www.businessinsider.com Open in urlscan Pro
151.101.1.171  Public Scan

Form analysis
1 forms found in the DOM

POST javascript:void(0);

<form id="emailCapture" action="javascript:void(0);" method="POST" novalidate="">
  <div class="flex-parent">
    <div class="user-input-container">
      <label id="focusedLabel" class="headline-regular" for="newsletter-module-email">Email address</label>
      <input class="headline-regular" type="email" autocapitalize="off" name="newsletter-module-email" id="newsletter-module-input" placeholder="Email address" autocomplete="email" required="required">
    </div>
    <div class="mobile-error-msg error-msg headline-regular"></div>
    <div class="submit-container headline-bold">
      <input class="submit-btn headline-bold" external-event="inline-email-signup" type="submit" value="Sign up" id="NlSubmitButton" aria-label="Sign Up">
    </div>
  </div>
  <div class="desktop-error-msg error-msg headline-regular"></div>
  <div class="sign-up-tos headline-regular" id="nlTos"> By clicking ‘Sign up’, you agree to receive marketing emails from Insider as well as other partner offers and accept our
    <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/terms" target="_blank" rel="" data-analytics-post-depth="20">Terms of Service</a> and
    <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/privacy-policy" target="_blank" rel="" data-analytics-post-depth="20">Privacy Policy</a>. </div>
</form>

Text Content

Jump to

 1. Main content
 2. Search
 3. Account


Menu icon A vertical stack of three evenly spaced horizontal lines. Search icon
A magnifying glass. It indicates, "Click to perform a search".
Insider logo The word "Insider".
0
Newsletters

Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders. It often
indicates a user profile.

Log in

Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders. It often
indicates a user profile.
Subscribe
 * Business
   * Tech
   * Finance
   * Markets
   * Strategy
   * Retail
   * Advertising
   * Healthcare
   * Premium
 * Life
   * Entertainment
   * Culture
   * Travel
   * Food
   * Health
   * Parenting
   * Beauty
   * Style
 * News
   * Politics
   * Military & Defense
   * Sports
   * Opinion
 * Reviews
   * Tech
   * Streaming
   * Home
   * Kitchen
   * Style
   * Beauty
   * Gifts
   * Deals
   * Pets
   * Parenting
   * Coupons
   * Health
   * Learning
   * Hobbies & Crafts
   * Travel
 * Video
 * All
   * A-Z
   * Advertising
   * Business
   * Careers
   * Coupons
     * DoorDash
     * Walmart
     * Dell
     * Staples
     * Under Armour
   * Culture
   * Design
   * Entertainment
   * Executive Lifestyle
   * Finance
   * Food
   * Health
   * Healthcare
   * Intelligence
   * Latest
   * Life
   * Markets Insider
   * Media
   * Military & Defense
   * News
   * Opinion
   * People
   * Personal Finance
     * Banking
     * Credit Cards
     * Insurance
     * Investing
     * Loans
     * Mortgages
   * Politics
   * Premium
   * Retail
   * Reviews
   * Science
   * Sports
   * Strategy
   * Tech
   * Transportation
   * Travel
   * Featured
   * Talent Insider
   * About
   * About
   * Advertise
   * Careers
   * Code of Ethics
   * Contact Us
   * Corporate
   * Corrections Policy
   * Follow
   * RSS
   * Sitemap
   * Facebook
   * Twitter
   * Instagram
   * YouTube
   * LinkedIn
   * Subscriptions
   * Intelligence
   * Premium


US Markets Open H M S In the news

Dow Jones
+0.01%

Nasdaq
+0.17%

S&P 500
+1.1%

META
+0.25%

TSLA
-1.33%

BABA
+0.93%

Close icon Two crossed lines that form an 'X'. It indicates a way to close an
interaction, or dismiss a notification.
Chevron icon It indicates an expandable section or menu, or sometimes previous /
next navigation options. HOMEPAGE
0
Newsletters

Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders. It often
indicates a user profile.

