Announcement: climate Intervention EIA grants from CIEIF - 12/1/24 application deadline
Renaud de RICHTER
July 11, 2024; contact: Peter T. Jenkins, Fund Manager; peter....@cieif.org
CIEIF Makes Second Round of Grants and Announces Increased Grant Amount and Date for 2024 Applications
Bethesda, Maryland, USA - The Climate Intervention Environmental Impact Fund (CIEIF; https://cieif.org/) is pleased to announce completion of its second round of $65,000 grants towards environmental impact analysis for climate restoration projects. The three new grantees are:
Bluemethane Limited (www.bluemethane.com) – a UK start-up aimed at harvesting methane from wastewater treatment plants and other aquatic sources.
Exaquest Carbon (https://exaquest.org) – a California nonprofit organization founded in 2020 with the mission to develop open-source technologies for scalable and cost-effective carbon dioxide removal (CDR).
Floating Island International (www.floatingislandinternational.com) – an established Montana company with systems to clean freshwater ecosystems, which now seeks to remove methane from dam reservoirs and other aquatic sources.
The grants to two separate teams aimed at removing aquatic methane represent CIEIF’s recognition of the alarming rise in worldwide methane levels attributable to diverse aquatic sources, primarily wetlands. Techniques that are innovated by the two teams may be adaptable in the future to other such sources.
CIEIF’s decision making team consists of Peter Jenkins, Fund Manager; Renaud de Richter, PhD., Science Advisor; and John Fitzgerald, Legal Advisor. They narrowed numerous applications down based on several factors, including their clarity, their long-term potential for climate benefits, and the applicants’ commitment to publishing the results of their environmental impact assessments (EIA). All grantees will publish their impact-related results either in a peer-reviewed journal or as a publicly available report with independent peer review. One of CIEIF’s primary goals is to increase understanding about the potential risks and benefits of various climate interventions.
Bluemethane’s project will take place at a wastewater treatment plant in southern England. It uses mechanical agitation of wastewater in a Bluemethane-developed machine called Harvey to extract the high-concentration methane so it can be recovered and used as biogas. CIEIF’s funding will enable a comprehensive EIA, including ongoing monitoring, covering all potential impacts of this technique. It does so under a detailed framework Bluemethane developed that will be applicable, with some adaptations, to other aquatic methane capture projects in the future.
Exaquest Carbon has developed a method – “BioSink”- which involves collecting waste dead wood and mechanically lowering it to a depth of 800 ft in the ocean. In minutes, the hydrostatic pressure at that depth causes the wood to become waterlogged and then sink on its own thousands of feet to the seafloor below. Once at the seafloor, carbon in the wood stays out of contact with the atmosphere for more than 1,000 years. The huge abyssal plains of the ocean floor are up 12,000 feet deep and remote from human activity. CIEIF’s grant will allow Exaquest to conduct a detailed predictive EIA of the potential localized impacts to be used for a permit application to the EPA. This will include two trips for collecting and analyzing ocean floor sediments, marine biology, water chemistry, and other parameters at the proposed sinking location, 140 miles off the Southern California coast.
Floating Island International (FII) has developed a system that prevents methane emissions being generated by nutrient-impaired freshwater and captures dissolved methane before it enters the atmosphere. Behind many typical hydroelectric dams, which abruptly halt the natural flow of water, organic sediments build up in the reservoir and oxygen is depleted as the sediments decay. This results in anoxic conditions, thus allowing methanogens to generate biogenic methane. Leveraging FII’s experience with water/air circulation pumps and gas and nutrient capturing, they seek to perfect methane removal in a field test in the Bighorn Reservoir behind Yellowtail Dam, near Fort Smith, Montana. CIEIF funding will support a detailed predictive EIA involving potential impacts on fisheries, nutrients, oxygenation, public safety, and other concerns in order to obtain necessary permits from the US Bureau of Reclamation and other affected agencies.
More details about all three projects will be made available at https://cieif.org/current-grants/
CIEIF also is announcing another round of three grants with increased award amounts of $75,000 each. The deadline for applications is December 1, 2024. Innovative climate intervention projects worldwide in need of funding for focused environmental impact assessment, impact modeling, and/or public-stakeholder outreach are encouraged to apply. Details of the eligibility requirements are at: cieif.org/what-we-do and cieif.org/guidelines-for-grant-applicants/.
CIEIF will issue future reminders of this December 2024 opportunity. To receive them directly, go to cieif.org/ and Sign Up for Updates.
