Mangrove Water Technologies Wins $3 Million Grant in Global Carbon Reduction Competition

Congratulations to Mangrove Water Technologies!

Arman Bonakdarpour and David Wilkinson

Mangrove Water Technologies, a new UBC spin-off company, will receive up to $3 million to help commercialize a technology developed at UBC that simultaneously converts carbon dioxide and saline wastewater into value-added chemicals and reusable water. Its economic and environmental impacts could be considerable.

Formed by past and present members of professor David Wilkinson’s research group in the UBC Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, Mangrove is one of four winners of the second round of the Emissions Reduction Alberta (ERA) Grand Challenge: Innovative Carbon Uses, a multi-year, three-round global competition. In 2014, Wilkinson’s group was one of 24 first round winners, each of whom received a $500,000 prize.

The four winning projects are eligible for up to $10 million in additional funding through the final round of the competition.

Oil and gas operations produce, among other things, significant amounts of waste in the form of carbon dioxide and saline wastewater. Mangrove’s technology — an electrochemical reactor equipped with ion-selective membranes — desalinates the wastewater and converts the carbon dioxide into carbonate salts and acids for on-site use by the oil and gas industry.

Easy to operate, transport, and scale to industrial levels, the modularly designed technology offers an economical alternative to conventional desalination and CO2 removal processes. Indeed, it has the potential to significantly reduce global carbon emissions and help conserve water reserves around the world.

When coupled with a waste gas-to-power system, Mangrove’s technology could be capable of removing in excess of one megatonne of CO2 (equivalent to the annual carbon emissions from 210,000 cars) and conserving more than 11 million barrels of water (equivalent to 770 Olympic-sized swimming pools) each year in Alberta alone.

Read more about the ERA Grand Challenge: Innovative Carbon Uses