Take on a YouTube video from Nature Tech Collective, originally posted 2026-05-01. Watch the source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qpq2v2HRhXw
This is a Nature Tech Collective webinar with Dr. Will Burt, VP Science & Product at Planetary, walking through ocean alkalinity enhancement (OAE) as Planetary practices it — adding a mineral antacid to seawater to neutralize dissolved CO₂ and shift the air-sea equilibrium toward more uptake. The framing is 101-level by Burt’s own admission, pitched at an audience he assumed would be mixed. The substantive claim is the familiar one: OAE sits in the favorable corner of the NOAA scalability-vs-cost matrix, and Planetary is among the further-along operators trying to prove it at sea.
What’s worth knowing for a practitioner already tracking this space is mostly tone and positioning rather than new technical content. Burt leans on the David Ho / Jamie Palter framing that the ocean’s sheer surface area and volume make it the logical sink — returning to pre-industrial would shift total ocean carbon by under 1% — and uses NOAA’s effectiveness-vs-cost ranking to argue OAE beats most alternatives on scaling potential. The transcript cuts off before the meatier sections (their actual deployment results, MRV approach, and the “misconceptions” discussion Amal flagged in the agenda), so the parts most likely to matter to someone evaluating Planetary’s specific approach — dose-response in the field, retention modeling, base material sourcing — aren’t in what’s available here. If you want those, you’ll need to actually sit through the recording.
For context, Planetary has been running OAE trials off Halifax for several years and is one of a small cohort — alongside Ebb Carbon, Vesta, and Gigablue — pushing different OAE flavors (electrochemical, coastal mineral, open ocean). The science backdrop Burt gestures at is laid out more rigorously in the OAE state-of-the-planet review by Oschlies et al. and in Ho et al. on MRV challenges. If you’ve read those, this webinar will not add much on the science side; its value is hearing how an operator currently frames the pitch to a nature-tech audience that isn’t CDR-native.
Useful for: people new to marine CDR who want a coherent intro from an operator, or comms/policy folks who want to hear how Planetary is currently positioning OAE against direct air capture and afforestation. Skippable for anyone already deep in OAE literature or tracking Planetary’s deployment data directly.