SAN FRANCISCO, California (November 20, 2007) -- Climos, a company dedicated to removing carbon from the atmosphere, today announced a Provisional Patent Filing with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office covering systems and methods needed for commercializing a technique known as ocean iron fertilization.

Ocean iron fertilization involves the application of a trace amount of iron to iron-limited regions of the ocean in order to accelerate the growth of phytoplankton. This process has been demonstrated experimentally in 12 publicly funded open ocean experiments since 1993. A natural part of Earth's carbon cycle, phytoplankton production sequesters over 3 billion tons of CO2 from the surface ocean to deep water every year in a process referred to by oceanographers as the "Biological Pump." Over the last billion years, this mechanism has been primarily responsible for the concentration of over 80% of Earth's mobile carbon in the deep ocean. Oceanographers first discovered in 1988 that iron is a limiting factor on phytoplankton productivity in many of the world's oceans.

"Ocean iron fertilization has been demonstrated experimentally at sea many times. However to prove a specific benefit regulated carbon markets depend on precise carbon measurement, rigorous accounting, known permanence and the ability to track reductions transparently from initiation through retirement," said Dan Whaley, Climos CEO. "This filing protects key innovations we have developed that are necessary to bring carbon reductions from practice at sea to markets on land."

Drafting was led by Michael Shuster, Partner in the Intellectual Property Group and Co-Chair of the Life Sciences practice at Fenwick & West in San Francisco. "Protecting intellectual property involved in an ocean-based operation presented an interesting challenge. We employed a systems approach to connect activity at sea with Climos technology on land used to quantify, value, and market carbon credits generated by ocean fertilization activities. I believe that these aspects of the technology represent the critical path in the commercial application of ocean fertilization."

About Climos

Climos is a company dedicated to removing carbon from the atmosphere. Founded in California's Silicon Valley by entrepreneurs Dan Whaley and Richard Whilden, Climos scientific research is overseen by Dr. Margaret Leinen, former Assistant Director of Geosciences at the National Science Foundation (NSF). Climos is guided by a Scientific Advisory Board that includes some of the world's experts in ocean, earth and climate science.

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