Equatic's ocean tech makes waves: Boeing invests heavily in carbon removal
We speak to Equatic COO Edward Sanders to explore the company's approach and its potential impact on the aviation industry and beyond.
Equatic, a startup from UCLA's Institute for Carbon Management, is making waves in the battle against climate change with its ocean-based carbon capture technology.
Equatic claims its solution can remove gigatons of CO2 from the atmosphere while simultaneously begetting clean hydrogen at a more affordable cost than other methods.
The implications for the aviation industry are significant, as airlines and aircraft manufacturers have struggled to secure reliable and cost-effective carbon credits and hydrogen, which is a vital component in e-fuels and a potential alternative fuel source for aircraft.
Aerospace giant Boeing has already taken notice, entering into a pre-purchase option agreement with the startup, signalling strong interest in the technology's feasibility and scalability.
We spoke to Equatic COO Edward Sanders to explore Equatic's approach and its potential impact on the aviation industry and beyond.
How Equatic's ocean-based carbon removal works
Equatic's technology utilises seawater, air, rock, and renewable electricity to capture and store CO2 while producing carbon-negative hydrogen.
The process involves passing an electrical current through seawater (electrolysis) and then passing atmospheric air through the processed seawater (direct air capture).
This traps CO2 in solid minerals, which have been described as 'seashell-like material', and dissolved substances naturally present in the oceans, guaranteeing secure storage for over 100,000 years.
Some media coverage about Equatic has included comments from sceptics raising a note of caution. For example, John Fleming, senior scientist at the Centre for Biological Diversity, told The Verge, “Equatic is attempting to exert control over very complex ocean chemistry."
For its part, Equatic says that its technology does not affect ocean acidification, which has been a byproduct of climate change, and that the seawater discharged back into the ocean is chemically comparable to what was taken in at the start of the process.
The potential CO2 removal impact of Equatic
According to Sanders, Equatic's approach has advantages over many others. There's no need for CO2 stripping, transportation, and geological storage. The company can also construct coastal facilities without requiring the rock structure for injecting CO2.
While oceans are already the world's largest CO2 reservoirs, Sanders highlighted the speed and measurability of the process.
"A commercial plant will take out one tonne of CO2 every five minutes. An equivalent ocean area would take 12 months to remove the same one tonne, and you wouldn't be able to measure it."
When asked about the potential CO2 removal impact of Equatic, Sanders said that it's entirely feasible for Equatic to remove a gigaton.
"We would need plants on coastlines around various parts of the world in the order of five to seven hundred to remove a gigaton of CO2. To put that into perspective, there are already 20,000 desalination plants worldwide. So a fraction of Equatic plants could do this."
(According to Our World in Data, 37 billion tonnes of CO2 were released into the atmosphere in 2022, so removing one gigaton of CO2 would make a tangible contribution to combating climate change.)
Boeing’s involvement
The company's approach has garnered the attention of aerospace giant Boeing, which recently entered into a pre-purchase option agreement with Equatic.
Under the agreement, Equatic will remove 62,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide and deliver 2,100 metric tons of carbon-negative hydrogen to Boeing over a 5-plus-year period starting in the mid-2020s. This aligns with Boeing's "SAF And" strategy for industry decarbonisation, which includes hydrogen as a crucial component of e-fuels.
The scale is significant. When the deal was announced, Forbes reported that the agreement was substantially larger than other corporate carbon capture agreements, such as the 25,000-tonne carbon elimination contract Climeworks signed with JP Morgan.
Looking more broadly at how the aviation industry could be involved with Equatic, Sanders opened up the possibility of "co-locating" Equatic plants near aviation facilities.
"If an airline or airport wants to make hydrogen on-site, I see this as ideal, so there is the opportunity for co-locating some of the facilities closer to the place where it (the hydrogen) actually gets used."
The cost advantage
Earlier in his career, Sanders worked with Australian LCC Jetstar. He understands the aviation industry and recognises the importance of reducing prices, having worked with a low-cost airline.
"You need to drop the price to stimulate volume," he said, adding that the magic number of $100 cost per tonne of CO2 often used in the carbon removal space is realistic (media reports talk about Equatic aiming to reach this in 2028), though the ultimate aim should be $10.
In fact, Sanders says that the clean hydrogen generated by Equatic's technology could be sold at a price lower than current alternatives, offsetting operational costs.
"If we're selling CO2 removal credits at $60 per ton, the cost to produce hydrogen is below $1, less than $1 per kilogram," Sanders said. "So we're actually lower than grey hydrogen, blue hydrogen, or any colour on the rainbow of hydrogens because there are two products from this process – you can price one against the other."
Scaling up the technology
Equatic has pilot plants operating in Los Angeles and Singapore, with plans to open Equatic-1, the world's largest ocean-based carbon removal plant, in Singapore, breaking ground this year.
Sanders says that the plant will initially have a CO2 removal potential similar to that of the Climeworks Orca facility in Iceland (around 4000 metric tonnes of CO2), which, until Climeworks opens its Mammoth plant this year, is the world's largest direct air capture (DAC) plant.
When asked why Equatic chose Singapore, Sanders said, "Singapore hasn't got the geological sequestration sites", which makes it unsuitable for many DAC technologies.
Yet, at the same time, "it's a nation-state, on an island. And so it takes as seriously, if not more seriously, its obligations around net zero and needs to look for solutions.
"We are one of those solutions, and we use the resources Singapore has today - ocean, air, and an engineering sophistication….that fits really neatly with the Equatic approach."
In the future, there are plans for a 100,000-tonne plant. After that, Sanders said Equatic could scale anywhere with coastal access, with areas such as Canada and North Africa being mentioned.
The Equatic-1 plant is already funded, with the company having raised over $45 million in non-dilutive funding and support from various sources, including the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the Anthony and Jeanne Pritzker Family Foundation, the Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the Environment, and government agencies in the US and Singapore.
Our take
Equatic is already far ahead of most other climate tech startups, having secured significant funding as well as backing from Boeing and with its Singapore plant on the horizon.
Significantly, it does two crucial things that we need to reach net zero – it removes carbon from the atmosphere and has a by-product, green hydrogen, necessary for transitioning away from fossil fuels.
From an aviation perspective, the idea of co-locating Equatic plants at airports on the coast (there are many, from Hong Kong to San Francisco International) is interesting.
As a result, the potential is certainly there and Time Magazine has already nominated Equatic's ocean-based carbon removal processes as one of the best inventions of 2023.