that we were having the biggest dust storm in 50 years. Well, that dust is what makes the water become more alkaline and more oxygenated. And it sequesters carbon and causes global cooling. So the world system is in a self-regulating balance. And obviously we're trying to take over the controls from Mother Earth. Now, there's this guy on the upper right hand corner, Peter [INAUDIBLE],, who I just got introduced to yesterday. And he did a wonderful bunch of analysis. And he has an organization that maybe we'll meet later. And they've studied this global warming or climate change problem in great detail. They have conferences every year, and he's been doing this for a number of years. And he sent me this presentation. And I want to point out that they analyze the many things that can draw down carbon dioxide. And what was interesting is he said refrigeration was one of them, and I didn't know why that was. But reduced food waste-- that makes sense. Wind turbines, plant-rich diet makes sense. Educating girls and family planning reduce-- and obviously solar farms. Now, the other thing you can see is we've got the natural, self-regulating planet operating with cooling and heating and carbon dioxide going up and down over these 10,000-year periods, approximately, and creating ice ages and then warm spells. Now, we've kind of overdone it by unsequestering all the carbon from oil and natural gas. Now, Peter's group started analyzing, what are the possible solutions? He's an engineer. And [? he's had ?] a very successful company. And he said, well look, if we're going to try to do what the politicians are trying to do and shut down the coal-fired power plants and all the gasoline-powered cars, it's going to cost $100 per ton of CO2 removed, and it's going to cost $300 billion a year. And it's just the most expensive solution. And of course, the people are going to fight against it. Now, he says that, in the air-- one of the major causes and one of his charts show that 40, 45% of global warming is methane being released from gas wells and landfills and cow flatus, animals flatus. And it goes up to the high atmosphere, gets converted to carbon dioxide by the ozone, which is oxygen [? three-- ?] very reactive. And that carbon dioxide hangs way up high 60, 100,000 feet up and it takes decades for it to come down and provides this great carbon blanket. So a lot of the carbon dioxide that's coming out of a coal-fired power plant near the surface, because it's heavier than air-- it's hot. But carbon dioxide-- so the thing is methane is lighter than oxygen and nitrogen. So it floats up to the high atmosphere. Carbon dioxide is heavier, so it comes back down and feeds the plants and the oceans nearby. So coal-fired power plants are actually our friends. And it's these methane guys that are our enemies. So the idea is that removing methane from the air-- if you spray iron dust up high like it happens naturally, that actually takes methane out of the air. But Peter [INAUDIBLE]---- I go back to my project in a minute. I just want to-- it's interesting that he came to the same conclusion we did from the Palm Beach. So the absence-- SARAH SIMON: Yeah. Yeah. I think-- PETER DREHER: --is to take-- a penny a ton is to increase the fish in the oceans. However, what I want to point out-- I did work in the fossil fuel industry, so I feel sorry for those guys-- is that the question is, will we still pump oil in 2050? Actually, their oil is there, but we'll pump less because the reserves will be down. And then the question is, will we still use oil in 2050? And the answer is, no-- I was involved with dual lithium-ion batteries industry with Tesla and others-- because 40% of oil consumption is trucks. And you save a million dollars a year-- I mean a million dollars over the life of a truck just by going electric because electric is so much cheaper than gasoline. And so all the trucks are going to convert to electric by 2030. And then 40% of oil consumption currently is electric cars, and they're all going to convert by 2050. And then 10% of oil consumption is aircraft. And already, my neighbors in Ohio for General Electric are making hybrid electric jet engines for commercial aircraft. And already, you can take an electric plane from Falmouth to Nantucket already. SARAH SIMON: Actually, we had a question from Jason [? Silbeck ?] about-- I'm not reading it directly here. He was wondering whether the fertilization, and perhaps even marine permaculture that Geoff mentioned, could be like the Kudzu program problem in the South. When you introduce a species at industrial scale or if you encourage a species to grow at industrial scale, isn't that going to present a certain amount of problems? And could it kind of take over that part of the ocean and change the ecologies there? GEOFF CHAPIN: I'll