“Carbon capture has only recently been able to take off because of this huge decrease in the cost of renewable green electricity in the past decade,” Millar says. The new pilot plant in Hawaii is connected to an existing desalination plant, so it also saves on some costs because there was already a system in place that can pump water from the ocean. It also uses less land a plant that could capture as much CO2 as this direct air capture facility would only require as much space as four shipping containers, Millar says. Working with the water also uses much less energy, making it less expensive than traditional direct air capture. There’s a greater concentration of CO2 in the water than in the air, so it can capture more in less volume. But Heimdal sees advantages to working with the ocean instead. That’s the approach taken by the first commercial direct air capture plant in the world. Some other companies in the “direct air capture” industry are using large fans to pull air through machines that chemically capture CO2 from the atmosphere. But the company’s main focus is to find a more affordable way to capture huge volumes of CO2. The startup’s new process can help locally improve the pH of seawater. The acidity in the Pacific Ocean, for example, has already started dissolving the shells of young crabs. As the CO2 dissolves, it acidifies the water, making it harder for marine life like corals and shellfish to form and survive. The ocean has absorbed a third of the excess CO2 humans have put in the atmosphere-billions of tons per year (the ocean has also absorbed 90% of the excess heat on the planet). 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.” “This moves it away from being carbonic acid, which causes ocean acidification, and toward bicarbonate and carbonate. “When the excess acidity is removed from the ocean, it shifts how CO2 exists back to how it was pre-Industrial Revolution,” says Erik Millar, coCEO of Heimdal, who began developing the technology with his cofounder Marcus Lima while both were students at Oxford University. The de-acidified seawater can be returned to the ocean, where it will naturally capture CO2.
The process also produces hydrogen and oxygen. It can then sell the acid it removes, which ends up in the form of hydrochloric acid. The startup, called Heimdal, pumps saltwater into a machine that uses electricity to rearrange molecules in the water, removing acid.