Log in
Subscribe
Home Chevron icon It indicates an expandable section or menu, or sometimes
previous / next navigation options. Business Insider


HOW Y COMBINATOR-BACKED SEABOUND IS USING CARBON-CAPTURE TECH TO TACKLE THE
SHIPPING INDUSTRY'S PROBLEMATIC EMISSIONS

Tasmin Lockwood
Aug 21, 2023, 3:26 PM GMT+1
Save Article Icon A bookmark
Facebook Icon The letter F. Email icon An envelope. It indicates the ability to
send an email.
Share icon An curved arrow pointing right.
Twitter icon A stylized bird with an open mouth, tweeting. Twitter LinkedIn icon
The word "in". LinkedIn Fliboard icon A stylized letter F. Flipboard Facebook
Icon The letter F. Facebook Email icon An envelope. It indicates the ability to
send an email. Email Link icon An image of a chain link. It symobilizes a
website link url. Copy Link
Read in app


The Seabound team inside one of its containers part way through the first on
board installation. Mark Potter

Redeem now







.
 * Shipping produces about 3% of the world's annual greenhouse-gas emissions.
 * The UN's International Maritime Organization has set a 2050 target for the
   industry to get to net zero.
 * The Y Combinator-backed Seabound believes its on board carbon-capture tech
   can play a key role.
 * This article is part of "The Blue Economy," a series exploring how the ocean
   ecosystem is being used and preserved by humanity. For more climate-action
   news, visit Insider's One Planet hub.
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   

Get the inside scoop on today’s biggest stories in business, from Wall Street to
Silicon Valley — delivered daily.
Loading Something is loading.


Thanks for signing up!

Access your favorite topics in a personalized feed while you're on the go.
download the app

Email address



By clicking ‘Sign up’, you agree to receive marketing emails from Insider as
well as other partner offers and accept our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.

Alisha Fredriksson didn't expect to be living on a cargo ship this summer.
Luckily, she and her team are taking the three-month stints in turns.

Fredriksson is the cofounder and CEO of Seabound, a climate-tech startup that
aims to lower the greenhouse-gas emissions produced by the shipping industry.

Seabound, backed by the famed accelerator Y Combinator, has built a
carbon-capture machine that can be retrofitted onto ships. It absorbs CO2 from
the exhaust gas and turns it into limestone pebbles, which can then be sold as a
building material.

From avocados to clothing, about 90% of traded goods are carried on the ocean.
As the backbone of global trade, shipping is responsible for 3% of annual
greenhouse-gas emissions — a figure the industry must slash. The UN's
International Maritime Organization recently set a goal for the sector to reach
net zero "by or around" 2050. 

Net zero means to balance out the amount of emissions that are emitted with
those that are removed from the atmosphere. Shipping, along with aviation and
steelmaking, is considered a hard-to-abate industry because of its global
complexities and reliance on fossil fuels.

It could cost up to $1.9 trillion to decarbonize shipping, a 2020 study by
University College London and the environmental consultancy University Maritime
Advisory Services found. 

"Shipping now faces a much harder challenge than it would have done had it been
better at adapting and improving over the last 10 to 20 years. It's become very
urgent now," said Stephen Turnock, the head of the engineering school at
Southampton University, of the International Maritime Organization's latest
guidance. 

Some form of carbon capture will be needed for shipping to "keep the world
spinning" as it moves toward more sustainable practices, said Ed Phillips, a
partner at the impact-investment fund Future Planet Capital.


Seabound cofounders Alisha Fredriksson and Roujia Wen. Seabound


PILOTING THE TECHNOLOGY ON BOARD 

Seabound's end goal is to capture 95% of the carbon produced by a ship, though
its current prototype captures only a small fraction of that.  Having tested it
on land, Seabound is now using a commercial container ship as its lab in a pilot
project with the London-based shipping company Lomar Shipping.

Seabound moved the prototype from its London research-and-development facility
to a shipyard in Yalova, Turkey, where it has been installed on a midsize ship
that can carry about 3,200 containers, Fredriksson said. Her team will take
turns living on board to test the equipment in a real maritime environment. 

The equipment connects to the ship's exhaust, which flows through a reactor full
of pebbles made of calcium-oxide – otherwise known as quicklime, limestone
without the CO2. Then a mineralization process takes place where carbon dioxide
binds to the pebbles to essentially become limestone. The fumes, now cleaner,
are released through an outlet pipe. The limestone is temporarily stored on
board and replaced with fresh calcium-oxide pebbles when the ship docks. 

The startup's opportunity is threefold: Seabound sells the carbon-capture device
to ship owners, runs a subscription service for pebble collections to make it
easy for shipowners to source new pebbles and offload used ones, and then sells
the limestone pebbles to be used as a building material or to be sequestered.

If the pilot goes well, the team will start designing and testing a new, bigger
version of the device that will be its first product. 

