The Current — October 2026
October 2026
Welcome back to The Current, Calcarea’s quarterly dispatch.
Calcarea’s operations have kicked into high gear over the past few months, with a flurry of activity taking place around our pilot at AltaSea. Since our last update in July, we have fully commissioned the system, completed functional testing, and moved into a heavy performance testing phase to push our technology to the limits. We also hosted an event at the pilot as part of SoCal DeepTech Week, as well as numerous other visitors. Please simply reply to this email if you are in Los Angeles and would like to tour the pilot.
In addition to our pilot, Calcarea has been deeply engaged in the regulatory discussions that will drive the sustainable transformation of the maritime industry over the next several decades. As a U.S.-based company, we’re encouraged by deeper U.S. engagement and alignment of the International Maritime Organization (IMO) regulations with U.S. maritime leadership. Finally, we’ve explored new business models in the voluntary carbon markets to accelerate our deployments prior to regulations coming into effect.
These are some of the exciting things we’ve been up to over the last several months:
The Pilot
- We successfully started up our pilot system and transitioned from functional to performance testing, including our first multi-day campaigns. This has included different seawater flow rates and carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations. With a footprint of three twenty foot shipping containers, the unit can sequester about 75 tonnes of CO2 per year at the typical 5% concentration in shipping exhaust, or hundreds of tonnes per year at higher CO2 concentrations. Our next step is to prepare the pilot for sea trials, which are expected to start in early 2027.
- We also hosted an event for attendees of “SoCal DeepTech Week” and members of the local community. The event featured a panel discussion with Calcarea co-founder Jess Adkins and CEO Andy Stevenson, and tours of the pilot facility.
- To support our sea trials and upcoming commercial installations, Calcarea is hiring a Marine Engineer. This individual will play a key role in managing our pilot on the vessel and engaging with major shipowners around our first wave of conceptual studies for commercial deployments. Please apply via the email link on our website.
Advancing Regulations and U.S. Maritime Leadership
One of the key focuses of our policy engagement is making sure AWL, our carbon storage process, is placed on a similar footing and timing with conventional subsurface carbon sequestration and utilization. To that end we submitted a paper that was formally accepted into the IMO regulatory process, outlining the scientific basis of our technology and advocating that the Onboard Carbon Capture and Storage (OCCS) working group take a technology-neutral approach to carbon conversion. We submitted similar comments into the current revision cycle of the European Union Emissions Trading System (EU ETS). Please reply to this email for a copy of these papers.
Re-establishing U.S. maritime leadership is a key priority of the current Administration, and we were glad to see a statement from Laura DiBella, Chair of the Federal Maritime Commission, outlining priorities for the IMO Net-Zero Framework (NZF). As a U.S. company we fully believe that sustainable technologies such as onboard carbon capture systems will be core parts of international maritime pollution control. Making meaningful progress towards adopting the NZF in the near-term will create opportunities for U.S. companies like Calcarea, and many others in the biofuels and related domestic industries.
Evolving our Business Model
In addition to regulatory markets, Calcarea is also becoming active in the market for value chain emissions reductions, environmental attribute certificates, and “Scope 3” carbon credits. Selling these credits can be a way for shipping companies to generate revenue from implementing carbon reducing technologies prior to regulations coming into place. We’ve had several discussions with customers of shipping companies who want to reduce the maritime emissions in their supply chains, as well as other industry stakeholders such as life cycle analysis (LCA) protocol developers and registries. These voluntary markets are a promising way to start de-risking our technology prior to regulations coming into force.
Get Involved
We’re continuing to work closely with shipowners, operators, and other stakeholders to advance regulatory clarity, gain insights from our pilot system, and engage in early design work on our first commercial systems. To that end we’ve decided to pause our formal Ocean Compliance Coalition (OCC) but continue to engage bilaterally with customers and other parties. Please simply reply to this email if you’d like to visit us at AltaSea at the Port of Los Angeles, learn more about our technology, or engage in the development process for our first full commercial scale systems.
