DOing our part and reversing climate change within our lifetime
A two prong approach
Carbon capture
photofuel

An ocean of opportunity

When we think of the ocean, we often think of water full of life – like fish, whales, coral reefs and seaweed.

In reality, most of the World Ocean is a lifeless desert, where barely any life form can survive.

These areas are neither populated by wild life nor human activity – this is an opportunity to produce energy without competing for resources.

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  • 65% of Earth is covered by open ocean

  • Yet only 24.4% of Earth's primary photosynthetic productivity comes from the open ocean

  • The open ocean produces biomass at merely 5% the rate of coral reefs and algal beds.

Carbon: The building block of life

Carbon is found everywhere – stored in the ocean, the atmosphere, and the crust of the earth. Carbon could spend millions of years moving through Earth in a complex cycle. A part of that, the ocean, acts as a carbon sink and can hold large amounts of carbon—about 50 times more than in the atmosphere.

This natural ebb and flow is exacerbated by man’s greenhouse gas pollution. So, understanding the carbon cycle is key to understanding Earth’s changing climate and how we can utilize it to effect positive change.

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The Oceanic Carbon Cycle

The ocean captures carbon through physical and biological processes, from CO2 dissolving into the water from the surface to the life cycle of marine organisms downwards. Over time, it has made the ocean floor a large reservoir of carbon. Much of the ocean’s nutrients lie in its cold depths. Via a process known as upwelling, currents carry carbon and nutrients to the top. Carbon is released as a gas back into the atmosphere, continuing the carbon cycle. By cycling huge amounts of carbon, the ocean helps bring order to the climate.

Image: Oceanic carbon cycle (IPCC).

What we can DO: Ocean-based carbon capture

Studies state that to keep global average temperatures within 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, greenhouse gas emissions must reach net zero by 2050. To reach a climate-neutral world, carbon dioxide removal (CDR) is required to counteract heavy emissions from industrial sectors. The oceans are already a great tool to regulate Earth’s climate and we can greatly accelerate the removal of carbon from our atmosphere by deploying artificial downwelling. Induced by pumps, artificial downwelling enhances the downward movement of cold CO2-saturated surface waters into the depths of the ocean floor for storage up to hundreds, even thousands of years.

DOing our part: Our goals

  • Enabling scalable carbon removal at low cost, without increasing ocean acidification.

  • Utilize the captured carbon as nutrition of Cyanobacteria and increasing photofuel production.

Reverse climate change within our lifetime
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In collaboration with
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We capture carbon & make fossil free fuels

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Founding team

We're a team of experienced engineers and researchers who share a passion for solving the big problems with practical solutions.

Desert Ocean Renewable Fuels and Chemicals was developed from technology spin-outs of Uppsala University and the EU Photofuel project.

Urban Carlson
Systems Engineer & CEO
Previously: co-founder of Freevalve

Passionate about

Peter Lindblad
Cyanobacteria specialist & Chief Biochemist
Researcher at Uppsala University

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Anders Höglund
Mechanical Engineer & CTO
Previously: co-founder of Freevalve

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Manifesto

Our technology does not require investment of trillions of dollars to create an electric infrastructure to store and distribute huge amount of energy.

What we have
The concept is very designed to be very scalable and cost efficient, since the challenge to replace fossil resources is at a scale that humanity has not experienced ever before.

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  • We want to replace fossil resources with CO2-negative, sustainable supplies in a way that does not;

  • compete with food production

  • require mining for copper, cobalt, aluminum, lithium or rare earth metals,

  • necessitate cooperation with dictatorships

  • jeopardize wild life or interfere with human habitats

Our solution

  • Self sustaining after installation

  • Uses automation and remote operability

  • Needs no external energy nor raw materials

Simple installation and maintainance

Our solutions are designed according to the principles of circularity and holistic system thinking.

We believe that it should be easy to do the right thing.

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12%
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87%
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$X
Per tonne C02 removed
87%
Metric description

Carbon capture & storage solutions

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Competing solutions

Desert Ocean

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Building on the Photofuel project

We use an organism capable of taking sunlight to convert CO2 and H2O into Butanol with high productivity and carbon efficiency, well proven in laboratory environment.

We have a proprietary concept for cultivation of this organism developed specially for the environment on the Desert Oceans.

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  • Photosynthetic cyanobacteria metabolizing carbon dioxide and water

  • Optimized for producing energy-dense liquid carbohydrates

  • Built in fail-safe mechanism to protect natural life

We may not save mankind

But the desert oceans may!

Image (by NASA): The dark blue areas show the largest lifeless areas on our planet. Great potential for harvesting energy and resources!

Let's create a more sustainable world
We're on a big mission – to solve the climate challenge and provide solutions for renewable fuels. We're always on the look out for new collaborations and partners.
Get in touch