address, at least from a seaweed perspective-- thank you for that question. I am trying to answer some of these questions in the chat as we go. Absolutely something you need to worry about. And you need to use native species that exist already in those areas. And additionally, you need to have multiple species types so that it's not cropping and it's more resistant and healthy for the environment. PETER DREHER: There is one type of-- yeah. There is one type of plankton we're trying to avoid. So we have the option of inoculating probiotics, basically, that actually feed on-- just like in the toilets we use probiotics to feed on the typhoid, we use probiotics in the ocean to feed on the bad plankton. SARAH SIMON: Well, we'll be interested in finding out more about them. Ramon, was there a question that you picked out that you'd like to answer RAMON BUENO: Well, there was a question from earlier on. I believe it's for Geoff. Solomon [INAUDIBLE] said, you said 100 gigatons [? of ?] a problem. The question just moved. Where is it? GEOFF CHAPIN: Oh, sorry. It's in answered now. I was just answering it. Yes, that's a good question, Ramon, that he raises. [INAUDIBLE] RAMON BUENO: [INTERPOSING VOICES] either me or you finish reading the question so that the audience can-- GEOFF CHAPIN: Yep. I'll answer. So the question was good. It was about-- sorry, I don't have it exactly. It was, there's a massive amount of sargassum. Can global markets support that to the extent that you can then sell and deal with all of the sargassum [? that ?] exist in the markets? It is a good question. The markets for seaweed are massive now. Seaweed for Europe just published a report about how big they are-- at least $9 billion. But it's growing. So what's important to note is that the use cases for seaweed and the elements extracted from it are growing all the time. So there's the existing market. There's the new use cases that are being discovered continually. And then there's this piece where, as we increase supply, the price will come down. And as the price declines, that opens up new use cases. So for example, hydrogels and aerogels at $200 a kilogram are not viable for use in as many use cases as they would be if they were $100 per kilogram or $10 per kilogram. So we will be expanding the market again that way. But certainly, we'd love to figure out where the limits are because that would be a multitrillion dollar issue at some point if we can use seaweed the way we want to with marine permaculture and sargassum. But we're going to try. But between food, fertilizer, agricultural and then end-use case products from plastics to health products to composites and even LCD panels, it's just an incredible array when you Google what nanocellulose can be used for, and alginates, and other things. So we're going to work on it. SARAH SIMON: Great. I see one here from Jonathan [? Huber ?] who asked a couple of questions. And I believe Geoff has answered a couple of them in the Q&A. But one question here is, what is the half-life of fish feces with respect to carbon sequestration? He's asking about the accounting for the carbon storage [? in ?] the carbon sink. Is the feces carbon all organic? How much carbon ends up in the carbohydrates of plankton, which Peter was speaking of? How much does ocean acidification affect all of this re-dissolving the carbonates to re-acidify it? How does this carbon balance work in the ocean when we're talking about the processes for algae that you've been discussing and hope to use in the ways in your businesses? Geoff, if you'd go first, I'd appreciate it. GEOFF CHAPIN: Well, I think the feces piece was directed towards Peter. So I'll let him answer. SARAH SIMON: Oh, all right. Sorry. [INTERPOSING VOICES] GEOFF CHAPIN: Feces. But on our part-- OK. Go ahead, Peter. PETER DREHER: So about 20% of the feces are inorganic minerals. And about 80% are organic. Now, obviously things get eaten on the way down. But the issue is that it does not get dissolved because the iron raises the oxygen and the pH of the water. So it's only the carbonic acid of the CO2 dissolved in the water that makes it acid. But because we are radically getting rid of the carbonic acid and the CO2, we are going to an alkaline. Now, the ocean is naturally 8.6. With oxygen it's 8.6 pH. So that's a [? plaiting ?] solution. SARAH SIMON: OK. PETER DREHER: And now they're worried. With the carbonic acid, it's going down to 8.4. So it's not much pH difference, but it's still alkaline. So it is still a net plaiting environment. But the point is is that, because of the ion, it becomes an even more alkaline surface water. And so none of those carbonates dissolve. They all go down to the Davey's locker. SARAH SIMON: OK. GEOFF CHAPIN: Davey Jones locker. [INTERPOSING VOICES] RAMON BUENO: A question. SARAH SIMON: