Company with ‘game-changing’ method for removing CO₂ from air nets over $10 million
While today’s technology can suck a mere 10,000 tons of carbon dioxide from the air annually, Israel’s CarbonBlue seeks to exponentially up efficiency by extracting it from water
Sue Surkes is The Times of Israel's environment reporter
CarbonBlue, an Israeli company that claims to have a potentially game-changing way of removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, announced Monday that it had raised more than $10 million from its first seed funding round.
Excess CO₂ in the atmosphere, caused mainly by burning fossil fuels such as coal and oil, is warming the planet.
CarbonBlue claims its method can quickly remove large quantities of CO₂ from water, allowing that water to draw more CO₂ out of the atmosphere. The process, it says, can reduce industries’ carbon footprint and generate cash.
The company was founded in January 2022 by CarbonBlue CEO Dan Deviri, 33, and Iddo Tsur, 32. It initially aims to integrate its solution into existing industrial infrastructure to remove CO₂ from the massive amounts of water that are already being used. This might be in power plants, where water is used to cool temperatures, desalination stations, or fish farms.
In nature, a balance exists between the quantities of CO₂ in the air and water. If water is stripped of CO₂, it will remove and absorb more of the gas from the air.
Proof of concept
CarbonBlue’s team of 15 employees and growing has completed proof of concept at its R&D site in northern Israel’s Kibbutz Ma’agan Michael, using what looks like an improvised collection of plastic pipes, taps, and a gas balloon.
Deviri, who became the youngest student at northern Israel’s Technion—Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa at age 14 and holds three undergraduate degrees, a master’s and a PhD, explains that there is a two-step process.
The first step is to mix water with lime to create a chemical reaction. The CO₂ separates from the water, leaving decarbonated water that can be returned to the environment to absorb more atmospheric CO₂. The separated CO₂ combines with the lime to create calcium carbonate — limescale or limestone.
The process would normally take around three days, but thanks to what Deviri describes as “our secret sauce,” CarbonBlue’s reactor does it in three minutes. It generates white pellets of 97 percent pure limestone that sink to the bottom of the reactor and can be easily removed.
However, mining the limestone for the lime necessary to create the initial chemical reaction would negate many of the environmental benefits, as lime is usually extracted from quarries with fossil fuel-driven energy. To avoid that, CarbonBlue recreates its own lime to ensure that the whole process is carbon-negative.
This is achieved by reversing the process employed in the first stage by dissolving the limestone and separating it back into two compounds: lime to be reused in the reactor, and almost totally pure CO₂. The company has developed and patented an acid-based chemical method for lime regeneration together with the University of North Dakota.
To scale up the process’s first stage, a reactor resembling an upturned ocean research submersible has been built and stands ready at Ma’agan Michael. The University of North Dakota is building the pilot machinery for the second stage — recreating lime and CO₂ — which it will ship to Israel.
Once both components are ready, they will be integrated into a small facility that desalinates brackish groundwater, mainly for Kibbutz Ma’agan Michael, as part of CarbonBlue’s first semi-industrial trial.
This is intended to demonstrate that the technology is effective when scaled up. It will test metrics such as energy use — which are expected to be low — and cost. Deviri expects to be able to remove a ton of CO₂ from every 12,000 cubic meters of seawater (roughly equivalent to 4.8 Olympic-size swimming pools) and from every 4,000 cubic meters (1.6 pools) of brackish or freshwater. According to the World Bank, Israelis produced 6.3 metric tons of CO₂ per capita in 2020.
Why water?
Before developing their solution, Deviri and Tsur (the latter studied physics as part of the army’s elite Talpiot program) researched existing carbon removal methods.
They discovered that the concentration of CO₂ in water is much higher than in air, making CO₂ removal from water more efficient. In seawater, the concentration is 140 times higher than in air.
Deviri said the long-term vision was to build CarbonBlue’s machinery on some of the thousands of abandoned oil and gas processing platforms littering the world’s oceans and store the CO₂ extracted from seawater in the empty reservoirs below the seabed that once contained fossil fuels.
However, the immediate plan was to integrate the technology with existing industrial infrastructure.
“In recent years, technology worldwide has managed to remove around 10,000 tons of CO₂ a year,” said Deviri. “That hasn’t increased.”
“Now, look at [central Israel’s] Orot Rabin power station. The water they recirculate just to cool the turbines could provide 250,000 tons of CO₂ removal per year. A single power plant in Israel, albeit the biggest one, could achieve 25 times the current global capacity of engineered carbon dioxide removal. It’s low-hanging fruit,” he said.
Deviri continued that technology to remove CO₂ directly from the air was still in the R&D stage. He said, “The potential for CarbonBlue to leverage existing infrastructure and hyper-scale to remove significant amounts of CO₂ from water within 10 years is much larger than that of any other technology.”
He continued that CarbonBlue combined well-known chemical processes. Furthermore, while other water-based carbon removal companies relied on electrochemical methods, which only work on seawater or brine, which conducts electricity, CarbonBlue could remove CO₂ from any kind of water, even contaminated water in sewage treatment plants.
Working with industry
CarbonBlue has already received an up-front payment for carbon credits from Frontier, a platform through which tech giants such as Facebook’s parent company, Meta, and Google’s parent company, Alphabet, support promising carbon removal companies.
However, Deviri explained that his company’s business model was also based on selling CO₂ to make industries ranging from beverage and polymer manufacturing to non-fossil fuel-driven energy more sustainable.
Marketing and Communications director Adam Etzion said, “In environmental circles, industry is often considered an enemy. We’re saying we want to work with industry and use the existing infrastructure for good.”
Added Deviri, “We are trying to make the problem the solution rather than start from scratch.”
