Spinoff

From the LA Business Journal: ...Equatic is a spinoff company of UCLA’s Institute for Carbon Management (ICM). It was created to activate the size and scale of the oceans to effect affordable and globally accessible carbon management solutions. The oceans are the world’s largest carbon removal machine. Year after year, they remove about 30% of the carbon dioxide emitted by human activities into the atmosphere.

At ICM, [Equatic] has been driven by two strategic considerations. First, the traditional paradigm of sequestering carbon dioxide in geological reservoirs using Carbon Capture and Storage, or CCS, will not mature quickly enough, or sufficiently, to affect the trajectory of climate change. Second, we must focus on catalyzing affordable climate change mitigation because existing carbon management solutions remain far too expensive for widespread adoption. To address these two concerns, Equatic’s technology platform was designed to leverage the oceans to both remove and store carbon dioxide while producing green hydrogen, a clean fuel, as a co-product...

Equatic, a Santa Monica-based carbon removal startup, is using the world’s largest and most abundant carbon capture technology: the ocean.

Equatic, the brainchild of Gaurav Sant and Erika La Plante, was born out of the Institute for Carbon Management at the University of California, Los Angeles. The company raised $11.6 million in series A funding in August – led by Catalytic Capital for Climate and Health, a division of Singapore-based Temasek Trust, and climate-focused private investment firm Kibo Invest. At its core, Equatic is creating a 100-kiloton commercial-grade carbon dioxide removal facility. The goal is to capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and use it to produce carbon-negative green hydrogen in one process. 

The platform feeds seawater into its facility and, using renewable energy, dissects that seawater into hydrogen, oxygen, base and acid components. The acid is neutralized and returned to the ocean, while the base helps remove carbon dioxide from the air. Equatic’s platform is designed to solve two problems. One is sourcing and collecting valuable green energy, which is meant to help the world wean off fossil fuels; and the other is neutralizing existing carbon emissions from the atmosphere...

Full story at https://labusinessjournal.com/special-reports/whos-who-in-tech-equatic-is-sinking-in-the-ocean/.