Transcription
[Music] Thank you for tuning in to the Northern Minor. We're at the AM Roundup event in Vancouver. Carbon capturing and sequestration is a hot topic at the moment. Here to tell us more is Acra Technology's founder, Greg Dipple. Thanks for joining me.
My pleasure. Thanks for having me.
Okay, so, uh, tell us more about Acra. I, uh, understand that it was born out of your research work at the University of British Columbia.
Yeah, so Acra Climate Technologies is the full name. Acra is a, uh, we are a spin-out from the University of British Columbia, building on more than 20 years of research that we did at UBC in collaboration with the mining industry. And now, uh, with Acra, we are building and working, uh, projects, uh, with mining companies using their tailings to capture carbon dioxide from the air and permanently store it in minerals.
Oh, wow. Okay, so how prevalent is the potential to, to store carbon in mineral tailings?
Yeah, so we need the right kind of tailings. So we work in tailings that are mafic to ultramafic in composition, so iron and magnesium-rich tailings. A lot of our current work is with mining companies in the nickel industry. And so the important thing is the host rock, because we're working with the waste, the tailings. If they are ultramafic in composition, then we can use them to capture CO2 from air and mineralize it, store it permanently. If you look at the scale of mining in ultramafic rocks today and the, and the historical deposits of tailings, there's the opportunity to store billions of tons of CO2.
Mhm. All right, so tell me a little bit more. How can Acra, Acra help mining companies sequester their carbon emissions?
Yeah, we partner with mining companies, deploy our people and our technology on the surface of the tailings storage facility with autonomously, uh, controlled, uh, Rovers and monitoring equipment that can measure the rate of carbon capture that's happening ambiently. And then we deploy our smart churning technology, which then allows us to elevate the rate of carbon capture. We also monitor that, and we, uh, have the, uh, contracts with, um, through the voluntary carbon markets to monetize those carbon credits.
I understand that you're also busy working on a white paper on the topic. Uh, can you tell us a little bit more about what will be contained in that and when will you publish it?
Yeah, so we're, we are working on, uh, we are working on a white paper that talks about the billion-dollar opport, the multi-billion dollar opportunity that we have using ultramafic mine tailings. And that white paper is should be, uh, released imminently. It's in collaboration with the, uh, climate agency out of the UK and Will McNamara, uh, as well. So it'll be a jointly produced white paper that is due out, uh, probably next month.
All right, so has Acra's technology been tested in the field at this stage?
Yes, we have a, we have a pilot we're running at the Mount Keith nickel mine in Western Australia with BHP. So we're demonstrating our technology at the scale of about 30 C s, capturing, uh, CO2 and, and demonstrating the effectiveness of our technology so that these, uh, results can be used to build, uh, future projects.
Can you perhaps share some of the key learnings from that pilot project?
Yeah, so, um, it's a big difference running a research project at a university, even if it's field-based, and operating at a, at a large scale at an operating mine. So we've, uh, you know, been able to fully integrate our operations into the process at a, at a working mine. So we have team is there, team is there seven, 7 days a week, staying on site 24 hours a day, working through, through the mining cycle and integrating all of our work with all the important safety, uh, regulations and everything else. Demonstrate that we can not only, uh, measure the rates of carbon capture, we can deploy our acceleration technology. We have, uh, measured and demonstrated the acceleration of CO2 capture and, uh, basically delivering the, uh, just in the process of, uh, in the next 6 months writing up the final results of that, which will demonstrate the scale at which we can capture CO2. And those data will ultimately feed into, uh, uh, protocols that are being used in registries in the voluntary carbon markets to allow those carbon credits, uh, use to enable our technology to ultimately be able to use to monetize carbon credits.
Okay, so I, I'm just very curious. Could you please explain in very plain language how the mechanism will work? Really, how, how do rocks sequester carbon just by themselves? How does?
Yeah, so, um, chemical weathering is a natural geologic process. It actually regulates the climate of the planet on geologic time. So 50 million years ago, there were no Antarctic ice sheets. The Indian plate, uh, hit the Asian plate, created the Himalayas. That increased the rate of chemical weathering globally, cooled the planet enough that the Antarctic ice sheets formed. So over geologic time, chemical weathering, reaction of CO2 in the air with rocks, regulates long-term climate change. So we're using that same process, but because we take finely ground mine waste in tailings, especially flotation tails, uh, we have materials that react a million times faster. So we can take processes that normally operate over geologic time and we can show in real time how these tailings are reacting with the CO2 in air and making carbonate minerals to store that CO2.
Fascinating. So, uh, what's next for Acra? Um, what kind of other technologies are in the pipeline?
Yeah, so the, right now, we're the technology we're deploying at Mount Keith is our smart churn technology. It relies on the inherent reactivity, which is important, but relatively modest. We have several different technologies that we're working on to activate the minerals in the tailings so that they're more reactive. And so that technology will ultimately be rolled out and then deployed with smart churning that allows us to capture CO2 at a faster rate. It allows us to store more CO2 in each ton of tailings, and it opens up our technology to be able to be applied at many more mine sites. So it's with this activation technology that is our, our pathway to operating at the hundreds of millions tons to gigatons scale.
Ultimately. Wow. This is a story that really gets me excited. All right, uh, there you have it. Acra Technologies' founder, Greg Dipple. Thank you for joining me.
Thank you.