Keely Anson
Our investment in Ebb Carbon
Across industries, there are many climate technologies capable of reducing carbon emissions. But turning those technologies into real-world infrastructure remains one of the hardest problems to solve. As a result, many of the most promising innovations fail to scale.
Integrating climate solutions into existing infrastructure offers a promising pathway to scale, but the road can be costly, complex, and slow. The companies that crack this challenge can scale climate impact by unlocking additional value from legacy infrastructure. When incentives are aligned, deployment follows.
A converging challenge: water and carbon
Desalination is critical to addressing the world’s growing demand for freshwater, an issue that is exacerbated by changing rainfall patterns caused by climate change. Historically, desalination generates vast volumes of brine waste. The salty waste stream left behind after freshwater is extracted. But what if this waste stream could become a climate solution?
Why Ebb Carbon?
The Autodesk Foundation is proud to support Ebb Carbon (Ebb), a company redefining both carbon removal and water infrastructure.
Ebb Carbon has developed an electrochemical water technology that uses desalination brine as a feedstock. By integrating with desalination plants and treating desalination brine before it returns to the ocean, Ebb Carbon creates multiple sources of value, including:
- Additional freshwater
- Permanent atmospheric CO₂ removal
- Valuable industrial chemicals
Integrating with existing infrastructure reduces deployment risk while improving plant economics, aligning incentives and transforming desalination plants from a single-purpose system into multi-benefit climate infrastructure.
This approach is fundamentally different from many carbon removal pathways. It does not rely on scarce feedstocks, entirely new facilities, or uncertain storage. Instead, it leverages existing industrial processes to deliver durable, scalable, and economically viable carbon removal.
Built for scale
Ebb’s model is compelling because it aligns three large and growing markets: freshwater production, carbon removal, and industrial chemicals. Together, these markets represent billions of dollars of annual economic activity. This multi-revenue design strengthens the business case beyond carbon markets alone. Desalination operators benefit from improved efficiency and lower costs, while carbon buyers gain access to high-quality, permanent removals.
Ebb Carbon has already secured early commercial traction, including offtake agreements with companies like Microsoft, Google, and Stripe, alongside partnerships with major water authorities. Importantly, their approach delivers geological-scale durability, with carbon stored safely in the ocean for hundreds to thousands of years.
Unlocking ocean-based carbon removal
Ocean-based carbon removal is one of the most promising pathways to gigaton-scale impact. Ebb’s electrochemical technology removes acid from desalination brine, enhancing a natural ocean process that permanently sequesters CO₂ while countering coastal acidification, which is a growing threat to marine ecosystems.
According to Ebb, integrating its technology with existing desalination facilities globally could enable up to 1 billion tonnes annually. Historically, these approaches have faced barriers such as high costs, permitting complexity and questions surrounding measurement, reporting, and verification (MRV).
Ebb addresses these challenges directly:
- Infrastructure integration reduces siting and permitting risk
- Rigorous MRV systems, validated by third parties, enable trusted credit issuance
- Co-product revenues improve project economics
Bridging climate mitigation and adaptation
What makes Ebb Carbon particularly compelling is its ability to address multiple facets of the climate challenge. By removing atmospheric CO₂, the company contributes directly to climate mitigation. By increasing freshwater production and reducing ocean acidification, it supports climate adaptation and ecosystem health.
Our collaboration
Through this investment, we are supporting Ebb’s next phase of development as they advance commercial deployments and scale their technology globally.
Autodesk’s technology and expertise can play a catalytic role in this work by:
- Accelerating design and integration of Ebb’s electrochemical systems into complex infrastructure
- Enabling modularization and repeatable deployment across multiple sites
- Supporting data, modeling, and visualization for large-scale industrial projects
These capabilities are critical as Ebb moves from early pilots to multi-site, infrastructure-scale deployment.
Learn more about Ebb Carbon.