Six former employees WIRED spoke with reported similar concerns about diving safety and problems with the company’s product. They raised these concerns in emails, texts, and documents from that time, which WIRED has reviewed. Internal presentations from late 2021 and early 2022, seen by WIRED, show that the company was aware that it was struggling to scale up its kelp growing.
In interviews with WIRED, the former leaders of Running Tide framed these issues as growing pains. “We were trying to both be R&D and a developed industry at the same time, which makes it kind of complicated,” says Kristinn Árni L. Hróbjartsson, the organization’s former general manager in Iceland. This problem wasn’t unique to Running Tide, Hróbjartsson says, but permeates the marine carbon-removal sector to this day. “It’s being evaluated as if it were an actual industry. Everybody is just still figuring out what to do.”
Odlin says staff may have glued seaweed onto buoys, but claims that this was a way of showing the “project road map” to investors. “There’s a big difference between falsifying data about the performance of a company and making a render of something you’re trying to do in the future,” he says. Still, Odlin admitted that he thinks Running Tide actually grew less than 10 tons of seaweed in the ocean during the company’s entire operations.
Not Up to Standard
While the Casco Bay experiment showed that Running Tide was still a long way from being able to grow large amounts of kelp, publicly the company presented the tests as evidence that its free-floating buoy technology was progressing. But having already sold credits to investors, it needed a carbon-removal strategy that would scale. Internal company documents show that Running Tide was considering a shift in plans in December 2021 from primarily building algae buoys to sinking wood chips in the ocean (Odlin says they started conducting experiments with wood chips in 2020). The development of the algae-sinking buoys would continue alongside the wood-chip sinking.