Ebb Carbon, a company that focuses on removing carbon dioxide from oceans, has raised $20 million to develop and deploy its technology to enhance the oceans’ ability to capture and permanently store CO2 from the atmosphere.
This investment is the largest to date in ocean-based carbon removal technology. Carbon removal is crucial in mitigating climate change, but most technologies for capturing and storing carbon remain in the early stages.
According to the IPCC climate change mitigation study, carbon dioxide removal methods must scale to billions of tons of removal annually over the coming decades to limit warming to 1.5°C. Using oceans for carbon capture and storage potentially presents one of the least expensive pathways for carbon removal because they naturally absorb and store CO2.
The Series A financing was led by climate solutions and cleantech-focused venture investors Prelude Ventures and Evok Innovations.
Ebb Carbon was founded in 2021 by former Tesla, SolarCity, and Google X executives. It commercializes an electrochemical method for ocean-based carbon removal that restores ocean chemistry by reducing higher acidity levels caused by higher CO2 levels in the atmosphere, drawing down CO2, and converting it to bicarbonate for safe and stable storage capable of sequestering CO2 for at least 10,000 years.
Ben Tarbell, CEO and Co-Founder of Ebb Carbon, said:
“If we want to avoid the most drastic impacts of climate change, the science is very clear that we will need to remove billions of tons of already-emitted CO2 from the atmosphere. The ocean is a natural and vastly underutilized ally in this fight. Our approach combines capture and storage into one step, by accelerating naturally occurring processes that benefit from the immensity of the ocean’s surface area. This enables one of the lowest cost solutions for atmospheric CO2 removal at scale.”