This Simple Technology Could Save A Billion Tonnes Of CO2 Each Year
Carbotreat is a game changer.
You may have never thought of it before, but almost everything you own was likely shipped across the world before you bought it. Your iPhone comes from the East, your food is shipped from South America, the raw materials for your car are shipped from Africa, and your car was possibly assembled across the ocean, too. These ocean-going behemoths are intertwined with our lives, economy and politics. This wouldn’t be an issue if ships weren’t so carbon-intensive and nearly impossible to decarbonise (try building a battery electric tanker). As such, shipping remains one of the biggest hurdles between us and saving the planet. But Carbotreat has developed a genius technology to make this Maritime mountain far easier to summit.
Carbotreat is a carbon capture startup from the Netherlands. They have developed a carbon capture technology that can be retrofitted to ships and capture their emissions before they even reach the atmosphere. The idea is not new. The exhaust gases from vessels have a far higher concentration of carbon dioxide than the air, meaning carbon capture technology can operate more efficiently than if they run on ambient air. So, applying this technology in this way makes sense, and many have proposed to do so. The difference is that Carbotreat has done the leg work and developed it to be retrofitted to a wide variety of ships, using various fuel types, and has actively started testing the system.
Well, Carbotreat recently had a huge breakthrough. Researchers have been testing Carbotreat’s ship-based carbon capture (SBCC) prototype on an operational LNG ship capable of carrying 82,000 tonnes of cargo, and the results are spectacular. The system was operational only for 1,000 hours (41.5 days) but captured up to 250 kg of carbon dioxide daily. After analysis, researchers have found that the system can capture 85% of the ship’s carbon emissions, surpassing Carbotreat’s 70% carbon capture goals.
That’s great, but how does this technology work?
Firstly, the ship’s exhaust is passed through an amine-based solvent in an “absorber.” The carbon dioxide portion of these emissions dissolves into this solvent. The solvent is then passed into a separate “desorber” tank where the solvent is heated, forcing it to release the carbon dioxide, which is captured and pumped into a pressurised tank to be stored as liquid carbon dioxide. Carbotreat can cycle this solvent continuously, allowing the system to run uninterrupted for months without over-saturating the solvent. When the ship docks, the liquid carbon dioxide is removed and transported to a geological storage site, where it will be pumped into the Earth and turned into stable carbonate minerals, safely storing the ship’s emissions away for millennia.
Sadly, this trial run didn’t utilise this entire process and was only concerned with validating how the carbon capture side would work, not the storage. However, the prototype will now be removed and fitted to a different ship, where it will deploy the entire carbon capture chain in a 500-hour trial. If this trial goes as well as the previous one, then Carbotreat’s groundbreaking technology will be ready for commercial deployment (infrastructure and manufacturing scaling aside).
How much of an impact could this technology have?
In 2018, global shipping emissions amounted to a whopping 1,076 million tonnes of CO2 and were responsible for around 2.9% of our global emissions! This figure has increased since then, so if Carbotreats technology could be retrofitted to every ship, it could save over 914.6 million tonnes of carbon emissions annually! That is nearly as much as Japan’s total annual emissions, or almost three times the emissions of the UK. With the growth of the shipping industry, that figure will likely break the billion-tonne mark by the time Carbotreat make it to market.
But this technology’s impact could be far more than that. Ships take a vast amount of carbon emissions to manufacture, and current emissions regulations are set to force many ships to be scrapped early for newer, more efficient models. With Carbotreat, these ships’ lives can be extended, which will not only be cheaper for the operator but also have a smaller overall carbon footprint than scrapping them and starting again. This also means that funds that would have gone on building new ships can instead be spent on developing alternative ultra-low carbon propulsion technology (such as nuclear propulsions, hydrogen, hybrid sail and biofuels) and rolling out the infrastructure to support them. This way, when the Carbotreat extended life ships eventually need to be replaced, a proper net-zero-compliant vessel will be ready for the job.
So, thanks to some genius Dutch engineering, one of the most polluting aspects of our lives may soon become significantly more eco-friendly.
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Sources: Splash247, Carbotreat, Carbotreat, EU, Offshore Energy, Statista