OAKLAND — Mike Walker worked his way to the top of the tech world for more than two decades, earning a six-figure salary as CEO of several successful startups, but even though he was living his dream, something was missing.
“It’s super important to find the reason why you want to do something,” he said.
His latest venture, Stax Engineering, may be the holy grail of business: making money out of thin air and saving the planet at the same time.
In recent years, Walker and his team have been on a mission to tackle emissions. His company builds green ships that serve as giant vacuum cleaners and collect the exhaust fumes from container ships while they are in port.
The ship is equipped with what they call a boom, a giant flexible arm that helps suck in emissions from a ship’s exhaust.
“It’s 75 meters long, it extends across the ship where a long, elephant-like trunk comes down and we place that over the top of the stack and that’s where the emissions are collected,” Walker explains.
A 2020 study from Spain (pdf) found that there were 265,000 premature deaths that year due to global shipping emissions.
Government regulations require ships to be connected to the local electrical grid, known as shore power, which allows ships to switch off their engines while at berth. But that is not always possible.
Colleen Liang, director of environmental programs and panning at the Port of Oakland, said many of these ships do not have shore power.
“Sometimes the ship can’t just plug in. Whether it is an old ship or the shore power infrastructure is not in the right location,” she says. “This is an alternative solution that still meets state requirements.”
It’s called capture and control technology and has gained momentum in recent years as more port communities demand stricter air quality restrictions.
The idea is to eventually have all ships connected to a shore power grid on land, so that they do not run their engines while they are stationary in port.
Angela Csondes, a supervisor at the California Air and Resources Board, said these new ships are a good stopgap for ships that don’t want to invest in shore power infrastructure. Even though these green ships can filter out 99 percent of particulate matter and other diesel pollutants, it’s not as clean as just plugging in.
“With these collection systems you burn fuel,” she said, “whereas with shore power systems you turn off the engine without using fuel.”
On a recent morning in May, Walker and his team helped a ship whose electrical outlet was too far away to reach from land.
The boom was deployed from the ship and hovered above the ship. When it got close, an engineer connected it to the ship’s chimney like a giant extractor hood. Within seconds the black smoke disappeared.
“We’re seeing in very clear terms that the smoke is not being dispersed into the air and being captured in these systems. It’s almost instant gratification,” Walker said.
