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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: In the Atlantic, the tropical storm that could, as it develops, take the name Jerry is making its way westward toward the U.S. • In the Pacific, Hurricane Priscilla strengthened into a Category 2 storm en route to Arizona and the Southwest • China broke an October temperature record with thermometers surging near 104 degrees Fahrenheit in the southeastern province of Fujian.
The Department of Energy appears poised to revoke awards to two major Direct Air Capture Hubs funded by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act in Louisiana and Texas, Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo reported Tuesday. She got her hands on an internal agency project list that designated nearly $24 billion worth of grants as “terminated,” including Occidental Petroleum’s South Texas DAC Hub and Louisiana's Project Cypress, a joint venture between the DAC startups Heirloom and Climeworks. An Energy Department spokesperson told Emily that he was “unable to verify” the list of canceled grants and said that “no further determinations have been made at this time other than those previously announced,”referring to the canceled grants the department announced last week. Christoph Gebald, the CEO of Climeworks, acknowledged “market rumors” in an email, but said that the company is “prepared for all scenarios.” Heirloom’s head of policy, Vikrum Aiyer, said the company wasn’t aware of any decision the Energy Department had yet made.
While the list floated last week showed the Trump administration’s plans to cancel the two regional hydrogen hubs on the West Coast, the new list indicated that the Energy Department planned to rescind grants for all seven hubs, Emily reported. “If the program is dismantled, it could undermine the development of the domestic hydrogen industry,” Rachel Starr, the senior U.S. policy manager for hydrogen and transportation at Clean Air Task Force told her. “The U.S. will risk its leadership position on the global stage, both in terms of exporting a variety of transportation fuels that rely on hydrogen as a feedstock and in terms of technological development as other countries continue to fund and make progress on a variety of hydrogen production pathways and end uses.”
Remember the Tesla announcement I teased in yesterday’s newsletter? The predictions proved half right: The electric automaker did, indeed, release a cheaper version of its midsize SUV, the Model Y, with a starting price just $10 shy of $40,000. Rather than a new Roadster or potential vacuum cleaner, as the cryptic videos the company posted on CEO Elon Musk’s social media site hinted, the second announcement was a cheaper version of the Model 3, already the lower-end sedan offering. Starting at $36,990, InsideEVs called it “one of the most affordable cars Tesla has ever sold, and the cheapest in 2025.” But it’s still a far cry from Musk’s erstwhile promise to roll out a Tesla for less than $30,000.
That may be part of why the company is losing market share. As Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin reported, Tesla’s slice of the U.S. electric vehicle sales sank to its lowest-ever level in August despite Americans’ record scramble to use the federal tax credits before the September 30 deadline President Donald Trump’s new tax law set. General Motors, which sold more electric vehicles in the third quarter of this year than in all of 2024, offers the cheapest battery-powered passenger vehicle on the market today, the Chevrolet Equinox, which starts at $35,100.
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Trump’s pledge to revive the United States’ declining coal industry was always a gamble — even though, as Matthew reported in July, global coal demand is rising. Three separate stories published Tuesday show just how stacked the odds are against a major resurgence:
As you may recall from two consecutive newsletters last month, Secretary of Energy Chris Wright said “permitting reform” was “the biggest remaining thing” in the administration’s agenda. Yet Republican leaders in Congress expressed skepticism about tacking energy policy into the next reconciliation bill. This week, however, Utah Senator Mike Lee, the chairman of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, called for a legislative overhaul of the National Environmental Policy Act. On Monday, the pro-development social media account Yimbyland — short for Yes In My Back Yard — posted on X: “Reminder that we built the Golden Gate Bridge in 4.5 years. Today, we wouldn’t even be able to finish the environmental review in 4.5 years.” In response, Lee said: “It’s time for NEPA reform. And permitting reform more broadly.”
Last month, a bipartisan permitting reform bill got a hearing in the House of Representatives. But that was before the government shutdown. And sources familiar with Democrats’ thinking have in recent months suggested to me that the administration’s gutting of so many clean energy policies has left Republicans with little to bargain with ahead of next year’s midterm elections.
Soon-to-be Japanese prime minister Sanae Takaichi.Yuichi Yamazaki - Pool/Getty Images
On Saturday, Japan’s long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party elected its former economic minister, Sanae Takaichi, as its new leader, putting her one step away from becoming the country’s first woman prime minister. Under previous administrations, Japan was already on track to restart the reactors idled after the 2011 Fukushima disaster. But Takaichi, a hardline conservative and nationalist who also vowed to re-militarize the nation, has pushed to speed up deployment of new reactors and technologies such as fusion in hopes of making the country 100% self-sufficient on energy.
