Project Tortuga is the phase 1 demonstration of Project Wallaby, and it’s now live in Western Australia. Eight containerised units are deployed and connected on site, running Capture6’s integrated water processing technology under real operating conditions, with carbon dioxide removal built into the same process.
From concept to concrete
Water security pressures in Western Australia are real and immediate, which makes it exactly the kind of environment that puts a technology to a genuine test.
That’s the core of what Capture6 does: we treat saltwater and industrial brine to recover clean, usable water, and as part of the same integrated process, we capture and remove CO2 from the atmosphere permanently. For Western Australia, that means a facility that eases pressure on stretched water supplies, with the added climate benefit of pulling greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere along the way. It’s a direct, tangible contribution to the state’s water security and its decarbonisation efforts.
Tortuga is where we’re proving that the system works end to end, at a scale that matters, as the first phase of the broader Project Wallaby.
What the demonstration actually shows
Project Tortuga has eight containerised units, deployed and operating together, demonstrating the key elements of our integrated water treatment system, with carbon removal built in, at a scale that mirrors how it would run commercially. Building it in containers lets us show two things at once: that the system works together, and that it can grow.
Each unit operation in Tortuga runs on commercially available equipment, which means scaling comes down to replication. Twenty units, fifty, a hundred: growing from Tortuga’s footprint to a full commercial facility is simply a matter of adding more of what’s already proven to work.
That’s what “derisking” means in practice. Every operating hour at Tortuga generates data on water treatment performance, reliability, and system integration under real-world conditions, the kind no lab or controlled pilot can replicate. It’s how confidence in the technology gets built, hour by hour, under conditions we can’t fully control.
Why this matters for what comes next
The lessons from Tortuga don’t stay in Western Australia. As phase 1 of Project Wallaby, its significance reaches well beyond this one facility: we’re deploying the same technology and approach at Project Monarch in California, and it will shape every project that follows. A modular, containerised system that’s proven itself here gives us a template we can bring anywhere.
That’s also the model for how we want to work with future partners. We plan to bring Tortuga’s containerised units directly to partner sites, so they get a simpler, faster, and more cost-effective path to water security, with carbon removal included as a built-in benefit. The heavy lifting of proving the technology happens once, here, so future partners inherit a system that’s already been tested at scale and ready to deploy wherever it’s needed next.
