Monitoring, reporting and verification for a marine carbon dioxide removal process: a case study

To achieve ambitious climate change goal as the one set by the Paris Agreement, Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) processes should be deployed in addition to rapid emission reductions. The process of Monitoring, Reporting, and Verification (MRV) is pivotal to certifying the effectiveness of carbon removal technologies for a voluntary or regulated CDR market.

The MRV process consists of monitoring the amount of greenhouse gas removed by a CDR activity and reporting the results of the monitoring to a third party. The third party then verifies the reporting of the results.

MRV applied to marine CDR (mCDR) that are facing challenges to precisely count the positive impact of those technologies ensuring the additionality and the long term durability of the CO₂ removal.

Here, the development and the application of a new mMRV protocol for a new approach to Ocean Alkalinity Enhancement (OAE) with equilibrated pH. The challenges faced and still to be addressed will be analyzed for all the steps of MRV, and the advantages in the discharge of a pH-equilibrated alkaline solution, compared to the traditional  OAE approach where a reactive substance such as slaked lime is discharged, are discussed.

A specific measuring procedure is established for assessing the net carbon removal through specific sensors for measuring parameters, i.e., pH, Turbidity, Suspended Solid, Conductivity, CO₂ detector.

The procedure for the reporting phase, where data will be automatically managed by the process internal software are presented, as well as the Verification procedure, performed by a third-party certifier that will evaluate and verify the compliance of the process to the process’ specs.