The Equatic Process – how we catalyze and power the decarbonized economy
The Process
The ocean naturally removes carbon from the atmosphere and stores it permanently. Equatic accelerates this natural process, accurately measuring carbon removed, with best-in-class energy efficiency.
Accelerated Removal Equatic’s commercial plant can drawdown carbon dioxide 99,000 times faster than the open ocean. We start this removal process by pumping in seawater and using renewable electricity to split the seawater into four streams (hydrogen, oxygen, acid, base).
Accurate Measurement Equatic’s plants are located on-shore and not the open ocean. This means we can accurately measure the carbon dioxide removed before the seawater is discharged. Buyers get certainty about the total carbon permanently removed from the atmosphere.
Energy Efficient Passing an electrical current through seawater has another unique benefit: producing carbon-negative hydrogen. Equatic can replace 40% of the energy used for carbon dioxide removal with the hydrogen it produces. Alternatively, Equatic can sell the carbon-negative hydrogen to others to decarbonize hard-to-abate industries like aviation and steel production.
Seawater is pumped into the Equatic plant
Equatic's proprietary electrolyzer separates the seawater into an acid stream (liquid), a base stream (liquid), hydrogen (gas) and oxygen (gas)
Acid stream is neutralized with crushed rock to avoid ocean acidification
Base stream is contacted with the atmosphere to remove carbon dioxide from the air
Solid carbonates are seperated
Seawater is discharged with residual dissolved and solid inorganic carbon
Why we use the ocean
The ocean is the world’s largest, most powerful carbon sink. Over millennia, it has drawn down and permanently stored more than 40,000,000,000,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide. To put that number in perspective, annual anthropogenic carbon emissions are 1/1,000th of the amount of carbon in the ocean.
The ocean has always regulated the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. However, human activity has caused atmospheric carbon to increase by [~35%] in just 100 years. This is too rapid an increase for the oceans to manage. The resulting excess carbon trapped in the atmosphere has caused rising global temperatures and the evolving climate crisis.
Truly scalable climate solutions must work with nature. The power of the ocean is in its chemistry. This chemistry endows the ocean with an unrivaled capacity to drawdown and permanently store anthropogenic carbon. Equatic uses this capacity and mimics the existing carbon cycle via a controlled process where we can accelerate and measure carbon removal.
There are many ways to remove carbon permanently. We believe that the best approaches, and most scalable solutions, replicate what the planet does already.
Measurement Reporting and Verification
The carbon removal market is growing. The highest-value credits are those that are readily measured, provide long-term storage, and whose cost-effective processes ensure accessibility.
Equatic’s CDR process is contained within the processing plant. This means we accurately monitor and verify the amount of carbon removed – down to the gram. Equatic works with third parties to measure and monitor outputs to avoid any impact to the environment.
Equatic is one of the only CDR companies with an ISO 14064-2:2019 standard in place. ISO 14064-2 provides a framework for quantifying, monitoring, reporting, and validating or verifying greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and removals. It specifies principles and requirements and provides guidance for project-level quantification, monitoring, and reporting of activities intended to cause GHG emission reductions or removals. It includes requirements for planning a project, identifying and selecting GHG sources, sinks, and reservoirs (SSRs) relevant to the project and the baseline scenario, monitoring, quantifying, documenting, and reporting GHG project performance, and managing data quality.
We calculate, unambiguously, the net extent of CDR effected by the Equatic process as follows:
Carbon that is dissolved in the seawater entering the plant is measured
Carbon mineralized after electrolysis is measured
Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere entering the air contactor is measured
Carbonate and bicarbonate is measured before discharge from the plant
Equatic monitors to verify that no secondary precipitation occurs after discharge
