Neervana NetZero presents
The
Eocene Project
Earth changed its climate once.
We believe it can be done again.
A planetary carbon-removal mission inspired by Earth's climatic past and engineered for its future.
For two centuries,
we have been changing Earth's
climate in one direction.
The question now is whether
we can change its direction again.
The carbon predicament
Cutting emissions is no longer the whole equation.
THE SCALE OF THE PROBLEM
~40 Gt
Annual anthropogenic CO₂ emissions
one annual flow
into the carbon problem
CO₂ emitted by human activity each year — the continuing annual flow into the carbon problem.
~2,500 Gt
Cumulative anthropogenic CO₂ emissions since the industrial era
Cumulative anthropogenic CO₂ emitted since the dawn of the industrial era — the legacy stock behind today's climate challenge.
One hexagon ≈ one present-day annual flow. The historical legacy is roughly sixty times larger.
visual grammar adapted from Neervana's carbon-capture rationale infographic
GIGATONNES.
Climate change is measured in gigatonnes.
Its solutions eventually have to be, too.
Removing carbon is possible.
Scaling carbon removal is the problem.
ENERGY
LAND
WATER
MATERIALS
COST
INFRASTRUCTURE
PERMANENCE
TIME
Existing negative-emissions pathways each offer important possibilities. But deployment at planetary scale encounters combinations of physical, economic and ecological constraints.
We began somewhere else.
Not with a technology. With a question.
Has Earth ever removed carbon at this scale before?
illustrative global mean
temperature trajectory
YEARS AGO
YEARS AGO
YEARS AGO
YEARS AGO
YEARS AGO
YEARS AGO
THE EOCENE
A warmer Earth. A different Arctic. Across freshened Arctic surface waters, vast populations of a tiny floating fern repeatedly proliferated. Under unusual basin conditions, part of that organic carbon was buried in sediments.
reconstructed potential Arctic carbon storage during the Azolla interval
estimated duration of the Azolla-rich interval
Published reconstructions, not direct measurements. The magnitude and climatic role of Azolla remain subjects of scientific study.
~49 MILLION YEARS AGO · VISUAL RECONSTRUCTION
THE EOCENE
A warmer Earth. A different Arctic. Across freshened Arctic surface waters, vast populations of a tiny floating fern repeatedly proliferated. Under unusual basin conditions, part of that organic carbon was buried in sediments.
900–3500 GtC
reconstructed potential Arctic carbon storage during the Azolla interval
~800,000
estimated duration of the Azolla-rich interval
Published reconstructions, not direct measurements. The magnitude and climatic role of Azolla remain subjects of scientific study.
THE GEOLOGICAL RECORD REMEMBERS AN EXTRAORDINARY INTERVAL
Its name was
Azolla.
One of the smallest protagonists in Earth's climate history.
The image-led macro transition and scroll choreography will be layered onto this native structure after the draft is validated.
THE EOCENE PROJECT
The first time,
no human was here to witness it.
Forty-nine million years later,
we are asking whether history can be made to rhyme.
Not by accident.
By design.
Not by recreating the Eocene. By engineering the conditions for biological carbon capture to scale—and turning a chapter of Earth’s climatic past into infrastructure for its future.
The next movement begins with the fern ↓
Small enough to hold in your hand.
Fast enough to make scale conceivable.
A floating aquatic fern measured in centimetres. Photosynthetic. Rapidly reproducing. Working in partnership with nitrogen-fixing cyanobacteria.
Carbon becomes plant.
Azolla fixes atmospheric carbon through photosynthesis, turning CO₂ into living biomass.
It grows.
Under favourable conditions, its biological surface can reproduce rapidly. The capture medium is alive.
It multiplies itself.
The material required for expansion is not manufactured in a factory. New biomass emerges from existing biomass.
It lives on water.
Azolla can create photosynthetically active surface without conventional agricultural soil. That does not eliminate nutrient, water or operating requirements — but it changes the geometry of the problem.
Carbon from air.
Light from the sun.
Biomass that multiplies itself.
Biology was not the problem.
Area was.
Every biological capture system needs productive surface. At planetary scale, the surface requirement becomes an infrastructure problem.
What if the same footprint
could create more surface?
So we built upwards.
A proprietary system for cultivating Azolla vertically under controlled conditions — multiplying biologically productive surface within a compact footprint.
We are not trying to invent photosynthesis.
We are trying to engineer its scale.
Atmospheric CO₂ → biological fixation → biomass → harvest → carbon fate. Gross biological fixation is not automatically equivalent to durable carbon removal; downstream carbon fate matters.
The Climate Tower
Biological carbon capture,
made vertical.
The Climate Tower is a new architectural typology for high-density biological carbon capture: a controlled vertical habitat where cultivation, circulation, access, harvesting and measurement become one integrated system.
The Climate Tower is not a monument.
It is a unit of replication.
One footprint becomes one installation. One installation can become a network.
Architecture multiplies area.
Biology multiplies biomass.
An idea this ambitious deserves
a simple question.
Does it actually work?
We started small.
A physical cultivation prototype let us observe the organism, the water surface, the growth cycle and the operating realities that a larger system would have to manage.
We built the biology before the architecture.
The idea did not begin as a tower. It became one by answering a sequence of physical questions.
Could Azolla be cultivated predictably?
Tray experiments · establish living behaviour.
Could productive surface be stacked?
Early vertical racks · turn area into height.
Could four working levels become one operating system?
