Hydro Teams Up With Verdox on Carbon Capture for Aluminium

Hydro has signed on with Verdox, the U.S. carbon-capture developer, to explore electrochemical CO2 capture technology at aluminium smelters — a pairing that puts a hard-to-abate metals producer next to one of the newer entrants in the capture-equipment field.

The collaboration, reported by Shanghai Metals Market's SMM Aluminum Express, targets a stubborn problem for the aluminium sector: process emissions that don't disappear with cleaner electricity. The two companies will work together to assess whether Verdox's electrochemical capture approach can handle flue gas from Hydro's smelting operations.

Why does aluminium need capture technology at all?

Most of the industry's decarbonisation effort so far has gone into the power side — swapping fossil generation for renewables to cut the emissions embedded in every tonne of metal. That leaves the smelting process itself, where carbon anodes consumed during electrolysis release CO2 regardless of how clean the grid is.

Capture at the smelter is one of the few routes to those residual emissions. That's the gap this partnership is testing.

What is Verdox bringing to the table?

Verdox, spun out of research at MIT, is developing electrochemical carbon capture — a method that swaps the heat-driven chemistry used in conventional amine scrubbers for an electrically charged sorbent. The claimed advantage is lower energy demand, which matters for any industrial host watching its power bill.

For Hydro, the attraction is a capture route that could in principle run on the same clean electricity the company is already buying for its Nordic smelters.

What happens next?

The announcement is a partnership to explore and develop the technology, not a built plant. No tonnage figures, capture rates, project timelines or investment amounts appear in the announcement, so treat this as an announced project at the feasibility stage rather than operating capacity.

That distinction matters for anyone tracking the aluminium sector's decarbonisation commitments. A capture pilot at a working smelter — with a date and a capture volume attached — is the milestone that would move this from pledge to project. Watch for the first announced trial site and its throughput numbers.