Aries La Riviere

Aries La Riviere

Biography

Aries La Rivière is from Chicago, IL. They graduated from Walter Payton College Preparatory School in 2024. Aries earned a Merit-Based scholarship to Macalester College, where they are studying Chemistry, Physics, and Indigenous studies. Aries works for both the chemistry department as a grader and the theatre department as a costume technician and designer. Aries is also the president of the Macalester Women and Gender-Inclusive Rugby Team, where they manage finances and communications. Aries worked as a research intern at Macalester College under Dr. Keith Kuwata, doing Quantum atmospheric chemical research. They presented their research on isoprene oxidation at the Midwest Computational Chemistry Consortium and the ACTC summer symposium in 2025 and again at Minnesota’s NASA undergraduate symposium in 2026. Aries is expected to graduate in May 2028 with a B.A. in Chemistry. After graduation, they plan to attend graduate school and complete a PhD in Marine Chemistry.

Optimizing Marine Carbon Dioxide Removal: The Spiegler-Kedem Model for
Nanofiltration in Oceanic Carbon Sequestration
Aries La Riviere¹, Manlin Xu² and Shuhei Ono^2
1Department of Chemistry, Macalester College
²Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, Massachusetts Institute
of Technology

Effectively mitigating climate change requires both large reductions in human-produced carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and durable, large-scale CO2capture. Nanofiltration (NF), the filtration of water using membranes with nanoscale pore sizes, allows for size- and chargebased ion selection. NF has been investigated as a possible way to produce chemically distinct streams from feed water that could be leveraged for marine-based carbon dioxide removal (mCDR). Previous experiments have shown promising chemical separations of product water streams, yet most have been conducted on simple multi-ion solutions or artificial seawater that inadequately represent the chemistry of some of Earth’s oceans. We report results from experiments conducted by processing room-temperature artificial seawater through an NF270 membrane under consistent flow conditions across multiple controlled pressures. This was used to constrain the Spiegler-Kedem (SK) model to predict the pressures and flow rates needed for the NF of seawater with any ion concentration. Constraining the reflection coefficient and solute permeability of NF for major ions as well as major carbonate system species allows for assessment of NF’s future mCDR potential. Taking us one step closer to NF being a viable method of global mCDR.