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If the global shipping industry were its own nation, it would be the sixth largest emitter of carbon dioxide, belching about a billion tons of the stuff into the atmosphere every year. And not to state the obvious, but the sector isn’t going anywhere. Not only is cargo shipping the means by which 80% of global trade is carried out, but transporting goods via ship is actually much more fuel-efficient than the alternatives.
That means that slashing shipping emissions, which account for nearly 3% of the global total, is 100% necessary for a decarbonized future. But unlike most other industries, there’s a global regulatory body — the International Maritime Organization — that can set goals and mandates to ensure that decarbonization happens on schedule. The IMO is targeting net-zero shipping emissions by 2050, with a 40% reduction in the carbon intensity of international shipping by 2030 compared to 2008. And while these goals aren’t binding, forthcoming measures set to be developed and adopted late next year will be.
Shipping decarbonization is still in its early infancy though, meaning the pathway to net zero remains highly unclear — and that there’s lots of room for technological innovation. One company that’s gained traction in the past few years is aiming more at the “net” than the “zero” part of that equation — rather than develop clean fuels, UK-based startup Seabound is retrofitting ships with onboard carbon capture devices. The process uses a technology called calcium-looping that allows the company to capture carbon from the ship’s exhaust system, essentially locking it up in a limestone rock, and then process it later on land.
Though it’s relatively unproven, onboard carbon capture has the potential to gain ground quickly if it can be shown to work at scale. But precisely because thetechnology is unproven, the industry is far from unified in the idea that it will play a consequential role in the final decarbonization picture. “Alternative fuels are probably going to be the dominant solution,” Aparajit Pandey, shipping decarbonization lead at the think tank RMI, told me.
Indeed, low and zero-carbon fuels made from green methanol or ammonia (which are themselves made from green hydrogen) are widely considered the leading contenders in this space — while methanol does produce some CO2 when burned, it’s much cleaner than fossil fuels due to its low carbon and high oxygen content, and ammonia contains no carbon at all. But it could take a while to ramp up production to meet the industry’s ravenous fuel demand. Plus, repowering an existing ship with ammonia or methanol requires an expensive and time-consuming engine retrofit, and turning over the entire global fleet could take decades.
Other ideas and approaches abound. Biofuels? They come with a familiar host of concerns, plus fuel production is inherently limited by the amount of biomass that’s available. Solar-powered ships? Folks are trying, but current panels aren’t nearly energy dense enough to power a freighter on their own. Electrifying ships? It definitely makes sense for smaller vessels like ferries and tugboats, but batteries also take up a lot of space that could otherwise be used for freight. They also need to be either charged or swapped, requiring infrastructure that just doesn’t exist yet.
“Carbon capture is probably the only way that you can get a meaningful amount of emissions reduction in any near term way,” Clea Kolster, partner and head of science at Lowercarbon Capital, told me, referring to the cargo shipping industry. Lowercarbon led Seabound’s $4.4 million seed round two years ago.
This is not a zero sum calculation, however. Seabound CEO Alisha Fredricksson told me that she believes both methanol and ammonia fuels have a significant role to play. “They’re just taking a long time to develop. And so we won't have sufficient supply for another 10, 20 years or so.”
Seabound’s system works by reacting the CO2 in a ship’s exhaust gas with calcium oxide to form solid calcium carbonate (aka limestone). This essentially locks the carbon away in small pebbles, which are unloaded when the ship docks. Because Seabound doesn’t purify or compress the CO2 onboard, the company says its system requires “negligible” amounts of additional fuel to operate. Once on land, the plan is for Seabound to either sell the limestone for use as a building material or to separate the CO2 and calcium oxide; the latter could then be reused to capture more carbon, while the former could either be used to produce methanol shipping fuel or geologically sequestered.
There are other companies attempting onboard carbon capture: Value Maritime, Mitsubishi, and Wartsila, among others, all of which rely on amine-based systems, a well-proven technology for carbon removal on land. But Fredricksson told me that miniaturizing these systems to work on ships is much more capital and energy intensive than Seabound’s decoupled approach, which allows the company to capture the CO2 at sea and process it later on land. This older tech also produces liquified CO2, which she says ports are less equipped to handle than a solid material like limestone.
