There’s a company in the middle of the Pacific Ocean that’s created a one-of-a-kind system that’s taking advantage of infrastructure that’s already in existence, and using it to suck out carbon from the ocean.
Taking carbon out of the ocean not only is simple, but it has a major advantage since it holds more carbon in a smaller space than it does in the air. Moreover, there is already tons of machinery that pulls water out of the ocean already, such as desalination plants. So all it needs to work is to simply connect their device, which is held in a shipping container, to these already existing systems.
In this particular case, the company Heimdal – which is based in Hawaii – is making use of the existing desalination plants that sit on the Big Island of this 50th state.
When seawater gets pumped up into the Heimdal V1, it separates the hydrogen and oxygen from the carbon-based acids that happen to be warming the seas using electrolysis.
Then, the purified seawater is returned to the ocean without the carbon, while the separated acids are sold as hydrochloric acid, which is a commonly used manufacturing and laboratory compound produced by a number of factories to fulfill the world market’s need of around 20-million tons yearly.
Co-CEO of Heimdal, Erik Millar, spoke to Fast Company, sharing, “When the excess acidity is removed from the ocean, it shifts how CO2 exists back to how it was pre-Industrial Revolution.”
He added, “This moves it away from being carbonic acid, which causes ocean acidification, and toward bicarbonate and carbonate. These are stable forms of mineralized carbon dioxide that make their way down to the ocean floor, where they are stored for more than 100,000 years.”
Hoping to Break the Cycle
In order to better understand how carbon in the oceans affects global temperatures is by understanding their place in the global carbon cycle. Climate systems are continuously transferring carbon molecules in and out of the soil, they explain, as well as all around in the atmosphere and down into the sea.
As a result, the world’s oceans have now taken at least a third of all the CO2 that’s pumped into the atmosphere, which has made the oceans both warmer and more acidic. Carbon within the oceans will eventually find its way back into the atmosphere, which is why removing it while it’s still contained in the water (at a denser solution) also means that humans can pull out more of it, and at a quicker rate at that.
Each Heimdal that’s deployed in a shipping container has the ability to pull 1,000 tons of carbon out of the ocean annually, and at just a fraction of the cost that air-capture methods use. Currently, the Heimdal prototype can pulls carbon out of the sea at a cost of $475 per ton, yet the hope is that future plants will be able to pull 5,000 tons per year at less than $200 per ton.
If the industry around the world continues to buy carbon offsets the same way that they have in the past years, Heimdal anticipates that they may just get five million annually, in just five years’ time as well. At least that’s the hope.
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