Planetary - The Accelerated Carbon Transition (ACT) Platform

• Removes CO₂ from the atmosphere and store it permanently 
• Converts mine tailings into safe, pure, alkalinity
• Generates green hydrogen and battery metals that replace fossil fuels
• Reduces the local impacts of ocean acidification

In order to meet this enormous global challenge, Planetary started from first principles – looking to nature for inspiration to accelerate the rebalancing of carbon in our atmosphere and oceans. The world must reduce ongoing emissions, support adaptation of our most vulnerable areas, and remove legacy emissions.

Mining & Electrochemistry

While commodity products like hydroxides (alkalinity) are already available on the market, the carbon footprint of these would negate much of the intended carbon removals. Therefore, Planetary started from scratch to find waste minerals (mine tailings) from around the world to use as a feedstock for purification in our electrochemical cells.

We start by carefully extracting key parts of the mine tailings including recovering battery metals (like nickel and cobalt) and silica (sand) and then take the remaining purified metal salt solution into a special electrolyzer.  There, using clean, renewable electricity, the salt and water are split to make hydrogen (a clean, emissions-free fuel), and a pure alkaline hydroxide.

It’s from this point that we transport the bulk alkaline materials to our ocean outfalls site where the alkalinity is introduced to the surface ocean that then draws in CO₂, sequestering it as already abundant bicarbonate and carbonate ions in seawater.

Ocean Outfalls

Planetary’s proprietary alkalinity dosing system will readily integrate into many pre-existing ocean outfalls. This way, we can reduce the carbon intensity and footprint of building new cement and steel projects while also staying within existing local permitting for ocean discharge. 

Ocean alkalinity enhancement has enormous potential to help mitigate the climate crisis, but steps must be taken to ensure that alkalinity addition is safe, and we still have a lot to learn. For this reason, Planetary is developing a detailed framework aimed at ensuring alkalinity addition at any site is preceded by detailed research and significant public awareness. At this time, our framework contains a preliminary experimentation phase, followed by three phases of site-specific research and development.