Seabound’s Innovative Solution to Capturing Ship Carbon Emissions

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• 📦Seabound’s Innovative Solution to Capturing Ship Carbon Emissions🚢

Seabound’s Innovative Solution to Capturing Ship Carbon Emissions

Achieving net-zero emissions, meaning achieving a balance between the amount of greenhouse gases (GHG) produced and the amount of gases removed from the atmosphere, is a goal various industries share. With every industry needing to produce so much energy, whether they like it or not, reducing CO2 emissions is challenging, at the very least.

This is especially true for the largest contributors of carbon emissions at the moment, which include shipping, transportation in general, but especially aviation and steelmaking due to their heavy reliance on fossil fuels. Developers and innovators of said industries are constantly trying to decarbonize their ways.

Carbon capture and storage is one of the solutions developers have come up with so far. However, more sectors are starting to realize that it may not be that viable of a technology if long-term decarbonization is the goal. Not only is it costly, but carbon stored underground could find ways to escape and seep back into the atmosphere, especially if left unattended.

A Y Combinator-backed shipping startup named Seabound, founded by Alisha Fredriksson and Roujia Wen, is testing ways to slash emissions with safer and more sustainable carbon capture tech.

Decarbonization

Being an industry that produces around 1.2 gigatons of carbon dioxide in 2020, equal to about 3% of the world’s annual greenhouse gas emissions, more and more shipping companies are developing various types of technology to reach decarbonization. The UN’s International Maritime Organization is also pushing for this goal by setting a 2050 target for the industry to get to net zero.

Though plenty of potential solutions are being worked on, such as alternative fuels using hydrogen or biofuels, these are solutions that are far from mature and may need a decade to develop and refine. Not only will development take a while, but this would also require ships to replace their whole fuel supply or propulsion systems.

With how largely the industry is contributing to emissions, a quicker, more hassle-free solution may be needed. This is what Seabound is in the process of developing.

Smokestacks and Pebbles

Seabound has created a prototype of a patent-pending compact carbon capture device for ships, with an end goal of capturing 95% of the carbon produced by ships. What makes Seabound’s carbon capture technology so different from others?

The London-based startup developed a reactor that can be placed onboard a ship filled with porous pebbles made of calcium oxide. The reactor directly connects to a ship’s smokestacks, capturing and trapping carbon from the exhaust.

By binding the pebbles and CO2 together, calcium carbonate is formed, which essentially turns the pebbles into limestone through mineralization. The device stores the limestones temporarily until the ship returns to port. Once on land, they will be offloaded and post-processed, replaced with fresh calcium-oxide pebbles for the next trip. The fumes released through an outlet pipe become cleaner in the process.

The startup’s technology brings plenty of opportunities. Seabound not only sells the carbon-capture device to ship owners for sustainable practices, but it also runs a pebble-collecting subscription service for ship owners to source new pebbles and offload used ones. Aside from the two, Seabound also sells the now-limestone pebbles as building materials or simply to be sequestered.

Prototype Pilot

Once commercialized, Seabound’s technology brings opportunities not only to themselves but to many ship owners with old and new vessels. Unlike plenty of other alternative solutions, Seabound’s reactor can be placed in ships without having their propulsion systems replaced, potentially lowering ship owners’ expenses.

With a goal so ambitious, Seabound hopes to move quite swiftly. The startup currently has its prototype placed at a shipyard in Yalova, Turkey, installed on a midsize ship. The team lives on board in succession to test the equipment in a maritime environment.

Seabound conducted its pilot phase in partnership with UK shipping firm Lomarlabs as part of the Clean Maritime Demonstration Competition, funded by the UK Department for Transport.

One of the issues Seabound faced was figuring out how to place the reactor without causing the ship to lose too much cargo space. In the first pilot, Seabound placed its equipment into five shipping containers stacked on top of each other, which took a little space ship owners would have to sacrifice. The reactor also adds weight, which would require the ship to use slightly more power to run.

Though these issues may be unavoidable, Fredriksson has assured one positive thing, which is the extremely minute amount of energy the reactor would consume. Seabound’s reactor is exothermic, which means heat would be required to start the device, but it would eventually release heat into its surroundings, essentially becoming self-sustaining.

Goals and Plans

Seabound is eager to move out of the prototyping phase to actually build its first product at a meaningful scale for customers. Last August, Seabound signed six letters of intent, or LOIs, with major ship owners. The startup will continue testing its reactor and plans to put the first full-scale version on a ship again as soon as possible.

By creating a device that can be retrofitted into any existing ship, Frediksson hopes that Seabound can help prevent ship owners from completely overhauling ships to electric fleets or ships with a completely different propulsion and fuel system. This would be not only wasteful in resources but also prohibitively expensive. With ships typically having a 30-year lifespan, adding a little something to an already intact ship would prevent a completely unnecessary change.

Seabound secured $4.4 million in a seed funding round led by Lowercarbon Capital last May, also supported by Eastern Pacific Shipping, Emles Venture Partners, Hawktail, Rebel Fund, and Soma Capital.

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