“She wants energy security over climate ambition, nuclear over renewables, and national industry over global corporations,” Mika Ohbayashi, director at the pro-clean-energy Renewable Energy Institute, told Bloomberg. Shares of nuclear reactor operators surged by nearly 7% on Monday on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, while renewable energy developers’ stock prices dropped by as much as 15%
Researchers at the United Arab Emirates’ University of Sharjah just outlined a new method to transform spent coffee grounds and a commonly used type of plastic used in packaging into a form of activated carbon that can be used for chemical engineering, food processing, and water and air treatments. By repurposing the waste, it avoids carbon emitting from landfills into the atmosphere and reduces the need for new sources of carbon for industrial processes. “What begins with a Starbucks coffee cup and a discarded plastic water bottle can become a powerful tool in the fight against climate change through the production of activated carbon,” Dr. Haif Aljomard, lead inventor of the newly patented technology, said in a press release.
Last week’s Energy Department grant cancellations included funding for a backup energy system at Valley Children’s Hospital in Madera, California
When the Department of Energy canceled more than 321 grants in an act of apparent retribution against Democrats over the government shutdown, Russ Vought, President Trump’s budget czar, declared that the money represented “Green New Scam funding to fuel the Left's climate agenda.”
At least one of the grants zeroed out last week, however, was supposed to help keep the lights on at a children’s hospital.
The $29 million grant was intended to build a 3.3-megawatt long-duration energy storage system at Valley Children’s Hospital, a large pediatric hospital in Madera, California. The system would “power critical hospital operations during outage events,” such as when the California grid shuts down to avoid starting wildfires, according to project documents.
“The U.S. Department of Energy’s cancellation of funding for [the] long-duration energy storage demonstration grant is disappointing,” Zara Arboleda, a spokesperson for the hospital, told me.
Valley Children’s Hospital is a 358-bed hospital that says it serves more than 1.3 million children across California’s Central Valley. It has 116 neonatal intensive care unit beds and nationally ranked specialties in pediatric neurology, orthopedics, and lung surgery, among others.
Energy Secretary Chris Wright has characterized the more than $7.5 billion in grants canceled last week as part of an ongoing review of financial awards made by the Biden administration. But the timing of the cancellations — and Vought’s gleeful tweets about them — suggests a more vindictive purpose. Republican lawmakers and President Trump himself threatened to unleash Vought as a kind of rogue budget cutter before the federal government shut down last week.
“We don’t control what he’s going to do,” Senator John Thune told Politico last week. “I have a meeting today with Russ Vought, he of PROJECT 2025 Fame, to determine which of the many Democrat Agencies, most of which are a political SCAM, he recommends to be cut,” Trump posted on the same day.
Up until this year, canceling funding that is already under contract with a private party would have been thought to be straightforwardly illegal under federal law. But the Supreme Court’s conservative majority has allowed the Trump administration to act with previously unimaginable freedom while it considers ruling on similar cases.
Faraday Microgrids, the contractor that was due to receive the funding, is already building a microgrid for the hospital. The proposed backup power system — which the grant stipulated should be “non-lithium-ion” — was supposed to be funded by the Energy Department’s Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations, with the goal of finding new ways of storing electricity without using lithium-ion batteries, and was meant to work in concert with that new microgrid and snap on in times of high stress.
That microgrid project is still moving forward, Arboleda, the hospital’s spokesperson, told me. “Valley Children’s Hospital continues to build and soon will operate its microgrid announced in 2023 to ensure our facilities have access to reliable and sustainable energy every minute of every day for our patients and our care providers,” she added. That grid will contain some storage, but not the long-term storage system discussed in the official plan.
Faraday Microgrids, formerly known as Charge Bliss, didn’t respond to a request for comment, but its website touts its ability to secure grants and other government funding for energy projects.
In a statement, a spokesman for the Energy Department said that the grant was canceled because the project wasn’t feasible. “Following an in-depth review of the financial award, it was determined, among other reasons, that the viability of the project was not adequate to warrant further disbursements,” Ben Dietderich, a spokesman for the Energy Department, told me.
