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How Equatic solved seawater’s toxic gas problem and delivered a two-for-one solution: removing carbon while producing green hydrogen
Since at least the 1970s, electrochemists have cast their gazes upon the world’s vast, briny seas and wondered how they could harness the endless supply of hydrogen locked within. Though it was technically possible to grab the hydrogen by running an electrical current through the water, the reaction turned the salt in the water into the toxic and corrosive gas chlorine, which made commercializing such a process challenging.
But last year, a startup called Equatic made a breakthrough that not only solves the chlorine problem, but has the potential to deliver a two-for-one solution: commercial hydrogen production and carbon removal. With funding from the Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, or ARPA-E, the company moved swiftly to scale its innovation, called an “oxygen-selective anode,” from the lab to the factory. On Thursday, it announced it had started manufacturing the anodes at a facility in San Diego.
“I want to emphasize how fast this has moved,” Doug Wicks, a program director at ARPA-E, told me. “They made some pretty large claims about what they could do, so we took it as a high risk project, and really within the first year, they were able to clearly demonstrate that they could make great progress.”
In 2021, Equatic’s co-founders Xin Chen and Gaurav Sant, who are researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, applied for an ARPA-E grant to work on their idea for a hybrid system that would use seawater electrolysis — sending an electrical current through seawater — to sequester carbon dioxide from the air in the ocean while also producing hydrogen.
Setting aside the chlorine issue for a moment, the process of getting hydrogen out of water is pretty established science. The carbon removal part was new. To achieve it, they would exploit another aspect of the electrolytic reaction: It could separate the seawater into two streams — one very acidic, the other very alkaline and able to easily absorb CO2. If they exposed the alkaline stream to air, it would suck up CO2 like a sponge and convert it into a more stable molecule that couldn’t easily return to the atmosphere. Then they could feed the water back into the sea, enhancing the ocean’s natural carbon pump.
This approach to carbon removal has two big things going for it. First, by driving this reaction through a closed system on land, Equatic can measure the carbon sequestered much more precisely than related methods that are deployed in the open ocean. “You can count what comes in, you can count what goes out, you just have greater control,” David Koweek, the chief scientist at Ocean Visions, a nonprofit that advocates for ocean-based climate solutions, told me. But with that control comes a trade-off, Koweek said. It requires more infrastructure, energy, and operational complexity than something like adding antacids directly to the water. That’s where Equatic’s second advantage could help. Its process produces clean hydrogen, a valuable commodity, which can help defray the cost of the carbon removal.
“We're not just a one way street, only energy in — you actually get some energy out,” Edward Sanders, the company’s chief operating officer, told me. He provided some numbers: For every 2.5 megawatt-hours of electricity Equatic’s system consumes, it can remove 1 metric ton of carbon from the air and produce 1 megawatt-hour worth of energy in the form of hydrogen. The company can either use the hydrogen to help power its operations or sell it. Therefore, the net energy use is more like 1.5 megawatts, he said, which is lower than what a direct air capture plant, for example, requires. (A direct air capture plant using a solid sorbent needs about 2.6 megawatts per ton of CO2 removed, according to the International Energy Agency.) Energy accounts for about 70% of costs, Sanders said.
Equatic was able to prove its concept out in two small pilot projects deployed in the Los Angeles harbor and in Singapore that each removed about 100 kilograms of carbon from the air, and produced just a few kilograms of hydrogen, per day. But because of the chlorine issue, the two plants were expensive, using bespoke, corrosion-resistant materials. Sanders told me it would cost on the order of millions of dollars to manage the chlorine gas at scale. The company would need to find a more economic solution.
The formation of chlorine in seawater electrolysis is a problem that has stumped scientists for so long that it has split the electrochemists into two camps — those who still believe it’s solvable, and those who think it makes more sense to just purify the water first.
When I asked Chen what the day-to-day work of trying to overcome this looked like, he said it was materials science research. He needed to find the right combination of catalysts to make an anode — a sheet of conductive, positively-charged metal — that, when used in electrolysis, would screen out the salt and not allow it to react. “It’s like Gandalf holding the way to tell chlorine, ‘you shall not pass.’” he said. “That’s essentially how it works. Only water molecules can pass through.”
