PEACH DACQUIRI

Scotiabank’s support during the early stages of Development of Viable Large-scale Marine Carbon Dioxide Reduction (CDR) and Practical Electrochemical Air Capture (PEACH), has been instrumental in the success of these two projects. The amalgamation of both initiatives is now collectively known as PEACH DACQUIRI.

PEACH DACQUIRI Inc. was registered in April 2023 and led by two young talented scientists, Dr. Arthi Gopalakrishnan, PhD, CEO and Prathap Suba, CSO. It also welcomed a legal and governance scholar, Anna-Maria Hubert, an essential member of the team, to address social concerns around new technologies. Over the past year, the team has had conversations with several investor groups as it advanced its technical developments and secured patent applications. With Scotiabank’s foundational support, the team has also been able to leverage additional funding from Mitacs and the Eyes High postdocs program.

In addition to PEACH DACQUIRI’s diverse and committed team, the company is also excited about the developments in its research. Carbon dioxide removal (CDR) is now recognized as an essential climate change-mitigation technology and Canada is leading in this field. Our technology has application to CDR removal in the ocean and, potentially, to oilfield or geothermal energy recovery operations. While electrochemical means of CDR removal in the ocean have been tested before, the PEACH DACQUIRI approach is quite novel and avoids the need to add external mined minerals, a drawback of alternative approaches.

The team currently has a fully working and tested lab scale prototype that can demonstrate appropriate pH changes and CO2 uptake as cations are moved from one batch of synthetic seawater, representing deep water, and added to another batch of seawater, equivalent to shallow water. The company has collected energy-usage data for the process. It has also started to work with large area electrodes in a continuous flow cell system, replicating a real-time process necessary for operation at scale.

In the next six months, PEACH DACQUIRI plans to build a stacked cell module for continuous CO2 removal with a 0.7-tons-per-year-per-module target. The modules will be compact and scalable to large aggregate removal volumes. It hopes to have a field test in 2024 and have a Mark II lower power system concept on the drawing board.