USC technology may reduce shipping emissions by half
New research shows how a shipboard system using limestone and seawater could cut maritime CO2 emissions by 50%.
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William Berelson of USC, left, and Jess Adkins of Caltech are studying processes that would trap and store greenhouse gases out at sea. (USC Photo) screenshot from video.
view moreCredit: USC
Scientists at USC and Caltech, in collaboration with startup company Calcarea, have developed a promising shipboard system that could remove up to half of carbon dioxide emitted from shipping vessels by converting it into an ocean-safe solution.
The breakthrough, described in Science Advances, describes how the system could reduce carbon emissions from the shipping industry — one of the world’s most difficult-to-decarbonize sectors.
“What’s beautiful about this is how simple it is,” said William Berelson, the Paxson H. Offield Professor in Coastal and Marine Systems at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences and co-corresponding author of the study. “We’re speeding up a process the ocean already uses to buffer CO2 — but doing it on a ship, and in a way that can meaningfully reduce emissions at scale.”
The process mimics a natural chemical reaction in the ocean. As ships move through seawater, CO2 from their exhaust is absorbed into water pumped onboard, making it slightly more acidic. That water is then passed through a bed of limestone, where the acid reacts with the rock to form bicarbonate — a safe, stable compound that exists naturally in seawater. The treated water, now stripped of CO2, is then discharged back into the ocean.
“What’s most exciting to me is that this started as a pure science question: How does the ocean buffer CO2?” Berelson added. “From there, we realized we might have a real-world solution that could help fight climate change.”
From lab to sea
Maritime shipping accounts for nearly 3% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Yet current solutions, like low-carbon fuels and electrification, remain expensive or impractical for long-distance voyages.
“We see our approach as a complementary strategy that could help ships reduce their environmental impact without major design overhauls,” said Jess Adkins, co-founder and CEO of Calcarea and the Smits Family Professor of Geochemistry and Global Environmental Science at Caltech.
In the lab, the researchers tested key elements of the process, using controlled amounts of seawater, limestone and CO2. Their experiments aligned closely with theoretical predictions, giving them confidence to scale up their modeling to the size necessary to work on real vessels.
“We wanted to show that we not only understood the chemistry — we could also predict how much CO2 would be neutralized,” Berelson said. “That allowed us to model what this might look like on an actual ship.”
The study also used sophisticated ocean modeling to examine what would happen when the bicarbonate-rich water is released back into the sea. Simulations tracked a hypothetical ship traveling repeatedly between China and Los Angeles over a 10-year period, discharging treated water along the route. The models showed negligible impact on ocean pH and chemistry — an important validation for the technology’s environmental safety.
The researchers estimate that widespread adoption of the technique could reduce shipping-related CO2 emissions by 50%.
“This is the kind of scale we need if we’re going to make a real dent in global emissions,” Berelson said. “It’s not going to happen overnight, but it shows what’s possible.”
Bringing the technology to market
The academic work is running in parallel with Calcarea, a startup company working to bring the technology to market. The company is in early discussions with commercial shippers and exploring pilot programs that would test the technology on working vessels.
Calcarea previously announced a collaboration with Lomar Shipping’s corporate venture lab, Lomar Labs, to commercialize and deploy their shipboard carbon capture system.
“Scalability is built into our design,” Adkins said. “We’re engineering a system that can integrate with existing vessels and be adopted fleetwide. By working directly with industry partners, we’re accelerating the path from lab to ocean.”
Berelson, a co-founder and scientific advisor for Calcarea, continues to study the science behind the approach, including reaction rates and long-term impacts on ocean chemistry.
The carbon capture device mimics the ocean’s natural carbon capture process but at a faster rate. (USC Photo/Nina Raffio)
USC Dornsife’s William Berelson explains the technology behind the carbon capture device. (USC Photo/Nina Raffio)
Will Berelson’s grad students test the project’s tech on Catalina Island. (Jason Goode/USC Wrigley Institute)
Journal
Science Advances
Method of Research
Computational simulation/modeling
Subject of Research
Not applicable
Article Title
Potential of CO2 sequestration through accelerated weathering of limestone on ships
Article Publication Date
18-Jun-2025
COI Statement
J.F.A. is the cofounder and chief executive officer of Calcarea Inc. W.M.B. is also cofounder of Calcerea Inc. J.F.A. and W.M.B. are inventors on patent application (#11,235,278 B2) held by Caltech and USC that covers systems and methods for CO2 sequestration in marine vessels. The authors declare that they have no other competing interests.
