DIPA - Climate Innovation

About...

DIPA is a non-profit organisation representing a group of innovative companies developing new ways to decarbonise industries and eventually our planet. DIPA's members are mostly small companies working on alternative methods of preventing, capturing and finding ways to use much of the carbon created by heavy industries.

There is no single technology that can resolve the environmental damage done by industry over the centuries. Global corporations, scientific researchers and world-class universities have been working on this for decades. But history teaches us that new technologies, new solutions, new approaches often come from small companies, innovative startups and motivated enthusiasts. In 2023, we set up DIPA to organise these into a coherent group each with technologies that can be integrated to form a complete, holistic approach that might one day clean our environment.

DIPA - the Decentralised Integrated Process Approach is a non-profit organisation representing smaller companies, each of which is researching and developing a component of our overall solution. DIPA represents these companies' business interests and ensures their voices are heard in government, NGOs, financial institutions and in global public media.

Technologies developed by DIPA members are already in operation in countries around the world. Most have completed their technology development and are building prototypes that will go into industrial-scale operations before the end of 2023.

Mineral Carbonation

The mineralisation of CO2, also known as mineral carbonation or CO2 mineral sequestration, for the long-term storage of CO2 is a CCS option (IPCC, 2005) that presents presumably the most important alternative for the more widely advocated method of CO2 capture and geological storage (CCGS) in underground formations. Mineral carbonation is nature's own way of capturing and storing carbon with the best-known example likely being England's White Cliffs of Dover where carbon is captured from the sea and permanently stored in calcium carbonate or white chalk.

Mineral carbonation is a FAR better option for storing carbon than pumping it into underground caverns where it will almost certainly leak back into the environment over time. Mineral carbonation permanently stores captured carbon in a solid, mineral form that is 100% natural and 100% environmentally neutral whereas all the underground carbon sequestration in the world doesn't permanently capture a single tonne of carbon. Much of DIPA members research and development integrates various new and innovative technologies with permanent natural carbon capture like mineral carbonation.

Mineral carbonation is a 100% natural chemical process that operates over geological time. However, new advances in industrial chemistry and new industrial processes have demonstrated that these times can be reduced from centuries to days. Many industrial processes such as steel making already use rapid mineral carbonation in their "weathering" processes where waste material is kept in a pool of water for several weeks to naturally reduce internal chemicals such as free lime, thereby allowing materials like steel slag to be sold as a cement additive or for use in road surfacing.

Mineral carbonation is an integral technology in many of DIPA's innovations. Recent experiments have demonstrated that using industrial scale mineral carbonation can result in carbon-neutral and in some cases even CARBON-NEGATIVE energy generation and materials production.

Hydrogen

Hydrogen is the smallest, lightest and most abundant element in the universe, accounting for around 75% of all the matter in the universe. Hydrogen is a component of water and of most organic compounds in our world. It is widely acknowledged as the best candidate to replace the burning of fossil fuels as burning hydrogen does not emit any carbon. When done cleanly and correctly, the burning of hydrogen to produce energy results only in the production of pure, clean water.

As ideal as it is, the production, transportation and storage of hydrogen are not without problems and these are areas where DIPA members are focussing their research. Today, the majority of hydrogen (∼95%) is produced from fossil fuels by steam reforming of natural gas and other light hydrocarbons, partial oxidation of heavier hydrocarbons, and coal gasification. These typically result in carbon dioxide emissions and are often referred to as grey hydrogen when emissions are released to the atmosphere, and blue hydrogen when emissions are captured through carbon capture and storage. Blue hydrogen has been estimated to have a carbon footprint 20% greater than burning gas or coal and 60% greater when compared to burning diesel.

DIPA's stated objective is to build industrial-scale projects that can generate green, carbon-neutral hydrogen. Today, DIPA can demonstrate a distributed, industrial-scale process that generates WHITE hydrogen where the process captures more carbon than it creates, resulting in a 100% carbon-negative process. We expect the first pilot plant to be operating by 2024.

World governments and agencies calculate that in order to reach carbon-neutral we will have to spend around $90 trillion, roughly one year of the combined world's GDP. DIPA doesn't dispute that it will certainly be expensive. But we also believe that new and innovative technologies will play a far greater role than anyone previously thought. Many of the systems DIPA is designing go beyond carbon-neutral. We believe we can never achieve carbon-neutral until we can produce real carbon-negative. That's simple arithmetic.

DIPA is an open organisation where any company or entity working towards a technology solution to achieving REAL Carbon Neutral is welcome to join.

DIPA is a non-profit company registered in England and Wales.