Frontier announce that it awarded an R&D grant to Leilac to support the production of zero carbon lime on behalf of Frontier buyers Stripe, Shopify, and Google.
The Leilac technology produces zero-carbon lime with electric heating and by capturing the CO2 released unavoidably from the raw material during calcination. The lime product has near-zero associated carbon emissions – making it a necessary enabler for scaling lime-dependent carbon removal methods like ocean alkalinity enhancement (OAE).
Frontier was founded by Stripe, Google, Shopify, and McKinsey Sustainability. Its members have committed to purchase over US$1 billion of permanent carbon removal by 2030.
Leilac CEO, Daniel Rennie said Leilac looked forward to working with Frontier to help restore ocean health and mitigate climate change. “Ocean alkalinity enhancement has enormous potential to simultaneously improve ocean health and remove legacy and hard-to-abate carbon dioxide emissions from the atmosphere at the gigatonne scale.
We look forward to working with Frontier, building on the solutions we are developing to reduce the cost and carbon emissions from cement and lime production. By enabling flexible electric heating and efficient capture of unavoidable process carbon dioxide, Leilac’s patented technology aims to produce the materials needed to seize this opportunity at the lowest possible cost.”
Initially, Leilac will produce OAE materials for testing and conduct an engineering study that aims to develop the lowest cost solutions for producing zero carbon lime for OAE.
The ocean stores approximately 25% of global carbon emissions, making it the world’s largest carbon sink. The absorption of atmospheric carbon dioxide, however, makes the ocean more acidic, harming marine life and limiting the ability of the ocean to absorb more carbon dioxide.
OAE involves adding alkaline substances, like lime and magnesia, to seawater. The OAE material converts the carbon dioxide dissolved in seawater into safe neutral salts, which are already common in the ocean and known to be stable for several thousand years. This process reduces the ocean’s local acidity, helping to improve conditions for marine ecosystems and enabling the ocean to absorb more carbon dioxide from the air – resulting in safe, long-term and verifiable atmospheric carbon dioxide removal.
The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration estimates OAE has the potential to remove 1-15+ billion tpy of carbon dioxide , supporting the level of carbon dioxide removal required to meet global climate goals.
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