Calcarea is a Caltech- and USC-born climate-tech company decarbonizing the shipping industry with onboard reactors that capture CO2 from ship exhaust and convert it into stable ocean bicarbonate. By speeding up the natural reaction between seawater and limestone - a process that normally takes over 10,000 years - down to about a minute, Calcarea aims to permanently and safely store roughly half of a cargo ship's emissions as slightly saltier seawater, at costs competitive with today's best carbon capture options.
Jess Adkins is a Caltech chemical oceanographer turned founder-CEO of Calcarea, a climate-tech startup that bolts a limestone-and-seawater reactor onto cargo ships to scrub up to half their CO2 and lock it away as ocean bicarbonate. After two decades studying how the deep ocean naturally buffers carbon, he spun his lab science out of the garage during COVID to attack shipping's gigatonne-a-year emissions problem at a fraction of the cost of atmospheric capture.