Ocean carbon removal startup Equatic has just announced the launch of its revolutionary low-cost, gigaton-scale climate solution.
Spun out recently from the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering’s Institute for Carbon Management, the company has already inked a major carbon dioxide removal (CDR) agreement with The Boeing Company.
The aerospace giant agreed to purchase 62,000 metric tons of carbon removal along with 2,100 metric tons of carbon-negative hydrogen from Equatic.
At the core of Equatic’s unique solution is a single process, which speeds up the ocean’s natural ability to sequester carbon dioxide and results in the production of carbon-negative hydrogen.
Lorenzo Corsini, Principal Advisor at Equatic, describes two of the main unprecedented challenges the world is currently facing: phasing away fossil fuels and permanently removing gigatons of CO2 from the atmosphere.
“Equatic’s first-of-its-kind technology solves both. It combines basic principles of chemistry with the natural capabilities of the world’s best carbon removal tool, the ocean, to create the most promising solution for scalable decarbonization — cost-effectively and at a globally-relevant scale,” Corsini said.
Relevant: UCLA Engineers Launch New Ocean Carbon Removal Project
“The aviation industry has an important role to play in global decarbonization efforts. Reaching aviation’s sustainability goals will require a multi-faceted approach and Boeing sees immense value in Equatic’s technology,” said Sheila Remes, Boeing’s Vice President of Environmental Sustainability.
Currently, the LA startup has two pilot plants, one in its hometown of Los Angeles, and one in Singapore.
Equatic expects to remove 100,000 tons of CO2 every year by 2026 and then rapidly increase that amount to millions of tons by 2028, while also bringing down the cost of the process to under $100 per ton of CO2 removed.
At this time, all of the carbon dioxide removed by the company has been pre-sold, including through pre-purchase agreements with Stipe.
Read more: Carbon180 Issues Policy Recommendations On Ocean Carbon Removal