Seabound completed its maiden voyage earlier this year, leaving from Turkey and traveling around the Middle East in a months-long trip that put their tech to the test in the real world for the first time. The system was installed on a freighter from Lomar Shipping, and was able to capture carbon at 78% efficiency and sulfur, a pollutant that can cause respiratory problems and acid rain, at about 90% efficiency while it was running.
Fredricksson and the company’s backers deemed the voyage a great success. “We hit the results we were looking for,” she told me. But in the grand scheme of things, the pilot was still quite small-scale. Seabound’s system only captured about 1 metric ton of carbon per day, a tiny percent of the ship’s overall emissions. That’s because the system was only running for a total of around 100 hours during the two months it was at sea. The objective, Fredricksson told me, was not to capture as much CO2 as possible, but to demonstrate the technical feasibility of the system and prepare for future scale-up.
Ultimately, the company hopes to capture up to 95% of a ship’s carbon emissions. But similar to batteries, this involves a space-related tradeoff. A larger, more effective carbon capture system would mean less room for cargo. “So I think the main goal for our engineering team over time will be to increase the efficiency to pack more and more tons of CO2 into each container,” Fredricksson told me. Right now, she says that 10- to 14-day voyages are Seabound’s sweet spot, given the size of its systems. The company hopes to build its first full scale system by the end of this year and start delivering to commercial customers in 2025.
The degree of interest in Seabound’s systems will depend in no small part on forthcoming directives from the IMO. As of now, there’s a rule mandating that ships calculate their energy efficiency and report it to the organization. Fredricksson says it’s already getting harder to sell ships with lower ratings. Pandey said he thinks future regulations could resemble the FuelEU initiative, which requires a steady decrease in the emissions intensity of shipping fuels over time, from 2% in 2025 to up to 80% by 2050.
While it’s unclear how a rule like this would incorporate onboard carbon capture into its framework, Pandey told me that if Seabound can prove out its tech on a larger scale, the approach is promising. “Of the carbon capture solutions that are out there, they’re probably the most innovative,” he told me. But he’s not sure that the company’s aim to commercialize by next year is realistic. “From now to prove it out to scale, who knows? Five years, six years, seven years, something like that,” Pandey guessed, “I think it could be viable, but it's so early.”
A recent report on the potential of onboard carbon capture from DNV, an organization that maintains technical standards for ships, agrees that a longer timeline is more likely, stating that, “With the wider [carbon capture, utilization, and storage] infrastructure in development, scaling up of the maritime carbon capture network will take time and is expected to reach a broader uptake after 2030.”
Since returning from its first voyage, Seabound has reconfigured its system to fit into modified shipping containers that are intended to reduce retrofit time and costs. Now, if a shipowner wants to use Seabound’s system, the primary modification involves installing pipes to route exhaust from the ship’s smokestack or funnel to the company’s carbon capture device. Fredricksson estimates installation costs will be on the order of $100,000 per ship, though that will vary greatly depending on vessel size and type.
But if that estimate is in the right ballpark, it would be orders of magnitude cheaper than retrofitting a ship with an engine built for ammonia or methanol fuels. And yet Pandey isn’t so sure ship operators will be keen on either upgrade. “My strong guess is if they’re not going to retrofit a vessel for a new engine, they’re also not going to retrofit it for carbon capture,” Pandey told me.
Fredricksson expects Seabound will raise a Series A round later this year or early next, to help get its first commercial units off the line. And apparently, there’s been loads of investor interest. “Shipping and maritime is new for the climate tech ecosystem,” Fredricksson told me, meaning there’s lots to be gained by moving quickly and early. “There is so much CO2 out there being emitted by ships,” Fredricksson said, “and not a lot of solutions yet going after them.”
