Left: Kelp Blue's commercial kelp farm in Lüderitz, Namibia, where atdepth's methodology quantified 150 tons of atmospheric CO₂ removal in 2024. Right: visualization of atdepth's model of the Namibian coast.
June 5, 2025 — atdepth has successfully developed and implemented the first comprehensive methodology for accurately measuring carbon sequestration and atmospheric CO₂ removal from giant kelp farming operations.
Working independently with XPRIZE Carbon Removal finalist Kelp Blue and the Kelp Forest Foundation, we applied our breakthrough methodology to Kelp Blue’s commercial farm in Namibia, demonstrating that their kelp farm removed additional 150 tons of CO₂ from the atmosphere in 2024 through measurable, permanent sequestration pathways. The methodology only considers carbon sequestered through natural ocean processes that meet stringent permanence requirements and excludes the carbon in the harvested biomass, enabling dual revenue streams from both commercial kelp products and verified carbon removal.
Previous kelp-based carbon removal quantification methodologies have faced significant criticism from the scientific community, including concerns about temporal mismatches between photosynthesis and air-sea CO₂ equilibration, inability to track water masses and verify atmospheric CO₂ reduction, and conflation of carbon storage with carbon removal (e.g. Hurd et al., 2024). Our methodology directly addresses these fundamental concerns through mechanistic ocean modeling that explicitly resolves air-sea equilibration processes, tracks carbon transport and transformation over full equilibration timescales, and uses counterfactual analysis to isolate the kelp farm’s contribution to atmospheric CO₂ removal. This approach establishes kelp cultivation as a credible marine carbon dioxide removal pathway that meets the highest standards for carbon markets.
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Learn more about how atdepth’s Ocean Digital Twin platform can support your mCDR operations at atdepth.org