A drop in the ocean: does experimental technology hold the key to saving the world’s seas?

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

In 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.