Geoff, there was. Go ahead, Ramon. RAMON BUENO: We have a question from Tim [? Conners. ?] It says, do you think there's an option to adopt a technology to algae in the freshwater lakes? I seem to remember that a fair amount of money is spent cleaning up lakes. I don't know who-- [INTERPOSING VOICES] PETER DREHER: Another member of our club has a project to do that, very similar to Geoff. Sarah, I can't remember her name offhand. But she's-- SARAH SIMON: Somebody in Palm Beach. Yes, there are other alums that we can try and connect you with. And we'll look for [INAUDIBLE] when we answer these questions afterwards. Geoff, how about your processes? Can you use fresh water algae? GEOFF CHAPIN: So there are certain species of seaweed that can be grown in the lakes. And it's not my area of expertise. I think, certainly when you grow seaweed macro algae, it does uptake and use nitrogen and other elements that can be in over abundance in lakes. And so therefore it can be a very effective solution. I think you also have to, of course, watch out for invasive species issues, et cetera and runaway. But I would think there would be uses for that. It's just not something we've looked at right now. RAMON BUENO: There's a quick question from GK for Geoff. Says, how are India partners helping and in what manner? And then I'd like to have, also, a quick question for both of you before the time ends up off, which is, what country laws and legislation and/or international law and legislation comes into play when you're dealing with expanding large scale interventions in the ocean? And what do you know about that so far? But first GK question about India. GEOFF CHAPIN: Yeah, sure. So thanks, GK. We're working with a company in India that is an agriculture company that is trying to help farmers deal with heat stress and also when there are the monsoon rains and how to modulate the water flows when there's tons of rain and then it might be weeks without rain. And it's for that reason that they're interested in the agricultural hydrogels. So imagine spreading across your field, for a very low cost, a bunch of these beads that absorb the water when it rains and then plays it back into the plant over the next 30 days. You can actually tune the hydrogel rather to time how fast it comes back out. So if you infuse that with biostimulant and combine it with biochar, perhaps, all of these really help regulate the health of the soil and help the plants survive. So it's one of those players. And I can share, under [? India, ?] the name of that large player. We'd love to find other ways to help and get into India. The question you ask, Ramon, about the regulations-- this is a key thing. So when you have seaweed farms near shore, there are up to 17 or 20 different agencies, sometimes, that you have to get permits from. And so it can be very cumbersome. Part of the benefit of marine permaculture as designed by the Climate Foundation is that you free yourself up from those regulations when you move beyond the EEZ. In some countries, inside the EEZ, Extended Economic Zone, might be workable in some countries. But certainly beyond the EEZ entirely, about 150-200 miles offshore, there you're dealing with the UN Convention on the Laws of the Sea. So UNCLOS prohibits dumping. And it prohibits anything that isn't done in the production of a product. So if it's waste from producing a product, that's different than just dumping with no purpose or product behind it. And that's something Peter knows about too. So I'll turn it over to you, Peter. PETER DREHER: That's our major stumbling block right now. If we can overcome that-- there's one commercial project that was done, and they did get all the permits. But then the government changed their mind after it was done. And public opinion-- it's a delicate matter to be managed. But I think it's a matter of people getting comfortable with the technology and the intent and what's happening. But you're right. We're making fish. We're not in the carbon sequestration business. We're not trying to sell carbon credits. It's not New York City dumping the garbage in the Atlantic Ocean. SARAH SIMON: Great. RAMON BUENO: I was just wondering if there had been any mention of whether interventions like this-- whether there was concern that, aside from creating more fish or whatever, whether there were other less well known, unintended consequences, but. PETER DREHER: The one large experiment-- now, again, we're at 10 times the scale of that experiment-- had huge fish populations. Now, I will also say that it has to be done in deep water. If you do it in shallow water, you do end up with a lot of fish poop and 100 feet of water. And it will biodecay bacterially and actually raise carbon dioxide. And you'll end up with one of those jellyfish turtle soups with all the sargassum