To achieve the global climate objectives set in the 2015 Paris Agreement, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change asserts 10 GtCO2 will need to be captured annually between now and 2050, in addition to halting current emissions. One promising approach to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is to speed up natural carbon sequestering processes…cue Tilly and Eddy.

Tilly and Eddy are two autonomous rovers working tirelessly to crush mine tailings on Mt. Keith, a nickel mine in the Western Australian desert. Nickel is mined from ultra-mafic rock that is rich in iron and magnesium minerals that, when exposed to air, react with carbon dioxide to form solid carbonates. During natural weathering and erosion processes, these reactions remove carbon from the atmosphere and lock it up in rock where it stays for millennia.  Arca, a UBC spin-out company, is using Tilly and Eddy to accelerate this natural process. Tilly’s job is to till the mine tailings into a fine sand to maximize surface area for carbonate reactions. Eddy follows Tilly and uses eddy-covariance methods to monitor carbon dioxide drawdown rates. To-date, Arca’s pilot project at Mt. Keith is already sequestering carbon at a rate of 40,000 tons carbon dioxide per year, representing 11% of the mine’s total greenhouse gas emissions. 

Nickel is a critical component of electric vehicle batteries. As we transition from fossil fuels to electric vehicle-based transportation, nickel mining is expected to expand drastically. This presents a serious sustainability challenge as nickel mining itself is environmentally intensive and involves fossil fuel emissions. Arca hopes to offset those emissions with its carbon capture technology. Given the extent of global mining operations and the fields of ultra-mafic mining tailings that already exist, there is significant potential for Arca to scale their operations to meet significant carbon sequestration objectives. The company is already one of 20 finalist teams competing for the Musk Foundation's $50 million grand prize, which will be awarded to a group that can permanently sequester 1,000 tones of carbon in a year and prove their potential to capture 1 billion tons per year. 

Arca was founded three years ago through the entrepreneurship@UBC program by UBC Earth Oceans and Atmospheric Science Professor Dr. Greg Dipple and geologists Bethany Ladds and Peter Scheuermann. Since then, the company has won several prestigious awards including Startup of the Year in Foresight’s BC Cleantech awards and was labeled one of Canada’s 50 Most Investible Cleantech Ventures by Foresight Canada.