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carbon journal
We are sinking.
Rising temperatures are melting polar ice caps, raising global sea level. Decades of mismanaging our river systems have left them unable to fill in the gaps with sediment. This double-whammy has devastated our coastlines, leaving some of the economically important, ecologically sensitive, and biodiverse stretches of the planet struggling for air.
A double-whammy can only be defended against with a dual-edged blade. What if we could simultaneously remove CO2 from the air while restoring and fortifying our coastlines?
SinkCo Labs can. And we’re starting in my home state of Louisiana— a region constantly battling the effects of climate change when it comes to storms, sea level rise, and land loss.
On borrowed time: Utilizing biomass injections to tackle hurricane destruction in Louisiana
Low-lying river deltas and tropical islands are bearing the brunt of the destruction. The stats are bleak. In Louisiana, a football field of land turns to water every 90 seconds. The state has faced $200-300 billion in hurricane damage over the last 45 years.
Louisiana’s Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority is fighting an uphill battle to stay afloat, spending $1 billion a year on marsh creation, hurricane protection, and hydrologic restoration. Their work has benefited over 50,000 acres of land, 350 miles of levees, and 70 miles of barrier islands. However, the source of funding for the work, the settlement from the BP oil spill, will sunset in 2031. Without intervening coastal restoration efforts, Louisiana could lose up to 3000 square miles of land over the next 50 years, and the United States will lose its busiest ports by tonnage.
As the funding dwindles, it’s time to turn to biomass carbon credit projects.
SinkCo Labs technology buries biomass in seafloor sediments, but is using that biomass to literally uplift sinking coastal environments. We take agriculture and forestry waste — sawdust, bark, bagasse, stalks, husk — grind it up, mix it into a seawater slurry, and deliver it deep into the coastal seabed with a patented injection system, reaching depths between 15 and 30 feet below the surface of the seafloor. These depths are not only great enough to protect our sequestered biomass from oxygen, but also enough to shield it from natural erosive events and dredging.
Many Louisianians (such as myself) will remember the charismatic state programs that turned old Christmas trees into coastal management assets. SinkCo Lab’s approach is similar but much more durable, environmentally sound, and scalable.
Not only that, but Louisiana is an ideal operating environment for biomass operations like SinkCo’s.
The muddy seafloor created by large river systems like the Mississippi in the Gulf has sediments rich in clay minerals, and the platy shape of clay minerals boosts our storage capacity, cuts costs, and improves permanence. High clay content gives the sediments cohesiveness but also the ability to compact and flow. The flowy mud means our injections require less pressure than the water lines in your house, bringing down operating expenses substantially.
Once the biomass is below the seabed, the platy clay minerals block communication between pore spaces in the sediment, helping to chemically preserve the deposit. High sedimentation rates in river deltas are what take SinkCo deposits across the million-year permanence finish line. With mud accumulating up to 4 inches vertically per year in the Mississippi Delta, our deposits will be another 300 feet below ground by the time our carbon credits are promised to mature — a feature you just can’t get from standard coastal management.
The enduring problem with the coastal management industry standard
Aside from state-supported coastal management having an expiration date, its process is much less durable and beholden to the global supply chain. In order to grant the Louisiana wetlands prolonged equilibrium, we must explore another way.
In an industry-standard marsh creation project, the benefit area is sectioned off with retaining walls, and a sand-water mixture is brought in through pipes to fill it. It takes many months — up to a year — for these deposits to fully settle, leaving essentially a giant sandy pit. After the deposit settles, workers come in to seed the land with vegetation. Plants struggle to colonize the dredge material used for marsh creation, but their roots are vital to keeping the new land intact.
There are also challenges with the supply of dredge material used for fill in marsh creation. The state of Louisiana anticipates the need for 50 million cubic yards of sand per year to support restoration projects, a figure which nearly consumes the entire Gulf Coast supply (85 million cubic yards per year). On a global scale, competing demand for construction, electronics, and shoreline maintenance has threatened the supply of sand, a seemingly mundane resource. This demand has pushed dredging and sand mining operations into offshore “borrow areas.”
SinkCo raises the seabed by putting biomass down into the sediments below rather than by dumping sand on top of it. One of the best things about raising the seabed via injection is that, ecologically, it’s more like an arthroscopic procedure than open heart surgery. A small tube (3 inches in diameter) is inserted into the seafloor only using gravity (no drilling). The sediment at these rates flows like toothpaste, so once the tube is removed, the hole closes within a few minutes, and the biomass deposit is locked away.
SinkCo’s staged subsurface injections can uplift coastal zones gradually without significant surface disturbance, and the use of residual biomass instead of sand reduces reliance on dredge material.
Louisiana wetlands are sinking at an average rate of 4 mm per year. Small-scale application of SinkCo technology generated 3 centimeters of uplift in our Portugal testbed this year. This amount of sub-sediment “jacking” (as opposed to ordinary vertical accretion) would buy Louisiana Coastal wetlands an additional 7+ years of equilibrium.
Funding the future of coastal management
Louisiana’s $7.4 billion share of the Deepwater Horizon settlement has powered a historic sprint to rebuild vanishing marshes. However, when that pipeline of cash runs dry in 2031, are taxpayers expected to pick up the tab for this vital but costly work?
There is another way.
While the oil‑spill dollars ebb, a flood of private capital is chasing high‑integrity carbon‑removal tons. Frontier’s advance‑market commitment, backed by Stripe, Alphabet, Shopify, Meta and McKinsey, has already set aside US $1 billion to pre‑purchase durable removals between now and 2030. Tech titans like Microsoft just inked a 6.75 million metric ton, $800 million deal with AtmosClear, a bioenergy and carbon capture company.
Natural salt‑marsh sediments already hide up to 135 kg CO₂‑e per m² in their upper 2.5 m. If CPRA’s 105 000 acres of created marsh had been built with a deliberately biomass-enhanced mix of sediments, our back‑of‑the‑envelope shows they could have locked away 15–57 million tons of CO₂‑equivalent, worth $1.5‑$5.7 billion at $100 per ton.
That single design tweak would have paid back 20‑73% of the program’s $7.3 billion price tag.
Biomass injections: the natural solution to coastal protection
At SinkCo, we envision a future where sustainably sourced biomass replaces scarce, costly dredge material—delivering a carbon-negative foundation for coastal protection. By monetizing the climate value of stored carbon, we can unlock reliable funding for infrastructure built in harmony with natural processes, lowering risk for coastal communities and safeguarding fragile ecosystems for generations to come.
