It has been a crazy few weeks for the Carbon Kapture team. I went to COP26 last year as it was in the UK, but attending COP27 was not on my to-do list, for many reasons.
Instead, while the world focused on the event in Egypt, Dave Walker Nix and I went on a bit of road trip instead. Not quite as exotic as Sharm-El-Sheik, but to the picturesque outpost of Mulroy Bay in Ireland.
For those of you that don’t know, Mulroy Bay is in the North West of County Donegal. It’s a beautiful inland sea bay that has been a home to fishermen and sea farmers for hundred of years. The waters there are home to a number of fishermen and aquacultural businesses and the also home to our first partnership.
It’s been around a year or so since we first started talking with the wonderful Jerry Gallagher. He really is the most amazing person. He and his family have been farming the waters of Mulroy Bay for generations and they have kindly agreed to help us test our business model. It feels like this has been in the pipeline for so long, and in truth it has.
As a company we have been blessed with a tremendous following but as a business we have been hampered with issues. We have had challenges with being a part time boot strap organisation. Then we have been hampered with Brexit paperwork issues and finally Covid, just when we thought we were ahead on things a few of our staff got struck down and with no one else to cover those roles it just took forever to get back on our feet again.
Finally, we are in a good place again and it was a magnificent few days spent in Mulroy Bay with Jerry and his family. They are lovely people and the faith that they have showed in us has been truly heartening.
I am proud to be a part of this wonderful organisation and the team that I work with are really pulling things together. Over the next few weeks we will be launching our “Roped In” campaign. This is where businesses will get the chance to sponsor ropes that extract CO2 from the oceans. It is the first step in a number of phases that we are planning over the next few years.
Nature-based solutions are the most obvious way of fighting climate change and finding ways to monetise pollution is the simplest way of getting effective results. We as humans can’t improve on mother nature – she has been the guardian of this planet for billions of years. What we can do is help her life support systems grow back again and help bring balance to our dying planet.
What we need is fast-acting nature-based solutions and working globally to make impact now, not in 20 years’ time.
Our oceans have been the source of all life on earth. They are not in a good way right now. As temperatures rise their ability to be a good store of CO2 and carbon sink depletes. Why? Because as the waters heats, atoms become increasingly spread apart. Meaning the CO2 that would normally occupy a smaller space occupies a larger space.
What this means is that life simply cannot exist in the locations that it used to and we have to foster and engineer ways of encouraging and regenerating those opportunities. Sure, those opportunities don’t exist exclusively in our oceans, they exist on land too. But our oceans are 70% of our planet and our land is heavily occupied with human activity, so it makes sense to help our oceans recover.
We have a plan to get a million metres of ropes into the water by the end of 2024. That can happen in Mulroy Bay alone but our plans are far bigger and we want to have the biggest global network of seaweed farms in the world, allowing marine life to flourish where our farms exist and providing help and support to people right on the edge of the climate crisis.
That isn’t just a good idea, but a commercially good idea for so many people in so many different ways.