growing in it. And so this only works in and multi-thousand-foot deep water. And at those pressures, thousands of PSI and very cold, there is no biological activity down there. It is inert. And it's the same way our planet has made ice ages and hot ages on and off, just by storing, in the very deep ocean, sequestered carbon. So we're using completely natural processes. It's just, we're taking the controls away from Mother Nature. And that's the nice thing. If we stop fertilization in three years, the fish go away. So [INAUDIBLE] declines every year. And then within four years, we're back to what we had beforehand. So it's very much-- we're very much in control. And we're monitoring the species that are there too. So if we get a rogue species, we know how to get rid of it. So it's a managed ocean. It's not a wild ocean anymore. SARAH SIMON: I'd like to finish with the question of food. I think when people think of seaweed and algae, often we think about food. And certainly, the iron fertilization is trying to make fish to feed the world. [INAUDIBLE] actually asked, no bacon? Because Peter wanted to go to a pescatorian diet, which we could also do plant-based diets. But I was curious, Geoff-- and Peter, we know you're going to be growing fish for food. Geoff, are any of your products and processes direct food? Or is it mostly for use in land-based farming? GEOFF CHAPIN: For the sargassum, there isn't as much-- the arsenic issue, which we have dealt with, by the way. Somebody asked about arsenic. We've dealt with the arsenic issue for biostimulants and things you put on the field. But there's not as much of a food market except in fucoidans, which are part of our biorefinery process. So we can get the fucoidans out, which are healthy for people. But for feeding the world, that's more the kelp and the marine permaculture. Kelp is extremely healthy for so many different products. And so it's much more applicable there. PETER DREHER: It's a big part of ice cream. Your seaweed's used in ice cream a lot. So if people like ice cream, surprise, it's-- we in Africa we use guar beans. And a lot of ice cream is guar bean. Surprise. GEOFF CHAPIN: Yeah. We want to really-- [INTERPOSING VOICES] SARAH SIMON: That's why when my freezer doesn't work, the ice cream doesn't melt. But very good. So I think we've covered the open questions. That's great. I wanted to thank the two of you for helping us understand better, number one, how the oceans and the life in the oceans can help sequester and pull carbon directly out of the air. That's really something that has gained a lot of attention recently. I did want to mention that we-- I want to go back to just say [INAUDIBLE] from the Energy, Environment, and Sustainability Network. We are working hard to connect alums. We welcome any and all folks to join us. Whether it's sending us ideas or joining our various groups, we are trying to set up a good system of pipeline of information between the clubs and the network as a whole. Any club out there who is doing climate or environmental or energy work and events, we want to promote that. We also want to promote groups like the MIT Alumni for Climate Action, which is open for business and trying to take action to, they call it, mobilize alums and the alum voice to become part of the way that our decision makers and policymakers find enough science to get answers to climate and environmental issues. Ramon, did you have another comment or-- RAMON BUENO: No. I'll just add that I'm glad we had this conversation about ocean-based solutions. Considering it's 2/3 of the planet, we often don't think along those lines. And I have to think that as long as it's sustainably done and we don't do to the oceans what we've done to a lot of the landmass, it's potentially a great contribution just like many energy sources that are not really tapped and they need research and study. But I think this was a great addition to the conversation. So I really appreciate you guys being here. PETER DREHER: Yeah. What we're doing is equivalent to farming the entire Sahara. We're taking a desert, and we're irrigating it and planting it and having it turn into a lush rain forest. SARAH SIMON: Right. Right. And we do harvest from the ocean. It's kind of like hunting in the forest, but we now have boats and big nets that can accomplish the same fish scooping. So thank you all very much. It's been a great hour. We hope you'll be back to see us again. And we hope you'll be in contact with us through the website or writing to us at AlumniEnergy@MIT.edu. So thank you very, very much. Bye now. RAMON BUENO: Have a good day, everyone. GEOFF CHAPIN: Thank you so much for the opportunity. WHITNEY ESPICH: Thanks for joining us. And for more information on how to connect with the MIT Alumni Association, please visit our website.