Google has signed a prepurchase agreement with ocean alkalinity enhancement (OAE) company Ebb Carbon for the removal of 3,500 tons of atmospheric CO2.
This offtake deal builds on a long history between the tech giant and Ebb Carbon, whose co-founders include Ben Tarbell and Matt Eisaman, two former Alphabet employees in charge of climate and carbon removal initiatives.
For Ebb Carbon, this deal with Google comes a month after the company announced a partnership with the Saudi Water Authority (SWA), which will deploy Ebb’s OAE technology across its Saudi Arabia desalination facilities, unlocking an annual carbon dioxide removal (CDR) capacity of up to 85 million tonnes.
The company’s OAE approach happens in the outflow of discharge coming from desalination plants, where Ebb’s electrochemical system converts the brine into an alkaline solution that gets released into the ocean, where it will absorb CO2 emissions from the atmosphere.
Besides tackling excess CO2, this approach also increases the freshwater yield for desalination plants and generates valuable chemical co-products that can be applied in the desalination process or sold for use in other industries.
Ebb’s growth strategy is focused on integrating OAE systems into existing desalination infrastructure, which processes hundreds of millions of tonnes of seawater each day.
According to the company, the currently available global desalination infrastructure can enable billions of tonnes of annual CDR capacity.
Additionally, Ebb has been collaborating with Alphabet subsidiary X, the Moonshot Factory, exploring the use of the acid byproduct generated via Ebb’s OAE approach for the recycling of concrete waste.
Relevant: Ebb Carbon & Saudi Water Authority Launch Pioneering Desalination Decarbonization Partnership
This novel acid byproduct application is said to have the potential to deliver approximately 100 million tonnes of CDR annually through ocean alkalinity enhancement, while also advancing the circular economy in construction materials.
Antonio Papania-Davis, Project Lead at X The Moonshot Factory, stated, “Combining Ebb’s electrochemical approach to ocean alkalinity enhancement with X’s acid utilization technology has the rare potential for cost-negative carbon sequestration. It’s rare for waste streams to become revenue streams, and we hope our research provides the industry with a blueprint for harvesting this untapped value.”
Google Climate & Science Fellow John Platt commented, “The possibility of highly affordable carbon dioxide removal is extremely exciting. The combination of ideas from Ebb and X is the kind of creative thinking that we need to solve the climate crisis.”
Read more: Ebb Carbon’s Project Macoma Is Now Live In Washington State
