Arca
Abundant life needs a healthy climate. We remove excess CO2 from the atmosphere, and transform it into rocks – naturally storing it for millennia.
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Arca is a Foresight 50 2023 Honouree
Rocking CO2 for a liveable planet.
Arca fights climate change by permanently removing CO2 from the air. We do this by developing and deploying negative emissions technologies that accelerate a natural geochemical process called carbon mineralization — the transformation of atmospheric CO2 into rock. Our mission is to help restore the atmosphere by returning gigatonnes of CO2 into the ground, where it is safely stored forever. To achieve gigatonne scale, we will partner with the critical minerals industry to support the development of net zero metals that are essential for the clean energy transition. We leverage a waste product — mine tailings — to create massive carbon sinks.
Our complete removal system consists of two components:
- Mineral Activation. Arca’s activation technology significantly increases both the capacity of certain mine tailings to store CO2 and the rate at which mine tailings mineralize carbon. Our current research is demonstrating significant improvements (10x-50x) in both the rate and capacity for CO2 storage.
- Smart Churning and tailings surface manipulation. We deploy autonomous rovers, which move over the surface of the mine tailings storage facilities, manipulating the surface and controlling factors such as surface area, moisture content, and alkalinity. Arca has demonstrated that controlling these factors can increase the rates of CO2 capture by 2-5X.
- Our first commercial pilot will begin this year. Over the 2024-2030 period, we project over 265,000 gross tonnes of permanent atmospheric carbon dioxide removal from nickel mining operations in Australia and Canada. By 2030, we expect to expand into other commodities (e.g., chromium, asbestos, diamonds, and platinum group metals) and into a third jurisdiction which would likely be Scandinavia, Southern Africa, India, or Southeast Asia.
Why our venture should be considered one of Canada’s 50 most investable cleantech companies:
There is no potential greater environmental impact than responding to climate change by permanently removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. As the weather becomes hotter and more turbulent, governments, corporations, and citizens are focusing attention and resources on the emerging Carbon Dioxide Removals (CDR) industry.
Our company is arguably one of the top CDR companies in the world, based on: world-leading science; top-tier investors, customers and partners; and a clear leading position in our particular removal pathway. Our team has world-leading scientific credibility and significant business experience with starting companies within emerging industries. We plan to remove at least one million tonnes per year when at scale, which, at $100/tonne, would make us a Canadian climate technology unicorn.