Ingroup bias leads to troubled waters for regulatory enforcement, shows study of private shipping inspectors
University of Toronto, Rotman School of Management
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Sae-Seul Park is an Assistant Professor of Strategic Management at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management. Her research examines strategic human capital through the lens of knowledge management, with an emphasis on understanding how the interplay of incentives and social relationships shapes knowledge and learning processes that underlie outcomes at both the individual and the organizational levels. Her work considers how individual-level human capital characteristics influence the drivers of performance by the collective human capital pool, focusing on the antecedents and consequences of intraorganizational knowledge transfer and human capital development.
view moreCredit: Sae-Seul Park
Toronto -- Ingroup bias happens when people give preferential treatment to others they believe belong to their group. The group could be anything -- gender-based, religious, a fellow fan of the same sports team. What matters is the perception of a shared identity that creates a sense of trust and disarms scrutiny.
“Ingroup bias is a prevalent and consistent psychological force,” says Sae-Seul Park, an assistant professor of strategic management at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management. “It bleeds over even into things that should be completely objective, such as judicial rulings.”
As she discovered, it also included marine vessel inspectors with shared nationality. Prof. Park developed a research relationship with a private marine inspection company in an unnamed jurisdiction and was given access to data on the regulatory compliance inspections done by its employees. The resulting study appeared in Strategic Management Journal.
Two years of data from 27,637 routine inspections for commercial vessels—from oil tankers to cargo ships—showed that inspections of domestic vessels were 11% shorter on average than inspections for foreign ships, even though all inspections follow globally mandated standards and are conducted in English.
That was, until a catastrophic accident involving a heavily overloaded domestic vessel, with hundreds of casualties and national outrage when it was revealed the boat had received only a cursory inspection and failed to meet minimum safety standards.
Even though the vessel was not inspected by the private firm followed by Prof. Park, the pattern she’d previously noted among its inspectors was reversed in the accident’s aftermath. Inspections of domestic vessels became 18% longer than those for foreign craft, equivalent to about one hour and 12 minutes.
That, she says, is an indication that the previous ingroup trust with domestic clients was broken by the accident, prompting more rigorous inspections. This finding also provides evidence that shorter inspection times for domestic clients were indeed driven by ingroup bias, rather than other factors.
If that were not the case, “we should see that inspectors exercise greater scrutiny for all inspections after that incident,” she says. “What we observe though is that everyone becomes more careful only for ingroup vessels.”
The change was driven by inspectors with less additional training on top of the minimum requirements for the job. That group bumped up their inspection time for domestic vessels by an extra hour and 20 minutes, or 22%. No such increase was seen for better trained inspectors, perhaps because there was less room for improvement, Prof. Park wrote in her study, co-authored with Sunkee Lee and Oliver Hahl, both of Carnegie Mellon University.
Additional training can be used as a marker of professionalism, the researchers said, and the data shows that professionalism can act as a counterweight to the influence of ingroup bias on compliance monitoring.
The results show that “human capital is important—and individual human capital characteristics are important too,” says Prof. Park, meaning that companies concerned with enforcing standards need to pay attention not only to policies but to the people doing the work.
“No matter how hard a firm works to set optimal routines and manage operations, ultimately, it’s people who execute the actions that implement these strategies,” she says.
Bringing together high-impact faculty research and thought leadership on one searchable platform, the Rotman Insights Hub offers articles, podcasts, opinions, books and videos representing the latest in management thinking and providing insights into the key issues facing business and society. Visit www.rotman.utoronto.ca/insightshub.
The Rotman School of Management is part of the University of Toronto, a global centre of research and teaching excellence at the heart of Canada’s commercial capital. Rotman is a catalyst for transformative learning, insights and public engagement, bringing together diverse views and initiatives around a defining purpose: to create value for business and society. For more information, visit www.rotman.utoronto.ca.
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For more information:
Ken McGuffin
Manager, Media Relations
Rotman School of Management
University of Toronto
E-mail:mcguffin@rotman.utoronto.ca
Journal
Strategic Management Journal
Method of Research
Observational study
Subject of Research
People
Article Title
Mitigating ingroup bias in regulatory firms: The role of inspector professionalism
