The Ocean Carbon Platform
Planetary’s product, The Ocean Carbon Platform, enables the safe, measured removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. It packages together everything project developers need to establish and operate a responsible OAE project.
The Platform ensures safety, transparency, and permit compliance throughout a project’s development.
Three Product Modules
Planetary’s Platform allows the safe addition of antacid to seawater by optimizing all major steps of an OAE project.
Antacid Sourcing
Planetary partners with suppliers of safe, pure antacids produced with a low carbon footprint. We select antacids that are used extensively in wastewater and aquaculture and are naturally abundant in seawater, and we test them for impurities. We are actively developing advanced methods of purification that will allow us to reduce the carbon intensity of this phase without lowering our standards for safety.
Site Automation
Planetary automates alkalinity addition for water operators. Using a network of tanks, sensors, and pumps, as well as the software needed to manage them, our systems continually monitor and control the process to stay within existing safety limits. This enables operators to neutralize seawater acidity and remove CO2 from the air safely, all without installing significant infrastructure at the site.
Verifying Carbon Removal
Planetary has developed a sophisticated approach to quantifying and verifying net carbon removals. The Ocean Carbon Calculator includes models of local ocean mixing patterns, exact measurements of the added alkalinity, and an independently reviewed technique for measurement and verification called the Planetary Measurement, Reporting, and Verification (MRV) Protocol.
Antacid Library
Antacids used for OAE must meet a high standard. They must be:
- Pure – to ensure safety
- Produced with a low carbon footprint – to maximise CDR efficiency
- Naturally abundant in seawater – to minimise disruptions to marine systems
Planetary carefully tests and characterizes antacids from each potential supplier, working with independent verifiers to validate the antacid’s carbon footprint. The result is a growing library of trusted sources that can provide alkalinity for use in safe, effective, and responsible OAE projects.
We have established relationships with trustworthy suppliers of magnesium hydroxide, and are investigating future partnerships with suppliers of other appropriate alkalinity sources.
In the future, we may be able to expand our sourcing options by introducing purification steps that enable us to use additional materials that would otherwise not meet our standards. Planetary is developing novel technologies and methods to purify these antacids with minimal energy and low carbon emissions.
Site Automation
Planetary’s Site Automation System (SAS) bundles together a suite of specialized technologies used to add controlled doses of alkalinity to an outfall and measure the process, enabling project operators to effectively and safely add alkalinity to existing ocean outfalls.
The System provides three main functions:
- Controlling the alkalinity addition
- Monitoring the entire addition system
- Reporting the project status out to project operators and independent auditors
The System was designed to be portable, modular, self-contained, and easy to install and control.
It contains all the components necessary to control the addition of alkalinity to seawater, from pumps and holding tanks to sensor arrays and reporting systems.
Project operators can install the System at their outfall site quickly and without permanently modifying existing infrastructure, and can easily add to or remove the unit as the scope of the project expands or shrinks.
Ocean Carbon Calculator
The Ocean Carbon Calculator aggregates project data from all relevant sources, including Planetary’s Site Automation System (SAS) and third party sensors and databases, to determine the amount of carbon dioxide a project has removed and stored.
This data is fed into refined ocean models and specialised software to simulate ocean conditions, measure and predict total carbon removals, and simplify project reporting and auditing.
Planetary’s models, which focus on predicting how long water remains in the surface layer of the ocean, are either developed by our own research team or are based on established models developed for the region. As projects proceed, we confirm the accuracy of these models by comparing their predictions to real data, and we work to increase their precision so we can predict changes at a finer granularity.
A Unified System
Planetary’s Ocean Carbon Platform ties together hardware and software into one system for easy, safe, and verifiable carbon removal.
Automation and Monitoring Hardware
Our Site Automation System (SAS) bundles together specialized dosing and automation technologies into a self-contained system containing the pumps, sensors, tanks and computers necessary to add alkalinity to an outfall safely and monitor the process.
By collecting the necessary tools into one unit, Planetary allows project developers to deploy their OAE projects easily and modularly, scaling up or down as needed. Once our System arrives on site, it is ready to begin dispensing alkalinity after only a brief installation process.
Project Software
Our software simplifies project development, monitoring and modelling throughout a project’s lifespan.
Incorporating real-time alert systems, ocean models, and our own unique knowledge of alkalinity dispersion and carbon drawdown patterns, the software records all of the relevant data that a project needs to safely and accurately measure a carbon removal in a way that can be independently verified.