Chen and Sant were awarded $1 million from ARPA-E for the research in 2022. About a year later, they felt they were on to something. As with most scientific “breakthroughs,” there was no single moment of discovery — Chen was not even the first to do what he did, which was to use manganese oxide. “There’s a lot of literature that indicates it’s doable,” he told me. “There’s pioneering work by other scientists from almost 30 years ago, but they didn’t pursue it far enough because I don’t think the opportunity was right at that time.”
What Chen did was push to find an iteration that was more effective, durable, and affordable. He ultimately landed on a design that produced less than one part per million of chlorine — lower than the amount in drinking water — and performed reliably for more than 20,000 hours of testing. When he showed his progress to Wicks at ARPA-E, the agency was impressed enough to grant the scientists an additional $2 million. That funding helped them get their first production line up and running.
The facility in San Diego will be able to produce 4,000 anodes per year to start, and is expected to operate at full capacity by the end of 2024. It will produce the anodes for Equatic’s first demonstration-scale project, a new plant in Singapore designed to remove 10 metric tons of CO2 and produce 300 kilograms of hydrogen per day — 100 times larger than the pilot version. Equatic also has plans to build an even bigger plant in Quebec that can remove 300 tons per day. That’s about three times the capacity of Climeworks’ Mammoth plant, the world’s largest direct air capture plant operating today.
The manufacturing line will also be able to refurbish the anodes after about three years of use, simply by applying a new layer of catalysts. Wicks of ARPA-E told me this was a “breakthrough coating technique” that will allow the company to really decrease costs.
When I asked Wicks what he sees as the next milestones for Equatic, what will determine whether it will be successful, he said a lot was riding on the scale up in Singapore and Canada. The company has already signed an agreement to deliver 2,100 metric tons of hydrogen to Boeing and remove 62,000 metric tons of CO2 from the air on the aerospace giant’s behalf. The companies have not made the price of the deal public.
One challenge ahead will also be navigating the permitting environment in the different countries. Koweek of Ocean Visions told me that this kind of seawater chemistry modification was “relatively benign,” but he said there were still risks that had to be characterized.
In the meantime, Chen isn’t done trying to optimize his anode in the lab. I asked him how he felt after his initial discovery — were you excited? Did you celebrate?
“Not really,” he replied. “So I’m very excited inside. But I was generally thinking about it, can we push it further?”
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Current conditions: Shanghai, still recovering from the strongest storm to hit the city in 75 years, is bracing for Typhoon Pulasan • Extreme flooding in the north of Italy has forced some 1,000 people to evacuate • It’s looking unlikely that this month will break last year’s record for warmest September ever.
The explosive growth in solar power shows no signs of stopping this year. New analysis from energy think tank Ember forecasts the world is on track to add 593 gigawatts of solar power in 2024, nearly 30% more than last year’s installations and nearly 200 GW more than the International Energy Agency predicted at the start of the year. The report underscores how a handful of countries are responsible for most of the world’s new solar capacity. China leads, followed by the U.S., India, Germany, and Brazil. These five countries are on track to account for 75% of new global installations in 2024. And they are sustaining their growth year after year.
Ember
Here’s the most important takeaway from the Ember report: “This now puts ambitious climate pledges within reach.” It’s very possible – and indeed likely – that the world will triple solar capacity by 2030. In this scenario, solar power would generate a quarter of the world’s electricity. “Countries need to plan ahead to make the most of the high levels of solar capacity being built today and ensure the continued build-out of capacity in the coming years,” the report says.
