| The world's oceans stow vast amounts of carbon dioxide. Now, a growing group of scientists and companies say they've found a way to increase that storage capacity by tweaking ocean water chemistry. The technique, known as ocean alkalinity enhancement, usually involves dissolving acid-neutralizing rocks in the ocean, allowing it to absorb more carbon dioxide. Researchers have been exploring this technology for the last five years, but over the last two months, at least a couple of start-ups have begun operation along the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. Planetary, a start-up based in Nova Scotia, removed 138 metric tons of carbon last month for Shopify and Stripe. The start-up Ebb Carbon is running a small site in Washington that can remove up to 100 carbon metric tons per year and committed in October to remove 350,000 metric tons of carbon from the atmosphere over the next decade for Microsoft. Proponents of the technology say it's one of the most promising forms of carbon removal, which experts say will be necessary to meet climate goals even as the world cuts emissions. But in order for this to make a dent, it will need to be scaled up to remove billions, not hundreds of thousands, of metric tons of carbon per year, Yale associate professor of earth and planetary sciences Matthew Eisaman said. | 
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