Pierre Forin

Shipping goods across the oceans is a huge contributor to climate change, producing about 3% of global greenhouse gas emissions each year.

And since batteries still can’t propel massive vessels over thousands of miles, it’s also one of the trickiest sectors to clean up.

Pierre Forin, 30, initially worked on this problem at the research arm of TotalEnergies, the French energy giant. But in 2021, he moved to Caltech to collaborate with a pair of professors based there and at the University of Southern California, to develop lab-scale reactors to test and tinker with a system for trapping and storing away much of a ship’s carbon dioxide pollution. 

The following year, the trio raised $3.5 million and co-founded Calcarea, a Caltech spinout named after an ocean sponge, a reference to the technology’s ability to soak up carbon dioxide emissions. 

The company’s technology directs the ship’s exhaust through seawater, which forms carbonic acid. That mixture then runs through a bed of limestone to create bicarbonate ions, mimicking the chemistry that already locks away vast amounts of carbon in the oceans. 

Forin, the company’s chief technology officer, says the resulting water can be harmlessly released into the ocean along the voyage. That sidesteps much of the energy requirements and costs of compressing and storing carbon dioxide, which other approaches to capturing and sequestering the greenhouse gas rely on.

The company is also exploring the possibility of using the same technology to capture and dispose of carbon dioxide from  factories on land, like cement plants near coastlines.

Calcarea plans to install the first pilot unit on a commercial vessel next year, and it hopes to begin selling its technology in 2027 or 2028. That’s about the same time that the UN’s International Maritime Organization intends to implement emissions restrictions and set a carbon price on the shipping sector.

The company’s system won’t capture all of a ship’s climate emissions—and it remains to be seen which of the various approaches to cleaning up the sector will gain the most traction over the long term. 

But Calcarea has developed a product that should be market-ready just as regulations start to force change across the industry, helping shipping companies to start cutting pollution as they crisscross our oceans.