Despite being responsible for 3% of global carbon dioxide emissions, this transportation sector has few options to reduce their carbon footprint. No, it isn’t air travel. It’s cargo shipping, which emits more carbon than air travel.
Global shipping transports about 90% of the world’s goods. The industry consists of around 50,000 ships, most of which run on diesel. Many large ocean-going ships also use bunker fuel, a low-grade, tar-like oil that can contain 3,500 times more toxic sulfur than the diesel used for cars.
If shipping were a country, it would be the world’s sixth largest emitter. Yet, there are no zero-carbon technologies available at scale. UK-based Seabound wants to change the emissions seascape. It claims its solution can capture 95% of a cargo ship’s carbon dioxide emissions.
The company is still in the prototype stage. Last year it installed its prototype on a large cargo vessel. In a two-month period the device captured 78% of carbon emissions and 90% of sulfur dioxide from one of the ship’s auxiliary engines.
That’s a pretty good start for a prototype.
The Seabound system traps the exhaust gas created by a ship’s diesel engines and funnels it into a high-pressure chamber filled with calcium oxide pebbles. The CO2 then reacts with the calcium oxide and is turned into calcium carbonate (aka limestone).
The theory is that once in port, the limestone can be offloaded and used as a building material or converted back to pebbles and pure CO2. In the later case, the CO2 could either be stored underground or used to produce electro fuels – a synthetic fuel used to power ships.
The next step for the company is to build a larger system that can hit its 95% goal, a figure that to date has only been obtained in the lab.
At full scale the device would measure about 10 ft x 20 ft. The footprint is a non-issue considering the size of cargo vessels which in some cases are longer than the Empire State Building is high.
As encouraging as the pilot was, challenges remain. Creating the calcium oxide pebbles requires high temperatures and produces guess what – CO2. It seems the company also needs to firm up its strategy on what to do with the captured material. I suspect somehow monetizing it may be a key factor in commercialization, but this is just a guess.
The company has set a goal of outfitting 1,000 ships by 2030 and scaling to 10,000 by 2040. That seems a bit aggressive considering it won’t have its first production unit until 2025. That is assuming they are able to close on all their various funding rounds. Still, I’ll be rooting for them, and we’ll keep tabs on their progress.
#seabound #cargoshipping #carbonemissions #carbondioxide
