Ebb Carbon has launched its marine carbon removal pilot project on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula in the city of Port Angeles.
The startup uses an electrochemical process to create seawater that is chemically more basic than acidic. The basic or alkaline water can capture carbon from the ocean and safely store it. The strategy also helps combat ocean acidification that sours seawater and can harm or kill marine life.
Ebb Carbon has been testing its technology for two years in nearby Sequim Bay in partnership with the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. Last month the startup published data from that field study in the peer-reviewed journal Frontiers in Environmental Engineering, confirming the technology’s safety and efficacy.
The initiative, called Project Macoma, is located at the Port of Port Angeles on the Strait of Juan de Fuca. The short-term demonstration is designed to remove and store up to 250 tons of carbon annually and is expected to run until approximately spring 2026.
“With Project Macoma, we’re proud to be creating a blueprint for how safe and responsible carbon removal can advance global climate goals while protecting local marine health,” Ebb Carbon CEO Ben Tarbell said in a statement.
The effort “is still very much a learning pilot — setting the foundation on which we will scale our technology to the point where it can remove gigatons of CO2,” said a company spokesperson via email.
Ebb Carbon is based in South San Francisco and launched four years ago. It has raised $40 million from investors and has 22 employees.
A year ago, Ebb Carbon signed a carbon removal deal with Microsoft to potentially lock away up to 350,000 tons of CO2 over the next decade. The tech giant committed to funding the removal of 1,333 tons of carbon with the option to buy more.
Other companies in the Pacific Northwest are developing carbon removal technologies, including Svante, Banyu Carbon, CarbonQuest, Myno Carbon, Solid Carbon and others, which are using a variety of carbon capture and removal strategies. Oil and gas giant Occidental acquired British Columbia-based carbon removal company Carbon Engineering for more than $1 billion two years ago.
Carbon removal has been controversial for many years, with skeptics arguing the strategies would never scale up sufficiently to make a meaningful dent in carbon levels.
But the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has acknowledged the need for these strategies in fighting global warming, stating in its April 2022 report: “The deployment of carbon dioxide removals to counterbalance hard-to-abate residual emissions is unavoidable if net zero…emissions are to be achieved.”
