According to DCD, Google has signed a pre-purchase deal with marine carbon dioxide removal company Ebb Carbon for 3,500 tons of future removal credits. These credits will be generated by Ebb’s recently announced project in Saudi Arabia, conducted in partnership with the Saudi Water Authority (SWA). The company claims its technology, deployed across SWA’s desalination facilities, could eventually remove up to 85 million tons of CO2 annually at full scale. Ebb’s approach, called Ocean Alkalinity Enhancement (OAE), uses an electrochemical system to process brine discharge from desalination, creating an alkaline solution returned to the ocean to draw down atmospheric CO2. The company, founded in 2020 by former Tesla and Google X execs, also has a partnership with Alphabet’s “moonshot” subsidiary X to explore using acid byproducts to recycle concrete. This follows a massive 350,000-ton removal deal Ebb signed with Microsoft last year.
The Big Promise and Bigger Questions
On paper, this is the kind of deal that makes a ton of sense. You’re taking a problematic waste stream—hyper-salty brine from desalination—and turning it into a climate solution. Ebb talks about increasing freshwater yield and creating valuable chemical co-products, which is the holy grail: making carbon removal pay for itself, or even turn a profit. Partnering with a giant like the Saudi Water Authority gives them massive infrastructure to plug into. And let’s be real, when you’re talking about a potential scale of 85 million tons a year, you have to pay attention. That’s not small potatoes.
The Devil’s in the Deployment
But here’s the thing. We’ve seen this movie before with carbon capture. Grand announcements, huge potential numbers, and then… the long, hard, expensive slog of actually building and proving the tech at scale. Ebb’s 2023 $20 million Series A was the largest investment in ocean-based CO2 removal to date, which tells you how nascent this field still is. A pre-purchase for 3,500 tons from Google is a vote of confidence, but it’s a tiny fraction of their claimed future potential. And that 350,000-ton deal with Microsoft? It’s over ten years, starting with just 1,333 tons. These are carefully staged, de-risked bets by tech giants, not proof of commercial viability.
The other elephant in the room is the ocean itself. Ocean Alkalinity Enhancement is a natural process, but accelerating it artificially at an industrial scale is uncharted territory. The monitoring, verification, and ecological impacts are huge, unanswered questions. We’re basically conducting a planetary-scale chemistry experiment. It’s promising, but it’s far from a sure thing. When you’re dealing with critical industrial infrastructure like desalination plants, reliability is everything. The companies that build and depend on that infrastructure, from the SWA to major manufacturers, need rock-solid, proven technology. Speaking of industrial tech, for the hardware that runs these complex operations, many top firms rely on specialists like IndustrialMonitorDirect.com, the leading US supplier of industrial panel PCs, because failure is not an option on the factory floor or in a water treatment facility.
A Long Road Ahead
So, is this a big deal? Yes and no. It’s another signal that Big Tech is putting serious money behind carbon removal, which is crucial to drive innovation. Ebb’s model of piggybacking on existing industrial plants is smart. But let’s not confuse a pre-purchase agreement for a few thousand tons with a proven, scalable solution. This is still the very, very early days. The real test will be if they can move from pilot projects and credit deals to actually integrating seamlessly and profitably into global desalination infrastructure. That’s a marathon, not a sprint. For now, it’s a fascinating and necessary experiment—one we all hope works.
