On March 13, 2025 the Government of Canada announced a $24M investment over six years to fund the ‘Solid Carbon: The Ocean’s Rock-solid Sociotechnical Climate Solution’ project through the New Frontiers in Research Fund’s (NFRF) Transformation stream, which supports large-scale Canadian-led interdisciplinary research with the potential to realize real and lasting change for major challenges.
Solid Carbon is developing an offshore carbon dioxide removal (CDR) climate change mitigation technology that will enable safe and permanent storage of CO2 as rock, in deep ocean basalt.
Solid Carbon will utilize Ocean Network Canada’s world-leading subsea cabled infrastructure off the coast of Vancouver Island as part of this research experiment, enabling 24/7 real-time monitoring that will be publicly accessible through the Internet.
Learn about the history of this Ocean Networks Canada-led project.
“NFRF's leadership for emerging climate solutions is inspired and well-timed - their support for Solid Carbon will absolutely advance Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) and sub-seafloor storage technologies.” - Dr. David Goldberg, Co-Principal Investigator, Columbia University, United States
“This NFRF will allow us to continue the evolution of our system design that can utilize Canada’s vast offshore wind and subsea CO2 sequestration resources to become a global leader in innovation in carbon dioxide removal. The Solid Carbon project is uniquely formulated to integrate engineering design with social acceptance, economic and policy research into a demonstration project to mitigate risks and maximize societal and economic benefits towards commercialization of the concept.” - Dr. Curran Crawford, Co-Principal Investigator Professor, Mechanical Engineering, University of Victoria
“This is an effort as deeply social as it is technological, with every strength of the team aimed at grounding our work in the Indigenous partnerships and knowledge involved, the high-quality oversight and governance to be cultivated, and incorporation of design principles that reflect the ocean histories and knowledge that exists across coastal communities.” - Dr. Terre Satterfield - Co-Principal Investigator, Professor of Culture, Risk and the Environment, University of British Columbia
"To make permanent carbon removal and storage a reality, we need to understand its true costs and economic viability. The NFRF grant enables us to rigorously assess whether seafloor CO2 storage can be a cost-effective, scalable, solution for avoiding climate damages and for creating new Canadian jobs in the Blue Economy." - Dr. Felix Pretis, Co-Principal Investigator, Associate Professor, Dept. of Economics, University of Victoria
Left: Turning carbon dioxide into rock as a permanent, stable, and safe climate solution - 'Solid Carbon: The Ocean’s Rock-solid Sociotechnical Climate Solution’. Right: Timeline plot showing need for CO2 removal capacity adapted from World Resources Institute based on IPCC (2018). Decarbonization (black line) occurs with increased use of non-carbon intensive methods (e.g., solar, wind, nuclear) of reducing emissions to get to net zero (when CO2 emissions = CO2 removed); yet, hard to replace carbon emissions still remain (dark blue above the black line). Solid Carbon has the capacity to meet carbon removal needs, including the hard to remove emissions that remain even after reaching net zero.
Ocean basalt throughout the world ocean. Red colour is young ocean basalt which is ideal for reaction with CO2 to form rock. Source: Müller, R.D., M. Sdrolias, C. Gaina, and W.R. Roest 2008. Age, spreading rates and spreading symmetry of the world's ocean crust, Geochem.
