Sponsors (2)
Introduced February 25, 2026 by Brian Emanuel Schatz · Last progress February 25, 2026
The bill channels significant federal funding and centralized coordination into accelerating marine carbon removal research, standards, and market-readiness while increasing taxpayer commitments and creating environmental, equity, regulatory, and market-concentration risks that could disproportionately affect coastal and Indigenous communities.
Researchers, scientists, and coastal communities will receive coordinated, sustained federal funding and program support (NSF, NASA, Commerce) to accelerate marine carbon dioxide removal (mCDR) research, trials, workforce training, and monitoring.
Project developers, regulators, and communities will gain standardized measurement, monitoring, reporting, and verification (MMRV) protocols, benchmarks, and open data that improve scientific credibility and enable reliable assessment of marine carbon removal performance.
Coastal, tribal, and Indigenous communities will have mandated consultation and defined tribal/regional participation rights (including at‑grant engagement funding), increasing opportunities to shape research and protect local interests.
Taxpayers face open-ended, multiyear federal spending commitments to fund mCDR research, monitoring, and program infrastructure with appropriations through 2027–2031 and several indefinite funding authorizations.
Coastal ecosystems, subsistence resources, and local communities could be exposed to environmental harm from experimental field trials and deployments of mCDR technologies despite monitoring requirements.
Creating tradable marine carbon removal credits and prioritizing voluntary market mechanisms risks privileging private financiers, shifting benefits toward investors, and encouraging offsets over direct emissions reductions.
Based on analysis of 8 sections of legislative text.
Establishes a federal research, coordination, and standards program to study marine carbon dioxide removal, fund grants, set monitoring/measurement standards, and require community/Tribal engagement.
Establishes a coordinated federal research and standards effort to study marine carbon dioxide removal (mCDR). It directs NOAA (under the Secretary of Commerce) to stand up a Program within 90 days to fund and run research, field trials, monitoring, data management, and stakeholder engagement; directs DOE, NSF, NASA, and NIST to support research, workforce development, observations/modeling, and measurement/standardization activities; and requires integration of traditional ecological knowledge and consultation with Indian Tribes and affected coastal communities. Focus areas include generating empirical evidence on removal efficacy and durability, measuring ecosystem and social impacts, developing monitoring/verification best practices and benchmarks, evaluating commercialization pathways and voluntary carbon market definitions, and producing standards and data to validate performance. The Act preserves existing ocean-use laws and requires compliance with federal research-security rules; it authorizes appropriations for certain agencies and mandates FAIR data practices and community engagement funding for grants.