Real Ice Development Company Limited

At Real Ice, we are targeting direct action on climate change in the Arctic, where global warming is occurring at a faster rate than elsewhere on Earth. We aim to achieve this by replenishing Arctic Sea ice by designing systems that use renewable energy sources such as wind and tide to grow ice. These systems will be maintained and operated in collaboration with the indigenous people of the High Arctic regions.

First proposed by Flannery et al in 1971, researchers such as Professor Steven Desch, of the School of Earth & Space Exploration at Arizona State University and Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research, have further developed the idea of rescuing the rapidly melting Arctic by replenishing the region’s shrinking sea ice by deploying millions of wind-powered pumps over the Arctic ice cap. In winter these would be used to pump water to the surface of the ice, where it would freeze, thickening the cap.

Real Ice have been working for on an engineering solution for inland ice restoration, utilising a renewable energy powered pumping machines. Real Ice is developing and proving out in the Arctic concept designs for renewable generation, storage and ice restoration. Concept designs will be trialed in the Arctic starting during the winter of 2022/23.

Research shows that a 1.4 metre thickness of sea ice in the Arctic won't generally survive through the summer months and that approximately 6cm of ice will be lost each year from the ice pack. To ensure ice stability the ice should be greater than 2 metres thick. Each one of our pumping systems could drive large scale Ice restoration in key coastal areas affected by ice melt during the winter seasons. Ice created by the pumping systems will create ice expected to last ≥ 1 year.

Our goal will be to test various components  of the technology roadmap during the winter season 2022/23 including hydrogen fueled pumps and ice thickness measurement technologies. As the technology roadmap is proven out, scaling partners would be sought to massively increase deployment and impact. At sufficient scale (many thousands of devices), the new ice created would offset the anticipated impact of global warming on arctic ice melt.

We believe that a multi-jurisdictional approach will be successful:

• Leverage existing cap and trade mechanisms in the US to partner with industry to fund development of the necessary infrastructure in the Arctic to produce ice at massive scale

• In Canada, carbon taxes coupled with cap and trade provide significant incentives for collaboration with both industry and government.

• In Europe, where carbon cap and trade is no longer supported, we intend to work with regulators to consider approving reimbursement for initiatives such as Real Ice, that can provide verifiable first order cooling effects from increased surface reflectivity (increased albedo) in mitigation of climate change.