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UCLA team launches ocean carbon capture project at Port of Los Angeles

April 13, 2023

Prof. Dante Simonetti stood on a 100-foot barge Wednesday morning, tethered close to shore just outside one of AltaSea’s massive warehouses at the Port of Los Angeles.

In one hand, Simonetti, who helps head up UCLA’s Institute for Carbon Management, held a copper block called an electrochemical reactor. When a jolt of electricity is applied to the device and ocean water passes through it, he explained, a chemical reaction turns any dissolved minerals from that seawater into powder-fine solids.

In Simonetti’s other hand, he held a small plastic container filled with powder-like bits of limestone and brucite created through this process.

The point of it all was locked inside that powder, where carbon dioxide that had once been absorbed and dissolved into the sea gets trapped, sequestered from our acidifying oceans and ever-warming atmosphere for more than 10,000 years.

Even better: Once there is less carbon dissolved within the ocean, physics tells us the ocean will naturally pull more carbon from the air. And if the ocean starts absorbing more of the carbon that humans can’t seem to stop churning out, that could potentially help us all avoid learning firsthand what more extreme climate change will do to our planet.

With that goal in mind, Simonetti and his team spent two years scaling up that handheld ocean carbon capture system, making it about one million times larger. On Wednesday, they showed off that first-of-its-kind system, with multiple large electrochemical reactors, water tanks and other equipment rigged up on a barge that in a previous life hauled cargo to remote villages in Alaska and the Arctic Circle.

An ocean carbon capture system sits on a barge Wednesday, April 12, 2023 at the Port of Los Angeles. The technology, which is being developed by a research team from UCLA, is used to remove carbon from the ocean so it can draw more carbon down from the air. (Photo by contributing photographer Chuck Bennett)

Gaurav Sant, director of UCLA’s Institute for Carbon Management, shows off his team’s ocean carbon capture technology Wednesday, April 12, 2023 at the Port of Los Angeles. The technology is used to remove carbon from the ocean so it can draw more carbon down from the air. Associate Professor, (Photo by contributing photographer Chuck Bennett)

Dante Simonetti of UCLA shows off his research team’s ocean carbon capture technology Wednesday, April 12, 2023 at the Port of Los Angeles. The technology is used to remove carbon from the ocean so it can draw more carbon down from the air. (Photo by contributing photographer Chuck Bennett)

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Gaurav Sant, director of UCLA’s Institute for Carbon Management, said in about a week his team plans to launch a similar demonstration system in Singapore. Each shore-side pilot, which they’ve dubbed Project SeaChange, will be capable of drawing more than 40 tons of carbon from the air each year, removing up to 4.6 kilograms of carbon dioxide from each cubic meter of seawater processed.

As these demonstration projects come online, UCLA joins a small but growing group of startups working to address the climate crisis by using technology to remove carbon from the ocean so it will pull more carbon out of the air.

Last year, Pasadena-based Captura, which grew out of research at nearby CalTech, beat UCLA to the punch by launching a pilot ocean carbon capture system off the coast of Newport Beach, though it was a much smaller system, capable of drawing down just 1 ton of carbon each year. By June, Captura says it will launch a pilot that can scrub 100 tons of carbon a year, with plans in the works for a third system that should hit 1,000 tons.

Fenfang Wu, lead pilot engineer and lab manager of Captura, shows off the membrane contractor portion of a system that aims to remove 100 tons of carbon from the ocean each year. The pilot project is under construction at Captura’s laboratory in Pasadena, CA, on Wednesday, February 15, 2023. (Photo by Jeff Gritchen, Orange County Register/SCNG)

Demand for such projects — if they prove feasible and cost effective — is nearly a lock. With global goals to keep warming below 2 degrees Celsius, most industries on the planet are facing intense pressure to reduce their carbon emissions. One of the most attractive ways for them to do that is to buy carbon offsets, where they can continue operating but pay to run programs that help reduce atmospheric carbon.

To date, most proposals to remove carbon from the atmosphere have focused on trying to scrub the greenhouse gas directly from the air. But that form of carbon capture is so far proving to be a pricey and underperforming endeavor. So the teams at UCLA and Captura are banking on selling carbon offset credits as they look to roll out industrial-scale ocean capture plants commercially in the next few years.

The UCLA team’s technology offers another potential benefit. Its process, which differs in a few elemental ways from Captura’s, also produces hydrogen as electrolysis breaks seawater down into its element parts. Hydrogen is another hot commodity in the modern green economy, with startups and major corporations working on ways to use hydrogen to power everything from airplanes to trucks to cement production. So in addition to selling carbon credits, the UCLA team’s spinoff business, Equatic, hopes to also sell hydrogen.

That hydrogen could be used to power the company’s carbon capture plants, too. The pilot project at AltaSea requires two megawatt hours of electricity for each ton of carbon dioxide removed from the sea, Sant said. The system is plugged into the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power’s Green Power program, where its electricity is supplied from renewable sources. But as systems come online in other places, Sant said they could use hydrogen generated by the plant to supply some of the power needed to operate the system. He said some electricity would still be needed, though, so they’re looking to prioritize using renewable energy whenever possible, with the potential of someday using offshore wind turbines or solar systems as power sources.

If Equatic’s systems run entirely on renewable energy, that will not only make them better for the planet, but also make both the carbon credits it offers and the hydrogen it supplies even more valuable.

One other potential revenue point for UCLA’s team is the carbon-containing solids created during the process. Simonetti said that material could be used to replenish sand on beaches, or made into building materials such as cement. But much of it, he said, would likely be released back into the ocean due to the volume that will be created.

Still, the team insists its system will have “minimal to no effect” on the surrounding ecosystem, since they’re not putting anything in the sea that wasn’t already there.

“We design vessels that can rebalance our seawater to ensure that we have the same ion composition, pH, salinity, dissolved solids and other fundamental properties of seawater before we discharge,” Simonetti said.

They also have fine-mesh filters over their pumps, to keep aquatic life from being pulled into the system.

Regulators and private investors are demonstrating with their wallets that they’re optimistic about the potential of UCLA’s system. The company’s financing includes a $1 million grant from the Department of Energy, $1.5 million from Volkswagen’s settlement over an emissions cheating scandal, and a $21 million pledge from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.

The Department of Energy has set financial targets — $100 a ton for carbon removal and $1 per kilo for hydrogen — to make them commercially viable. Sant didn’t share how those prices pencil out now, noting that pilot projects are always expensive. But he said he’s confident they’ll hit those targets quickly as they scale up.

While the pilot projects in L.A. and Singapore are set to run for six to nine months, Sant said his team already is designing industrial-scale plants capable of drawing down millions of tons of carbon dioxide from the air each year.

The United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has estimated that we’ll need to remove 10 to 20 billion tons of carbon from the atmosphere each year, starting in 2050, to avoid hitting 2 degrees Celsius of warming. Thousands of large ocean carbon capture plants, at a cost of trillions of dollars, would be needed to hit that target.

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Of course, retrieving carbon from the ocean isn’t the only solution on the table, with billions in federal dollars being invested into proving various carbon removal systems. But Sant said the biggest limitation ahead isn’t just nailing the technology, but building them out at the scale and speed the climate crisis demands.

“That really is the fundamental metric that you’ve got to keep in mind,” he said. “It’s also probably the hardest one, because this is a scale of growth that is unprecedented.”

Orange County Register

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UCLA team launches ocean carbon capture project at Port of Los Angeles

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