"We will need some time to basically build that first product, so we want to
move out of prototyping land and into actually having a product at a meaningful
scale for our customers," Fredriksson said. "Then once we have really tested
that on land, that's when we put the first full-scale version on a ship again." 


A member of the Seabound team installing equipment inside a shipping container
on board a cargo ship. Alisha Fredriksson


ENERGY AND WEIGHT CHALLENGES 

Ships usually get lighter through their voyage because they use up fuel, but
capturing carbon means storing it on board in some form, which adds weight,
according to Turnock. "It might need a little more power to go through the
water," he said. 

It's likely a small amount of power, he added, but it's compounded by the weight
and size of the carbon-capture device itself. "If it's quite heavy, then it
usually has to be low down on the ship, and then there might be difficulty to
find the necessary volume to actually fit the system in without losing cargo
capacity."

"Shipowners are loath to lose cargo-carrying capacity because that's what makes
them their money," Turnock said.

In its first pilot, Seabound placed its equipment into five shipping containers
stacked on top of each other on the ship. It may require owners to sacrifice "a
little bit of cargo" within the ship's max capacity, and "fuel consumption is
relative to that capacity," Fredriksson said. 

Fredriksson added that Seabound's reaction was exothermic, meaning it needed an
injection of heat to get started but then was self-sustaining. It has a "very
negligible energy consumption on board," she said. 


Seabound's pilot equipment is installed on this ship. Alisha Fredriksson


DECARBONIZATION REQUIRES ALL HANDS ON DECK

There are a handful of other approaches to maritime carbon capture, such as
using the captured carbon to charge a CO2 battery, but overall it's a very
nascent space. "It's not an industry, it's an emerging category," Fredriksson
said. 

"What's interesting is that we're actually all trying different approaches," she
added. "It's our responsibility as technology innovators or developers to figure
out how we can work strategically or creatively within existing infrastructural
constraints."

Fredriksson said there were a host of creative ways being pursued to address the
shipping industry's emissions. "If we were all trying the same thing, it would
be kind of silly."

Carbon capture aside, electric ships or alternative fuels are favored by others.
Maersk, one of the largest container carriers in the world, is betting on green
methanol as a fuel, while other startups hope electrification will take off. 

"We're focused more on the opportunity with e-methanol, with ammonia, hydrogen,
and electrification; it's just avoiding being leapfrogged," said Future Planet
Capital's Phillips. "As an investor with a long-term view, sometimes backing a
technology that solves an issue in the short-term can be a risk in itself."
Still, Seabound's tech looks "pretty elegant" to the outsider. 

Leapfrogging doesn't make sense when most ships today run on fossil fuels and
are still being ordered, Fredriksson said. Ships typically have a 30-year
lifespan, she added. The cost of a complete overhaul to an electric fleet or one
that runs on alternative fuel would be "prohibitively expensive" while the
technologies themselves are still immature, she added. At scale, Seabound
intends to retrofit ships when they are in dry docks for routine maintenance. 

Turnock expects to see a patchwork of technologies emerge. The best solution
will depend on whether it's a short-distance ferry or a cargo ship sailing the
high seas, he said. "I don't think there's a magic bullet out there."

"We should be thinking about solutions which are overall good for the
environment and make sense, not just ways of bookkeeping CO2 so we're just
displacing the problem," he added. 

Sign up for notifications from Insider! Stay up to date with what you want to
know.
Subscribe to push notifications

Read next


Startups
Advertisement



Close icon Two crossed lines that form an 'X'. It indicates a way to close an
interaction, or dismiss a notification.

Advertisement

Recommended video

Advertisement

Advertisement

Advertisement

Advertisement



Follow us on:






 * * Copyright © 2023 Insider Inc. All rights reserved. Registration on or use
   of this site constitutes acceptance of our
 * Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.

 * Contact Us
 * Masthead
 * Sitemap
 * Disclaimer
 * Accessibility
 * Commerce Policy
 * Advertising Policies
 * Coupons
 * Made in NYC
 * Jobs @ Insider

 * Stock quotes by finanzen.net
 * Reprints & Permissions

Your Privacy Choices

 * International Editions:
 * United States US
 * International INTL
 * Asia AS
 * Deutschland & Österreich AT
 * Deutschland DE
 * España ES
 * India IN
 * Japan JP
 * México MX
 * Netherlands NL
 * Polska PL