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On Energy Transfer’s legal win, battery storage, and the Cybertruck
Current conditions: Red flag warnings are in place for much of Florida • Spain is bracing for extreme rainfall from Storm Martinho, the fourth named storm in less than two weeks • Today marks the vernal equinox, or the first day of spring.
A jury has ordered Greenpeace to pay more than $660 million in damages to one of the country’s largest fossil fuel infrastructure companies after finding the environmental group liable for defamation, conspiracy, and physical damages at the Dakota Access Pipeline. Greenpeace participated in large protests, some violent and disruptive, at the pipeline in 2016, though it has maintained that its involvement was insignificant and came at the request of the local Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. The project eventually went ahead and is operational today, but Texas-based Energy Transfer sued the environmental organization, accusing it of inciting the uprising and encouraging violence. “We should all be concerned about the future of the First Amendment, and lawsuits like this aimed at destroying our rights to peaceful protest and free speech,” said Deepa Padmanabha, senior legal counsel for Greenpeace USA. The group said it plans to appeal.
The Department of Energy yesterday approved a permit for the Calcasieu Pass 2 liquified natural gas terminal in Louisiana, allowing the facility to export to countries without a free trade agreement. The project hasn’t yet been constructed and is still waiting for final approvals from the independent Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, but the DOE’s green light means it faces one less hurdle.
CP2 was awaiting DOE’s go-ahead when the Biden administration announced its now notorious pause on approvals for new LNG export facilities. The project’s opponents argue it’s a “carbon bomb.” Analysis from the National Resources Defense Council suggested the greenhouse gases from the project would be equivalent to putting more than 1.85 million additional gas-fueled automobiles on the road, while the Sierra Club found it would amount to about 190 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent annually.
President Trump met with 15 to 20 major oil and gas executives from the American Petroleum Institute at the White House yesterday. This was the president’s first meeting with fossil fuel bosses since his second term began in January. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and Energy Secretary Chris Wright were also in the room. Everyone is staying pretty quiet about what exactly was said, but according to Burgum and Wright, the conversation focused heavily on permitting reform and bolstering the grid. Reuters reported that “executives had been expected to express concerns over Trump’s tariffs and stress the industry view that higher oil prices are needed to help meet Trump’s promise to grow domestic production.” Burgum, however, stressed that oil prices didn’t come up in the chat. “Price is set by supply and demand,” he said. “There was nothing we could say in that room that could change that one iota, and so it wasn’t really a topic of discussion.” The price of U.S. crude has dropped 13% since Trump returned to office, according to CNBC, on a combination of recession fears triggered by Trump’s tariffs and rising oil output from OPEC countries.
The U.S. installed 1,250 megawatts of residential battery storage last year, the highest amount ever and nearly 60% more than in 2023, according to a new report from the American Clean Power Association and Wood Mackenzie. Overall, battery storage installations across all sectors hit a new record in 2024 at 12.3 gigawatts of new capacity. Storage is expected to continue to grow next year, but uncertainties around tariffs and tax incentives could slow things down.
China is delaying approval for construction of BYD’s Mexico plant because authorities worry the electric carmaker’s technology could leak into the United States, according to the Financial Times. “The commerce ministry’s biggest concern is Mexico’s proximity to the U.S.,” sources told the FT. As Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer writes, BYD continues to set the global standard for EV innovation, and “American and European carmakers are still struggling to catch up.” This week the company unveiled its new “Super e-Platform,” a new standard electronic base for its vehicles that it says will allow incredibly fast charging — enabling its vehicles to add as much as 249 miles of range in just five minutes.
Tesla has recalled 46,096 Cybertrucks over an exterior trim panel that can fall off and become a road hazard. This is the eighth recall for the truck since it went on sale at the end of 2023.
This fusion startup is ahead of schedule.
Thea Energy, one of the newer entrants into the red-hot fusion energy space, raised $20 million last year as investors took a bet on the physics behind the company’s novel approach to creating magnetic fields. Today, in a paper being submitted for peer review, Thea announced that its theoretical science actually works in the real world. The company’s CEO, Brian Berzin, told me that Thea achieved this milestone “quicker and for less capital than we thought,” something that’s rare in an industry long-mocked for perpetually being 30 years away.
