S.F. entrepreneur floats a bold idea to 'fertilize' ocean

Dan Whaley wants to change your world.

Right at the edge between hopeful and scary, this San Francisco entrepreneur wants to fight global warming by altering the oceans.

Whaley hopes to sell carbon credits for "ocean fertilization," a plan that mixes big money and big science so ambitiously that some researchers fear we would never fully understand what we'd done.

Sometime this year, Whaley's company Climos expects to seek permits to drizzle an iron slurry over roughly 4,000 square miles of ocean.

In its wake, a green film of phytoplankton would bloom, absorb carbon dioxide, and fade, either naturally or as some other creature's meal. As waste and decomposing fragments from this eruption of life drift downward, carrying their internal carbon with them, some could sink deeply enough to be sequestered for 100 years or more, potentially slowing down global warming.

It is an elegant theory that researchers have explored for 20 years. Along the way, businesses have latched onto that theory hoping to make millions or even billions of dollars by selling carbon credits.

They've confronted passionate opposition from environmental groups and some scientists who fear that tinkering with the base of the ocean's food chain could do irrevocable damage.

Now, Climos has attracted venture capital and prominent scientists to the cause of ocean fertilization. Not everyone finds such heavy hitters reassuring.

"The idea itself is flawed … dangerous and irresponsible," said John Hocevar, a Greenpeace ocean specialist. "If Climos is basically in a better position to get it rolling, that's a bad thing."

Among many scientists, the view is more nuanced.

'Not the golden bullet'

Climate change driven by greenhouse gas emissions already is moving faster than predicted. The still-unknown impacts of ocean fertilization, some suggest, might be mild compared with the disruption expected from the growing load of carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere.

Even though we can't demonstrate if fertilization works or if it's safe, we need to keep studying it, a group of 16 ocean specialists from around the world wrote in Science magazine in January.

"The carbon problem will be harder than we think," said Scott Doney, an ocean chemistry specialist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts and one of the essay's co-authors.

While ocean fertilization alone is "not the golden bullet," Doney said, "potentially it could be one of a dozen or several dozen approaches that in aggregate might slow the rise of carbon dioxide."

Doney, who helped organize an ocean fertilization conference at Woods Hole last fall, knows Climos executives and considers them credible.

"My impression is they're doing this not just to make money but because it's really an important problem and we need some breathing room," he said.

"If they went forward and the science said no, this isn't working, or the environmental costs are too high, I think they would take their money and move someplace else."

That assessment is echoed by Whaley, who made millions in Internet travel before recruiting his oceanographer mom to become Climos' chief science officer. At 39, Whaley has already sold a company for $750 million, traveled South America, and now, as he tells it, wants more meaningful work.

Climos shares space with an LED light bulb company and a green venture capital firm in an airy San Francisco office full of open beams, exposed brick and trendy earnestness.

It stands in stark contrast to Planktos, the only other U.S. company to make a concerted, recent effort to profit by fertilizing the ocean.

Today, Planktos' stock is trading around 1.2 cents per share and its Web site has been reduced to a single page blaming the company's hiatus on "a highly effective disinformation campaign."

Planktos founder to try again

In the Foster City office park where Planktos founder Russ George once outlined his dreams for cold fusion, tree planting and ocean fertilization, the letters are flaking from a sign that proclaims "lanktos Inc."

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