The children’s hospital, at least, is in good company. On Tuesday, a Trump administration document obtained by Heatmap News suggested the Energy Department is moving to kill bipartisan-backed funding for two direct air capture hubs in Texas and Louisiana. And although California has lost the most grants of any state, the Energy Department has also sought to terminate funding for new factories and industrial facilities across Republican-governed states.
Editor’s note: This story initially misstated the number of neonatal intensive care unit beds at Valley Children’s Hospital. It has been corrected.
Rob and Jesse break down China’s electricity generation with UC San Diego’s Michael Davidson.
China announced a new climate commitment under the Paris Agreement at last month’s United Nations General Assembly meeting, pledging to cut its emissions by 7% to 10% by 2035. Many observers were disappointed by the promise, which may not go far enough to forestall 2 degrees Celsius of warming. But the pledge’s conservatism reveals the delicate and shifting politics of China’s grid — and how the country’s central government and its provinces fight over keeping the lights on.
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse talk to Michael Davidson, an expert on Chinese electricity and climate policy. He is a professor at the University of California, San Diego, where he holds a joint faculty appointment at the School of Global Policy and Strategy and the Jacobs School of Engineering. He is also a senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and he was previously the U.S.-China policy coordinator for the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap, and Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University.
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Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Robinson Meyer: Your research and other people’s research has revealed that basically, when China started making capacity payments to coal plants, in some cases, it didn’t have the effect on the bottom line of these plants that was hoped for, and also we didn’t really see coal generation go down or change in the year that it happened. It wasn’t like they were paying these plants to stick around and not run. They were basically paying these plants, it seems like, to do the exact same thing they did the year before, but now they also got paid. And maybe that was needed for their economics, we can talk about it.
Why did coal get those payments and not, say, batteries or other sources of spare capacity, like pumped hydro storage, like nuclear? Why did coal, specifically, get payments for capacity? And does it have to do with spinning reserve? Or does it have to do with the political economy of coal in China?
Michael Davidson: When it came out, we said exactly the same thing. We said, okay, this should be a technology neutral payment scheme, and it should be a market, not a payment, right? But China’s building these things up little by little. Over time we’ve seen, historically, actually, a number of systems internationally started with payments before they move to markets because they realize that you could get a lot more competitive pressure with markets.
The capacity payment scheme for coal is extremely simple, right? It says, okay, for each province, we’re going to say what percentage of our benchmark coal investment costs are we going to subsidize. It’s extremely simple. It does not account for how much you’re using it at a plant by plant level. It does not account for other factors, renewables, etc. It’s a very coarse metric. But I wouldn’t say that it had had some, you know, perverse negative effect on the outcome of what coal generation is. Probably more likely is that these payments were seen, for some, as extra support. But then for some that are really hurting, they’re saying, okay, well then we will maybe put up less obstacles to market reforms.
But then on top of that, you have to put in the hourly energy demand growth story and say, okay, well you have all these renewables, but you don’t have enough storage to shift to evening peaks. You are going to rely on coal to meet that given the current rigid dispatch system. And so you’re dispatching them kind of regardless of whether or not you have the payment schemes.
I will say that I was a skeptic, right? Because when people told me that China should put in place a capacity market, I said, China has overcapacity. So if you have an overcapacity situation, you put in place a market, the prices should be zero. So what’s the point? But actually, when you’re looking out ahead with all of this surplus coal capacity that you’re trying to push down, you’re trying to push those capacity factors of those coal plans from 50%, 60%, down to 20% or even lower, they need to have other revenue schemes if you’re not going to dramatically open up your spot markets, which China is very hesitant to do — very risk averse when it comes to the openness of spot markets, in terms of price gaps. So that’s a necessary part of this transition. But it can be done more efficiently, and it should done technology neutral.
And by the way that is happening in certain places. That’s a national scheme, but we actually see that the implementation — for example, Shaanxi province, we have a technology neutral scheme that would include other resources, not just coal.
Mentioned:
China’s new pledge to cut its emissions by 2035
What an ‘ambitious’ 2035 electricity target looks like for China
China’s Clean Energy Pledge is Clouded by Coal, The Wire China
Jesse’s upshift; Rob’s upshift.
This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by …
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A warmer world is here. Now what? Listen to Shocked, from the University of Chicago’s Institute for Climate and Sustainable Growth, and hear journalist Amy Harder and economist Michael Greenstone share new ways of thinking about climate change and cutting-edge solutions. Find it here.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.