The company has a unique approach: a proprietary electrochemical system – running on clean electricity – first converts seawater into hydrogen gas, oxygen gas, an acid stream, and an alkaline slurry. The slurry absorbs CO2 when exposed to air. The captured CO2 is discharged back into the ocean as stable mineral compounds meant to lock it up for 10,000 years or more.
The BBC reports that a major new plant in Singapore, said to be the world’s largest ocean carbon removal facility, is currently under construction. It will have over 100 times the capacity of the prototypes, capturing an expected 4,000 tons of CO2 and churning out around 100 tons of hydrogen annually.
Then there’s a much bigger commercial plant planned for Quebec, Canada, which could start operating as soon as 2026. This will boast a capacity to remove over 100,000 tons of CO2 and generate 3,600 tons of hydrogen each year.
The controversial machine sending CO2 to the ocean and making hydrogen - BBC
However, not everyone thinks ocean-based carbon removal is such a good idea. “Marine CO2 removal is simply too risky,” says Mary Church, geoengineering campaign manager at the Center for International Environmental Law (Ciel), a non-profit environmental law firm based in Geneva, Switzerland. “It could alter ocean chemistry, causing changes in nutrient levels and species abundance, with significant consequences for ecosystems.” Others are concerned about the feasibility of marine carbon removal, and whether it could really put a significant dent in emissions.
Ocean-based carbon removal would similarly attempt to store additional carbon in the ocean, but it has not yet been widely used or thoroughly tested. It is on the rise, however, with tens of millions of dollars pouring into the sector, including from some of the biggest names in tech, such as Microsoft and Shopify, as well as several airlines.
James Kerry, a marine and climate scientist at OceanCare, a marine conservation non-profit based in Switzerland, and James Cook University in Australia, says large-scale marine CO2 removal could harm the important role oceans play in climate, food security and oxygen production. Marine CO2 removal technologies pose “significant threats to human rights and the environment, especially at scale”, he says.
“At a scale to meaningfully impact the climate, marine CO2 removal would be inherently unpredictable and pose significant, new and unprecedented risks to the fragile ecosystems that sustain life on Earth,” says Church. “It does nothing to address the root causes of the climate crisis. Instead, it creates the illusion of a quick ‘fix’, delaying real solutions to the climate crisis and prolonging reliance on fossil fuels.”
“Critically, CO2 removal is not a substitute for emissions reductions,” he added, pointing to scientific findings that both reduction emissions and CO2 removal will be needed. “If we’re going to have a shot at keeping warming in check, we need carbon removal solutions that can meet the urgency of the climate crisis.”
I wish the reasons why geoengineering might not be such a good idea weren’t so spread out throughout the article
Seems like a rather as ingenious way to reduce atmospheric CO2 as long as the mineral CO2 deposited in the ocean is actually inert.
I think it is becoming pretty clear that we won’t be able to achieve CO2 reduction goals, so additional approaches to reduce actual CO2 are very much needed.
Edward Sanders, the CEO of Equatic, argues scalability is key. He told the BBC that the company’s approach could theoretically remove up to 20% of current global CO2 emissions if around 1,200 large facilities were deployed by the mid-2040s.
1,200 large facilities to account for 20% of current CO2 emissions seems in the realm of viability.