Thea is building a stellarator fusion reactor, which typically looks like a twisted version of the more common donut-shaped tokamak. But as Berzin explained to me, Thea’s stellarator is designed to be simpler to manufacture than the industry standard. “We don’t like high tech stuff,” Berzin told me — a statement that sounds equally anathema to industry norms as the idea of a fusion project running ahead of schedule. “We like stuff that can be stamped and forged and have simple manufacturing processes.”
The company thinks it can achieve simplicity via its artificial intelligence software, which controls the reactor’s magnetic field keeping the unruly plasma at the heart of the fusion reaction confined and stabilized. Unlike typical stellarators, which rely on the ultra-precise manufacturing and installment of dozens of huge, twisted magnets, Thea’s design uses exactly 450 smaller, simpler planar magnets, arranged in the more familiar donut-shaped configuration. These magnets are still able to generate a helical magnetic field — thought to keep the plasma better stabilized than a tokamak — because each magnet is individually controlled via the company’s software, just like “the array of pixels in your computer screen,” Berzin told me.
“We’re able to utilize the control system that we built and very specifically modulate and control each magnet slightly differently,” Berzin explained, allowing Thea to “make those really complicated, really precise magnetic fields that you need for a stellarator, but with simple hardware.”
This should make manufacturing a whole lot easier and cheaper, Berzin told me. If one of Thea’s magnets is mounted somewhat imperfectly, or wear and tear of the power plant slightly shifts its location or degrades its performance over time, Thea’s AI system can automatically compensate. “It then can just tune that magnet slightly differently — it turns that magnet down, it turns the one next to it up, and the magnetic field stays perfect,” Berzin explained. As he told me, a system that relies on hardware precision is generally much more expensive than a system that depends on well-designed software. The idea is that Thea’s magnets can thus be mass manufactured in a way that’s conducive to “a business versus a science project.”
In 2023, Thea published a technical report proving out the physics behind its so-called “planar coil stellarator,” which allowed the company to raise its $20 million Series A last year, led by the climate tech firm Prelude Ventures. To validate the hardware behind its initial concept, Thea built a 3x3 array of magnets, representative of one section of its overall “donut” shaped reactor. This array was then integrated with Thea’s software and brought online towards the end of last year.
The results that Thea announced today were obtained during testing last month, and prove that the company can create and precisely control the complex magnetic field shapes necessary for fusion power. These results will allow the company to raise a Series B in the “next couple of years,” Berzin said. During this time, Thea will be working to scale up manufacturing such that it can progress from making one or two magnets per week to making multiple per day at its New Jersey-based facility.
The company’s engineers are also planning to stress test their AI software, such that it can adapt to a range of issues that could arise after decades of fusion power plant operation. “So we’re going to start breaking hardware in this device over the next month or two,” Berzin told me. “We’re purposely going to mismount a magnet by a centimeter, put it back in and not tell the control system what we did. And then we’re going to purposely short out some of the magnetic coils.” If the system can create a strong, stable magnetic field anyway, this will serve as further proof of concept for Thea’s software-oriented approach to a simplified reactor design.
The company is still years away from producing actual fusion power though. Like many others in the space, Thea hopes to bring fusion electrons to the grid sometime in the 2030s. Maybe this simple hardware, advanced software approach is what will finally do the trick.
The Chinese carmaker says it can charge EVs in 5 minutes. Can America ever catch up?
The Chinese automaker BYD might have cracked one of the toughest problems in electric cars.
On Tuesday, BYD unveiled its new “Super e-Platform,” a new standard electronic base for its vehicles that it says will allow incredibly fast charging — enabling its vehicles to add as much as 249 miles of range in just five minutes. That’s made possible because of a 1,000-volt architecture and what BYD describes as matching charging capability, which could theoretically add nearly one mile of range every second.
