Equatic, a carbon removal company, has announced the US manufacturing of oxygen-selective anodes (OSAs), an advancement in scalable hydrogen production via seawater electrolysis. Developed by Equatic’s co-founder and lead scientist, Dr. Xin Chen, at UCLA, OSAs eliminate the need for pure water, allowing the use of seawater to produce hydrogen without harmful chlorine gas emissions. The development of OSAs was supported by the US Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) with a $3 million grant.
The first OSA manufacturing facility will be located in San Diego, California, where production is expected to reach 4,000 anodes annually by the end of 2024. The facility will be staffed by specialists from industries such as electronics and medical devices, contributing to job creation and training opportunities throughout Southern California as operations scale up.
“Traditional electrolysis has only been possible with pure water, an increasingly scarce global resource. Equatic’s OSAs eliminate the process’s dependence on pure water and it taps into the world’s most abundant water resource instead: the ocean,” said Dr. Doug Wicks, a program director at ARPA-E, a U.S. Department of Energy agency that funds early stage, potentially game-changing energy technologies. “This U.S. discovery will be manufactured by a team of highly-skilled technicians in San Diego, fueling our domestic clean economy and creating ripple effects that will be felt worldwide.”
In 2021, Dr. Chen’s team at UCLA began developing this seawater electrolysis method, which avoids chlorine gas production a significant environmental hazard. The team designed catalysts that stabilize chlorine in seawater while generating hydrogen. This innovation extends the life of anodes, which can be refurbished by applying new, affordable catalytic coatings made from affordable, earth-abundant elements. The project has produced results that are crucial to scaling hydrogen production and carbon removal technologies.
Edward Sanders, Equatic’s Chief Operating Officer, emphasized the importance of this technology: “This breakthrough will allow us to scale to gigaton levels of carbon removal. It also addresses critical challenges in the clean energy and carbon removal industries, particularly cost and infrastructure availability, such as CO2 pipelines or desalination plants. The production of OSAs opens doors for coastal regions worldwide to play a pivotal role in meeting climate goals.”
Equatic’s proprietary process combines electrolysis and direct air capture, producing both clean hydrogen and removing carbon dioxide, which generates a dual revenue stream. The clean hydrogen output will help lower the cost of carbon removal to less than $100 per tonne by 2030, further accelerating global climate efforts.
The San Diego facility will play a key role in the upcoming demonstration-scale plant, Equatic-1, in Singapore, as well as the first commercial-scale plant in Quebec. By 2026, the Quebec facility will be capable of removing 109,500 tonnes of CO2 and producing 3,600 tonnes of green hydrogen annually. Equatic is also committed to ongoing research that will continue to improve the efficiency and sustainability of OSAs, ensuring a robust domestic supply chain for future manufacturing.