Carbon Ridge, the Santa Monica-based carbon capture company, announced an industry first in late July: it deployed the first centrifugal-based onboard carbon capture system on a shipping vessel.

At a time when the European Union, U.S., China and other big shipping hubs have been cracking down on maritime emissions, companies like Carbon Ridge are flooding the market with new ways to reduce emissions without hampering the global economy that relies on the exchange of vegetables, clothing and mechanical parts.

Carbon Ridge worked with Scorpio Tankers Inc. to deploy its carbon capture system on an LR2 product tanker. Deploying this kind of carbon capture system in the shipping sector is harder than one might think. Not only does there need to be buy-in from the ship owner, but the groups that own the cargo on the vessel, like Amazon.com Inc. or Exxon Mobile Corp., dictate much of what those vessels are able to do.

“(Carbon Ridge) not only represents the leading edge of CCS technology, but they also have the requisite understanding of our industry to develop and implement practical solutions,” Cameron Mackey, the chief operating officer at Scorpio Tankers said in a statement.

That buy in may become easier. In April, the International Maritime Organization voted to adopt a global policy regulation that would require ship owners to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 65% in 2040 if the policy is ratified later this year or face consequences.

“There have to be first movers of people that are willing to move a little bit ahead of the stick in order to adopt these technologies so that they’re ready when the requirement is really there and when the cost really starts to become significant,” said Chase Dwyer, the co-founder and chief executive of Carbon Ridge said. “These things don’t get developed overnight. There are always little kinks and things that need to be worked out as you go commercialize something for the first time. It’s better to go through that process before you’re regulated to do so, rather than doing so after the fact and trying to play catch-up.”

The company designed a carbon capture module that would specifically be smaller than past iterations of OCCS columns and modular to fit the constraints of the vessel. Carbon Ridge takes the flue gas that comes out of the shipping vessel and runs it through a module that removes nitrous oxide, sulfur and carbon dioxide. It then uses a liquid product to absorb the carbon dioxide and compress it, allowing it to be stored on the vessel.

“We believe that you should have long duration storage of the CO2, whether it’s an unutilized product or it’s permanently buried underground,” Dwyer said.

The move to carbon capture

Before Dwyer created his own carbon capture company, he spent years working in the renewable energy sector and focusing on projects involving solar, wind and alternative fuels. In 2020, there was a lot of chatter in the industry about how to use alternative fuels in the maritime industry in order to decarbonize shipping – but it wasn’t happening quickly enough.

“We ultimately came to the conclusion, myself and a few partners, that the math just didn’t really work over the next decade to two decades based on where the development was,” Dwyer said.

Indeed, the bar for decarbonizing the maritime sector was high. The shipping industry largely burns fuel oil – effectively the black sludge left over from an oil refining process that has the same consistency as peanut butter. One of the cheapest petroleum products on the planet, it’s heated up and burned. The idea that the shipping sector was going to quickly move from this fossil fuel-emitting, low-cost product to something more refined and cleaner than ammonia or methanol (which are more expensive to produce and give off 50% less energy), wasn’t feasible.

That’s when Dwyer began looking into carbon capture, and, in 2021, he co-founded Carbon Ridge with the goal to decarbonize the maritime sector. The company raised $9.5 million by Santa Monica-based Crosscut Ventures and Western Technology Investment back in August, bringing total investment to $15.5 million.

“A lot of these solutions to achieve meaningful decarbonization require significant amounts of capital and significant amounts of real asset deployment,” Dwyer said. “…what we’re really looking for ultimately are investors that understand that and that are in it for the long game.”