It’s still not entirely clear whether the technology actually works, although BYD has a good track record on that front. But it suggests that the highest-end EVs worldwide could soon add range as fast as gasoline-powered cars can now, eliminating one of the biggest obstacles to EV adoption.
The new charging platform won’t work everywhere. BYD says that it will also build 4,000 chargers across China that will be able to take advantage of these maximum speeds. If this pans out, then BYD will be able to charge its newest vehicles twice as fast as Tesla’s next generation of superchargers can.
“This is a good thing,” Jeremy Wallace, a Chinese studies professor at Johns Hopkins University, told me. “Yes, it’s a Chinese company. And there are geopolitical implications to that. But the better the technology gets, the easier it is to decarbonize.”
“As someone who has waited in line for chargers in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, I look forward to the day when charging doesn’t take that long,” he added.
The announcement also suggests that the Chinese EV sector remains as dynamic as ever and continues to set the global standard for EV innovation — and that American and European carmakers are still struggling to catch up. The Trump administration is doing little to help the industry catch up: It has proposed repealing the Inflation Reduction Act’s tax credits for EV buyers, which provide demand-side support for the fledgling industry, and the Environmental Protection Agency is working to roll back tailpipe-pollution rules that have furnished early profits to EV makers, including Tesla. Against that background, what — if anything — can U.S. companies do to catch up?
The situation isn’t totally hopeless, but it’s not great.
BYD’s mega-charging capability is made possible by two underlying innovations. First, BYD’s new platform — the wiring, battery, and motors that make up the electronic guts of the car — will be capable of channeling up to 1,000 volts. That is only a small step-change above the best platforms available elsewhere— the forthcoming Gravity SUV from the American carmaker Lucid is built on a 926-volt platform, while the Cybertruck’s platform is 800 volts — but BYD will be able to leverage its technological firepower with mass manufacturing capacity unrivaled by any other brand.
Second, BYD’s forthcoming chargers will be capable of using the platform’s full voltage. These chargers may need to be built close to power grid infrastructure because of the amount of electricity that they will demand.
But sitting underneath these innovations is a sprawling technological ecosystem that keeps all Chinese electronics companies ahead — and that guarantees Chinese advantages well into the future.
“China’s decisive advantage over the U.S. when it comes to innovation is that it has an entrenched workforce that is able to continuously iterate on technological advances,” Dan Wang, a researcher of China’s technology industry and a fellow at the Paul Tsai China Center at Yale Law School, told me.
The country is able to innovate so relentlessly because of its abundance of process knowledge, Wang said. This community of engineering practice may have been seeded by Apple’s iPhone-manufacturing effort in the aughts and Tesla’s carmaking prowess in the 2010s, but it has now taken on a life of its own.
“Shenzhen is the center of the world’s hardware manufacturing industry because it has workers rubbing shoulders with academics rubbing shoulders with investors rubbing shoulders with engineers,” Wang told me. “And you have a more hustle-type culture because it’s so much harder to maintain technological moats and technological differentiation, because people are so competitive in these sorts of spaces.”
In a way, Shenzhen is the modern-day version of the hardware and software ecosystem that used to exist in northern California — Silicon Valley. But while the California technology industry now largely focuses on software, China has taken over the hardware side.
That allows the country to debut new technological innovations much faster than any other country can, he added. “The comparison I hear is that if you have a new charging platform or a new battery chemistry, Volkswagen and BMW will say, We’ll hustle to put this into our systems, and we’ll put it in five years from now. Tesla might say, we’ll hustle and get it in a year from now.”
“China can say, we’ll put it in three months from now,” he said.“You have a much more focused concentration of talent in China, which collapses coordination time.”
That culture has allowed the same companies and engineers to rapidly advance in manufacturing skill and complexity. It has helped CATL, which originally made batteries for smartphones, to become one of the world’s top EV battery makers. And it has helped BYD — which is close to unseating Tesla as the world’s No. 1 seller of electric vehicles — move from making lackluster gasoline cars to some of the world’s best and cheapest EVs.
It will be a while until America can duplicate that manufacturing capability, partly because of the number of headwinds it faces, Wang said.