Carbon Clean, a carbon capture tech startup raised $150 million to ramp up its climate tech solutions for heavy industry.
UK-based Carbon Clean is a climate tech solutions provider that helps industries achieve their net zero goals.
They provide carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS) technologies to heavy industries. These include steel, cement, refinery, energy from waste, and biogas.
The recent Series C investment round bagged the largest equity investment for a point source carbon capture. This is a major step for the firm’s goal of industrial decarbonization on a gigaton scale by the mid-2030s.
Chevron led the funding round for Carbon Clean, along with other new big investors. They include Samsung Ventures, Saudi Aramco Energy Ventures, and AXA Investment Managers.
Other investors are the CEMEX Ventures, Marubeni Corporation, and WAVE Equity Partners.
Carbon Clean’s $150M Carbon Capture Investment
The investment will support the startup’s goal of becoming the world’s leading provider of carbon capture solutions.
Aniruddha Sharma, Chair and CEO of Carbon Clean, said:
“Carbon Clean’s vision is to deliver global industrial decarbonization on a gigaton scale, and we are now on track to do this by the mid-2030s. Today’s funding round is a testament to the confidence of industry and global investors in our technology… And its importance to reach net zero goals.”
In particular, the firm focuses on the heavy industry which accounts for around 30% of global emissions.
To achieve its aim, Carbon Clean will collaborate with industrial partners and governments.
The $150m funding will be for creating hundreds of the firm’s patented carbon capture units for industrial facilities.
The company called its carbon capture technology “CycloneCC”. It’s a fully modular technology designed to fix the two key obstacles to adopting CCUS: cost and scale.
Carbon Clean’s Modular Solution: CycloneCC
CycloneCC is a breakthrough combination of two proven technologies:
- Carbon Clean’s advanced, proprietary amine-promoted buffer salt solvent (APBS-CDRMax®), and
- A process technology – rotating packed beds (RPBs).
It’s considered the world’s smallest industrial carbon capture technology. It has a 10x smaller footprint than conventional carbon capture technology. It’s also deployable in less than 8 weeks.
Carbon Clean said that its fully engineered and standardized design promotes scalability. It can also reduce the size and total cost of carbon capture by up to 50%.
Best of all, it can drive down carbon capture costs to $30/ton only on average. The storage of captured carbon on a large scale is at around $80 to $90 per ton.
And so, the firm considers its CycloneCC a game-changer for hard-to-abate sectors.
As part of the new funding made for this carbon capture tech, Carbon Clean and Chevron seek to test it at one of the oil giant plants in California.
Chris Powers, Vice President, CCUS for Chevron New Energies said,
“Chevron is proud to lead Carbon Clean’s record Series C funding round… And we’re especially excited about the potential for CycloneCC to revolutionize the industrial carbon capture sector.”
The startup’s latest carbon capture investment follows its $22M Series B round in 2020. It comes as investments into CCUS tech had increased significantly.
Market analysts expect investments in CCUS startups to be more than triple in 2021.
The major driver for this growth is industrial companies’ move to net zero emissions. European climate funding jumped 10x over from £840 million in 2017, to £8.4 billion in 2021.