Gaurav Sant is the founder of Equatic, a startup building North America’s first commercial-scale ocean-based carbon removal facility. Led by Sant, who is also the Director of UCLA’s Institute for Carbon Management, Equatic enhances the ocean’s natural ability to trap and store carbon by running an electrical current through captured seawater at its facility. This year the company started manufacturing a breakthrough anode that it says promises to allow it to also use this process to safely produce green hydrogen that can be sold to help make carbon removal affordable at scale. Equatic says its Canada plant will remove 109,500 metric tons of CO2 and produce 3,600 metric tons of green hydrogen in its first year.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]What is the single most important action you think the public, or a specific company or government (other than your own), needs to take in the next year to advance the climate agenda?
More than anything, the world needs a definitive signal that climate change mitigation is vital, immediate, and not optional, and that this goal will require technological adoption of low-carbon solutions. This will focus our minds and our financial agenda so we can make the decisions needed in a time-bound manner, with a focus on measurable outcomes, not attempts and aspirations.
What is a climate solution (other than your own) that isn’t getting the attention or funding it deserves?
We are not sufficiently focused on the foundational sectors other than energy that impact our everyday lives – things like cement, steel, and plastics, which we cannot do without. These sectors need much more financial and policy support to innovate and decarbonize at scale.
Where should climate activism go in the next year?
Climate activism needs to focus on collective education and coalition building across national and sub-national jurisdictions, and from K-12 schools to retirement facilities. Such activism needs to focus on the message that technological innovation, and deployment at scale can deliver affordable, and accessible climate change mitigation, globally. But, that means we need to deploy these solutions starting now, and around the world; in the global north, and south, simultaneously.
What’s the most important climate legislation that could pass in the next year?
We need a carbon tax and/or broad-based, easily accessible mitigation incentives to drive new, low-carbon technological adoption. These are very important signals for our society.