Bamboo prototype · circulation, shade and access become engineering.
Could five levels become repeatable infrastructure?
TERI prototype · steel, pools, access, circulation and control.
A prototype can show that a system exists.
Engineering asks the next question: can geometry, access, density and productive surface be resolved into a structure that can actually be repeated?
Existence is only the beginning.
Then the system has to survive climate.
Seasonal temperature and environmental data define when, where and how a biological capture system can operate — before deployment is treated as a scaling exercise.
Optimisation begins with the world outside the prototype.
And every level still has to receive light.
Solar-path analysis tests orientation, spacing and shading so that vertical area remains biologically productive rather than merely architecturally impressive.
That requires measurement.
Hope has to survive
measurement.
Optimism birthed the idea.
Engineered pragmatism must carry it forward.
From growing conditions to fresh harvest and carbon accounting: a protocol designed to make each claim traceable to its supporting record.
An inspectable chain of evidence.
WO2024241342 A1
A SYSTEM FOR ENABLING ARTIFICIAL CULTIVATION OF AZOLLA AND A METHOD THEREOF
Priority claimed · 19 May 2023
PCT/IN2024/050585
Technical disclosure.
Not certification of carbon performance.
Engineering studies shown separately from the patent record. Publication does not imply patent grant, independent MRV validation or WIPO endorsement.
Trust should be
engineered, too.
Every carbon claim should lead back to one.
Halos illustrate drawdown; they are not atmospheric dispersion predictions.
Reporting behind the introduction / methodology note
- Rainforest credit claims challenged by investigation — The Guardian / 18 January 2023 ↗
- Popular offset projects face questions over climate benefits — The Guardian / 19 September 2023 ↗
- Regulator brings carbon-credit fraud charges — CFTC / 2 October 2024 ↗
- Carbon-market value falls amid a crisis of confidence — The Guardian / 31 May 2024 ↗
Headlines are paraphrases, not quotations. Reporting includes investigations, market analysis and regulatory action; these are not interchangeable findings of fraud. The CFTC item describes charges as announced on the date shown.
Illustrative model supplied by the project: logged captured CO₂ = fresh biomass harvest × 0.1; cumulative capture = the running sum of logged capture. The conversion is a project assumption, not an independent validation. The two logged-quantity traces use matching normalised profiles with a fixed visual offset. Capture accounting does not itself establish durable net removal.
Rainforest credit claims challenged by investigation
REPORTING PARAPHRASE
Popular offset projects face questions over climate benefits
REPORTING PARAPHRASE
Regulator brings carbon-credit fraud charges
REPORTING PARAPHRASE
Carbon-market value falls amid a crisis of confidence
REPORTING PARAPHRASE
A market for carbon.
A deficit of trust.
carbon capture
A gigatonne is not
a laboratory
problem.
It is the challenge of repeating what works.
And here, the capture medium is alive.
Each established installation can grow starter biomass for the next. The capacity to begin again travels with the harvest.
The next tower begins
inside the last.
Starter biomass moves outward. New installations establish themselves.
Then they, too, become sources for the next generation.
Biology supplies the starter culture. Infrastructure, resources, operations and verified carbon outcomes determine the pace of deployment.
One tower is
infrastructure.
Many become
a system.
Distributed across places.
Connected by evidence.
Working towards a shared atmospheric purpose.
A living network. A capability worth passing on.
Earth remembers extinction.
Late Ordovician
Ice advances. Habitats retreat. Ocean systems unravel.
Continental-scale glaciation drew sea levels down and disrupted shallow marine habitats. Marine life faced a profound ecological crisis.
Repeated crises affected marine ecosystems. Widespread low-oxygen conditions and nutrient-driven blooms are among the processes investigated.
Siberian volcanism released greenhouse gases over an extended interval, reshaping climate and ocean chemistry during Earth’s most severe extinction.
Rifting of Pangaea coincided with vast volcanic activity in the region that became the Atlantic. Rapid environmental change accompanied the extinction.
A large asteroid struck near present-day Yucatán. The impact set off a global environmental shock and ended the age of non-avian dinosaurs.
≈1.3°C long-term warming
WMO estimate assessed in 2024, relative to 1850–1900. Not an annual temperature anomaly.
More loss.
Less room to return.
Escalating pressure on a living planet. An extinction risk we cannot afford to normalise.
A future we
choose to protect.
Emissions cuts. Ecosystem recovery. Accountable carbon removal.
Earth remembers extinction.
Late Ordovician
~444 million years ago · Ice advances. Habitats retreat. Ocean systems unravel.
Late Devonian
~372–359 million years ago · Oxygen-poor seas. Ecological disruption across successive crises.
Permian–Triassic
~252 million years ago · Vast volcanic provinces. Carbon shocks. The Great Dying.
Triassic–Jurassic
~201 million years ago · Continental rifting and immense eruptions transform a connected world.
Cretaceous–Palaeogene
~66 million years ago · An impact. A global shock. Darkness after the fire.
Now: the branch ahead
Seven of nine planetary boundaries breached — Planetary Health Check 2026. Approximately 1.3°C long-term warming assessed in 2024 — WMO, January 2025.
Business as usual
Escalating ecological pressure and irreversible loss.
A deliberate course correction
Emissions cuts, ecosystem recovery and accountable removal. History need not have the last word.
Maybe this is how the climate clock turns back.
History need not
have the last word.
The past was not a choice. What we build next can be.