Built on decades of research, CarbonRun mobilizes the power of rivers and oceans to safely and verifiably draw down CO2. As CarbonRun’s co-founder Eddie Halfyard told the New York Times, “the beauty of it is how simple the technology is.” From limestone silos that sit on the side of a riverbank, site-specific amounts of natural alkalinity are added to river systems with high carbon drawdown potential. This increases the river’s carbon removal capacity and delivers the CO2 to oceans for permanent storage. The water does most of the work, on the back of CarbonRun’s dosing technology.
The appeal of this novel removal pathway has attracted the support of the largest buyers in carbon removal - CarbonRun recently received a 5-year, $25.4M offtake for their removals through Frontier Climate, a buyers coalition founded by companies including Stripe, Alphabet, and Meta. With this offtake, CarbonRun will be expanding project operations across Eastern Canada.
In order to scale at this rate, CarbonRun knew they needed to operate efficiently and thoughtfully right from the start. They built a strong field science and process engineering effort, and engineered dosing technology with an eye towards repeatable deployments. They did all of this thoughtfully, in a community-centric manner, involving local leaders from the start of project planning, and performing regular ground truth sampling to monitor co-benefits and overall impact.
CarbonRun needed a strong MRV plan alongside their operational plan to back up the tonnes they are delivering at their growing scale. Mangrove worked with CarbonRun to implement an end-to-end data collection and modeling process, allowing CarbonRun to measure, quantify, and report their removals for delivery.
Across the full footprint of their project, from the watershed, to doser, to the carbon system, CarbonRun has access to a wealth of data to prove carbon is being removed. The challenge is that this data comes in all forms: from precise machine data, such as telemetrics from the operational systems on the limestone silo and in-field water sensors, to unstructured data from human processes, such as photos of field studies or regular grab-samples for water quality and environmental testing. In addition to direct measurements, CarbonRun models the chemical reactions and concentrations within the water, as well as the flow of water across the watershed surrounding the river. These time-series outputs from the scientific models are also used for carbon accounting.
Mangrove’s MRV platform connects to the various frontline systems and field-team workflows. The Mangrove team and CarbonRun worked closely, mapping out data sources and workflows and configuring the platform to collect the data. Areas where there were degrees of uncertainty were identified and transformations were applied where data needed to be cleaned and normalized.
From this data stream, CarbonRun needs to report ongoing net carbon removal. The actual determination of the removals is based on the accounting equations laid out in CarbonRun’s proprietary removal methodology. As new data becomes available, Mangrove continuously calculates CarbonRun’s net carbon removal using their methodology, while performing system monitoring and validation of the data.
The outcome is a ledger of net carbon, in tonnes, sequestered each day, along with the emissions calculations for that specific day’s worth of sequestration. This accounts for the precise quantity of limestone added to the river, including the process (e.g. transportation) emissions backing up that limestone, as well as the comparison with baseline conditions of the specific river as well as other comparable sites.
Data is packaged and made available for verifiers, partners, and buyers through accessible portals where the underlying evidence and production data can be reviewed and audited. The same data can also be made available to the community and to public databases such as CDR.fyi and Cascade Climate to help the carbon removal market grow.
The centralized repository of measurements and quantification in Mangrove ensures CarbonRun does not need to duplicate or re-calculate data in order to produce new reporting. From the same ledger, data can be transferred through API to a registry of choice; a user can log in to a portal to view an array of backing evidence; or a configured spreadsheet report can be generated for offline review.
“Mangrove provides CarbonRun with real-time tracking of our measurements of carbon removal and environmental benefits.” explained Dr. Shannon Sterling, Founder and Chief Scientific Officer at CarbonRun. “With Mangrove’s system in place, we’re able to channel our energy into optimizing our innovation and driving down costs. We can trust that our data would be tracked and compliantly reported to our partners. Mangrove’s rigorous MRV system provides the transparency and accountability needed to demonstrate the impact of our river restoration and climate mitigation work.”
Through the process of operationalizing MRV, both the Mangrove and CarbonRun teams came away with several key learnings:
While the vision of MRV is a highly-connected, fully-automated system, it made complete sense to start with simpler manual processes of gathering data, and bulk importing at regular cadences to normalize data in Mangrove. The main goal was to ensure that the right data was collected, that it was clear where the data came from, and that accurate quantification was applied to the data.
The earliest stages of a first-of-a-kind (FOAK) project are paired with plenty of experimentation to ensure operations are properly configured. CarbonRun took an agile approach in deploying their operations, and similarly in partnering with Mangrove to operationalize their MRV. As the team refined their science, evolved their on-the-ground tooling, and iterated on their commercial strategy, their Mangrove implementation could be adjusted in lockstep. For example, Mangrove’s configurable platform allows CarbonRun to pull in outputs from a new scientific model, or to package their MRV data into a package that is compliant with a new standard they are required to report to.
Having a strong MRV plan is just as important for attracting high-quality buyers as it is for delivering tonnes. Leading carbon removal projects like CarbonRun pass the muster of the highest due diligence standards by demonstrating that they take MRV seriously.
Since deploying Mangrove, CarbonRun has:
As CarbonRun continues to scale its projects globally, Mangrove’s solution will scale in parallel, playing a pivotal role in enabling project growth, ensuring robust transparency and operational efficiency across all stages of deployment. Every new site and project that CarbonRun pursues will need to have an MRV setup that mirrors its distinct local conditions – CarbonRun can develop new projects with the full confidence that data collection and the quantification modeling remain configurable to each new project.
