What is the name of your organization?
BlueShift
What is the name of your solution?
Energy-efficient Marine CDR
Provide a one-line summary or tagline for your solution.
Breakthrough electrochemical technology for ocean carbon dioxide removal, reversal of ocean acidification, and climate restoration
In what city, town, or region is your solution team headquartered?
Somerville, MA, USA
In what country is your solution team headquartered?
USA
What type of organization is your solution team?
For-profit, including B-Corp or similar models
Film your elevator pitch.
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What specific problem are you solving?
In order to avoid the worst effects of climate change, we need to both decarbonize and employ scalable carbon dioxide removal (CDR). The IPCC currently estimates that we need 5-16 GtCO2 per year by 2050 in order to limit warming to <2°C. Many carbon removal methods such as reforestation suffer from low permanence and high risk of reversal. High permanence and high certainty technologies such as direct air capture suffer from high energy and capital costs. We need more scalable and lower energy technologies for carbon removal. Billions of people, especially the most socioeconomically disadvantaged that have contributed the least to carbon pollution, are the most at risk.
Further, carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is polluting our oceans and driving ocean acidification, putting entire ecosystems at risk. By 2100, the ocean is on track to being 150% more acidic then it ever has been in 20 million years. Hotspots, such as coastal upwelling zones and estuaries, suffer from locally more severe acidification. Studies estimate that ocean acidification could decrease shellfish supply by over 50% and losses of $1 trillion dollars annually due to the decline of coral reefs and fisheries.
What is your solution?
We are developing direct ocean capture (DOC) of carbon. The advantages of DOC over direct air capture include greatly decreased land use, lower energy use, and co-benefits of the ocean. The ocean serves as a giant exchanger with the atmosphere, rapidly equilibrating with CO2 levels, and naturally has 150x more carbon per volume than the atmosphere. The ocean has already absorbed over 1/4 of human CO2 emissions.
The core of our technology is an energy-efficient pH swing in which we acidify seawater to convert dissolved carbonates into CO2, extract the CO2, and then remove the acid to re-use it, producing seawater without carbonic acid. The acid is generated, and later reversed, using an electrochemical cell containing our quinone electrode that absorbs or releases protons from/to water when reduced or oxidized, respectively (Ali et al., 2024). This decarbonated seawater is then returned to the ocean where it draws down the same amount of extracted CO2 from the atmosphere. Locally, this
Who does your solution serve, and in what ways will the solution impact their lives?
This solution especially serves the most impacted communities living on coasts. At scale, this technology can remove gigatons of CO2 from the atmosphere and oceans, potentially slow down sea level rise, and locally reverse ocean acidification. This solution is critical for increasing our food supply from aquaculture that currently suffers from a large gap in scalable solutions for acidification. Aquaculture farmers are critical for our future food supply, but are unequipped to deal with the many challenges they face such as pollution, disease transfer, warmer waters, and acidifying waters. Further, coral reef ecosystems, and the fisheries and tourism dependent on them, are in danger of collapse due to ocean acidification. Our technology directly addresses these climate change and ocean acidification concerns without adding chemicals or byproducts to the ocean.