The Federal Reserve announced yesterday that it would reduce the benchmark federal funds rate by half a percentage point, from just over 5% to just below. What does this mean for renewable energy? Well, it just became a much more enticing investment, wrote Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin. High interest rates have an outsize effect on renewable energy projects, because the cost of building and operating a renewable energy generator like a wind farm is highly concentrated in its construction. Wood Mackenzie estimates that a 2% increase in interest rates pushes up the cost of energy produced by a renewables project by around 20%, compared to just over 10% for conventional power plants. “As rates fall, projects become increasingly financially viable,” said Advait Arun, senior associate of energy finance at the Center for Public Enterprise and Heatmap contributor.
The European Union’s head office has warned that the extreme weather devastating parts of the continent are proof that “climate breakdown” is “fast becoming the norm,” The Associated Pressreported. Parts of Europe are experiencing some of the worst flooding in at least two decades, while Portugal has declared a “state of calamity” as enormous wildfires rage out of control and threaten the homes of more than 200,000 people. “We face a Europe that is simultaneously flooding and burning. These extreme weather events ... are now an almost annual occurrence,” said EU Crisis Management Commissioner Janez Lenarcic. “The global reality of the climate breakdown has moved into the everyday lives of Europeans.” Europe is the fastest warming continent on Earth.
Today the startup Brightband emerged from stealth with $10 million in Series A funding and a unique plan to commercialize generative AI weather modeling. Instead of trying to go up against Weather.com, Brightband is tailoring models to specific industries such as insurance, finance, agriculture, energy, and transportation. The round was led by Prelude Ventures. AI models like Brightband’s are trained on decades worth of past weather data, and when fed a snapshot of current conditions, can predict what will come next, much like ChatGPT does with text. Brightband’s CEO Julian Green told Heatmap’s Katie Brigham that customizing forecasts for particular industries will also be as simple as querying a large language model. A wind farm operator could, for example, “just take an attached file of historical wind energy production, and throw it in there and say, hey, tell me what the wind energy is going to be like next week.” Brightband says it hopes to publish a paper by year’s end with an open-source version of its forecast model, alongside evaluation tools to assess its performance.
Truck drivers seem to really like Tesla’s Semi electric truck. PepsiCo is Tesla’s first customer for the trucks, and has 89 of them deployed across various fleets. Speaking at the IAA Transportation event, PepsiCo’s electrification program manager Dejan Antunović said some veteran drivers are reporting that they never want to go back to driving diesel after having handled the Tesla Semi. “Based on its history of delivering efficient electric vehicles in volume profitably, I think Tesla is the one to make commercial electric trucks happen at scale,” wroteElectrek’s Fred Lambert.
Researchers were pleasantly surprised to discover that 90% of young corals that were bred using in vitro fertilization and deposited in reefs across the Caribbean survived last year’s marine heatwave.
Brightband emerges from stealth to commercialize AI-weather forecasting.
The weather has never been hotter.
The past few years have seen a boom in the weather prediction industry, with AI-based weather models from the likes of Google DeepMind, Huawei, and Nvidia consistently outperforming traditional models. Most of that work has been research-oriented, but today the startup Brightband emerged from stealth with $10 million in Series A funding and a unique plan to commercialize generative AI weather modeling. Instead of trying to go up against Weather.com, Brightband is tailoring models to specific industries such as insurance, finance, agriculture, energy, and transportation. The round was led by Prelude Ventures.
Weather forecasting has traditionally been the domain of the public sector, with the most widely used models coming from the U.S. National Weather Service and the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts. Brightband’s CEO Julian Green told me that private companies haven’t been able to break in “because it has cost so much to have billion dollar supercomputers,” which are required to run today’s so-called “numerical” weather models.
These models rely on complex atmospheric equations based on the laws of physics to predict future weather patterns, and because of their computational intensity, are usually only updated four times daily. It’s possible then that AI-based weather prediction could thus actually reduce energy demand — because while it takes a lot of energy to train an AI model, after that’s done, generating forecasts is simple. “So instead of six hours to have a forecast, it takes under a second. Instead of using a billion dollar supercomputer, you’re using a laptop,” Green told me.
AI models like Brightband’s are trained on decades worth of past weather data, and when fed a snapshot of current conditions, can predict what will come next, much like ChatGPT does with text. “Think about the weather AI prediction problem as predicting the next frame in a radar sequence,” Green told me.
