Internship Opportunity: Electrochemical CO2 Removal from Seawater

ABOUT SeaO2

Founded in 2021, SeaO2 is a Dutch start-up company working on ocean-powered gigaton scalable carbon removal technology, with currently 14 employees. The foundations for our technology were developed at TU Delft and Wetsus in the PhD work of Rose Sarifian, supervised by David Vermaas.

OUR MOTIVATION

To limit global warming to 1.5-2 °C, it is essential that besides rapid decarbonization, carbon capture technologies are deployed to offset both historical and hard-to-abate CO2 emissions. One increasingly used approach for achieving this is marine carbon dioxide removal (mCDR) [1]. mCDR leverages the large surface area of the oceans and the high carbon concentration in seawater to ultimately facilitate the drawdown of atmospheric CO2. Scaling-up these technologies in an economically viable way will require extensive research & development, and thorough engineering.

OUR TECHNOLOGY

At SeaO2 we develop a mCDR technology that removes CO2 from the ocean through electrochemical Direct Ocean Capture (DOC). This process consists of 5 steps, as shown in the overview below. At the core of our technology is the bipolar membrane electrodialysis (BPMED) system. Using this BPMED stack, seawater is split into an acid and a base stream (1). The acid stream is thereafter used to acidify the seawater, which shifts the carbonate equilibrium towards gaseous CO2, and enables CO2 extraction from seawater through a vacuum process (2). Thereafter, the base stream is added to neutralize the seawater and the decarbonised stream is discharged back into the ocean (3). Since the ocean and atmosphere are in equilibrium, CO2 will be drawn from the atmosphere and dissolve into the decarbonised seawater (4). Ultimately, the captured CO2 can be used for permanent storage, for instance through mineralization, or utilized in other processes, like the production of renewable fuels (E).

Internship Description

We are looking for an enthusiastic master student that will join our team for an exciting research project focussed on improving the overall energy efficiency of our electrochemical process. You will contribute to the development and optimization of our bipolar membrane electrodialysis setup in our R&D facilities based in Amsterdam. This hands-on project is aimed to deepen our understanding of the electrochemical process and will involve testing of various stack components, performance analysis under seawater conditions, modeling stack parameters, and data analysis.

Your Profile

• Background in chemical engineering, chemistry, electrochemistry, process engineering or related. Looking for a master thesis internship

• Basic knowledge of electrochemistry

• Excited to learn more about electrodialysis and the carbonate system

• Good English skills, both spoken and written

References

1) S. Karunarathne et al. “Review on CO2 removal from ocean with an emphasis on direct ocean capture (DOC) technologies”, Sep. Purif. Technol., 353 (2025), 128598

2) R. Sharifian et al. “Electrochemical carbon dioxide capture to close the carbon cycle” Energy Environ. Sci. 14 (2021), 781–814

3) I. A. Digdaya et al. “A direct coupled electrochemical system for capture and conversion of CO2 from oceanwater”, Nat. Commun., 11 (2020), 1–10.