He said that customizing forecasts for particular industries will also be as simple as querying a large language model. A wind farm operator could, for example, “just take an attached file of historical wind energy production, and throw it in there and say, hey, tell me what the wind energy is going to be like next week.” Likewise folks in the aviation industry could have the model tell them if their plane’s wings are likely to ice up, utilities could get detailed insight into expected energy demand and generation, and finance companies could get up-to-the-minute information about weather-sensitive commodities. Previously, companies would’ve had to build their own forecasting teams or hire third-party advisors to get such specific predictions.
Brightband wants to further differentiate itself from the types of models that tech companies have already built by using only raw data inputs to generate its forecasts, from sources such as satellites, weather balloons, and radar systems. Perhaps surprisingly, this is not the way that most models currently work. Because there are data gaps, such as over oceans and in the developing world, the datasets used to train today’s AI weather models, Green explained, “smear the available data over a three-dimensional grid of the globe,” diluting the accuracy of both the real-time weather and presumably the resulting forecasts.
It’s hard to say how much more accurate using only raw data inputs will be, because “that’s what nobody has done yet,” Green told me. Data gaps are still an issue of course, but Green told me that Brightband’s approach will also allow the company to better analyze when and where filling these gaps would add the most value.
Brightband says it hopes to publish a paper by year’s end with an open-source version of its forecast model, alongside evaluation tools to assess its performance.
Renewable energy just became a much more enticing investment.
That’s thanks to the Federal Reserve, which announced today that it would reduce the benchmark federal funds rate by half a percentage point, from just over 5% to just below. It’s the beginning of an unwinding of years of high interest rates that have weighed on the global economy and especially renewable energy.
The Federal Reserve’s economic projections also indicated that the federal funds rate could fall another half point by the end of the year and a full point in 2025. The Federal Reserve began hiking interest rates from their near-zero levels in March 2022 in response to high inflation.
High interest rates, which drive up the cost of borrowing money, have an outsize effect on renewable energy projects. That’s because the cost of building and operating a renewable energy generator like a wind farm is highly concentrated in its construction, as opposed to operations, thanks to the fact that it doesn’t have to pay for fuel in the same way that a natural gas or coal-fired power plant does. This leaves developers highly exposed to the cost of borrowing money, which is directly tied to interest rates. “Our fuel is free, we say, but our fuel is really the cost of capital because we put so much capital out upfront,” Orsted Americas chief executive David Hardy said in June.
So what does that mean in practice? Let’s look at some numbers.
Wood Mackenzie estimates that a 2% increase in interest rates pushes up the cost of energy produced by a renewables project by around 20%, compared to just over 10% for conventional power plants.
Meanwhile the investment bank Lazard estimates that reducing the cost of capital (the combined cost of borrowing money and selling equity in a project, both of which can be affected by interest rates) from 7.7% — the bank’s rough assumption over the summer — to 5.4% would lower the levelized cost of energy for an offshore wind system from $118 to $97 — around 17% — and for a utility solar project from $76 to $54 — roughly 28%. While there's not a one-to-one relationship between interest rates and the cost of capital, they move in the same direction.
Reductions in cost of capital also make more renewables projects viable to finance. According to a model developed by the Center for Public Enterprise, a typical renewable energy project with a weighted average cost of capital of 7.75% will have a debt service coverage ratio (a project’s cash flow compared to its loan payments)of 1.16. Investors consider projects to be roughly viable at 1.25.
So at the cost of capital assumed by Lazard, many projects will not get funded because investors don't see them as viable. If the weighted average cost of capital were to fall one percentage point to 6.75%, a project’s debt service coverage ratio would rise to 1.28, just above the viability threshold. If it fell by another percentage point, the debt ratio would hit a likely compelling 1.43.
“As rates fall, projects become increasingly financially viable,” Advait Arun, senior associate of energy finance at the Center for Public Enterprise and Heatmap contributor, told me matter-of-factly.