The earth’s carbon dioxide levels are at their highest point in 3 million years, and all that CO2 won’t go away on its own. It must be captured and stored to prevent further damaging the environment – a process that requires cutting-edge technology and lots of cash. London-based Carbon Clean Solutions has plenty of the former and recently got a significant injection of the latter, positioning it to become a global leader in carbon capture solutions.
The company makes small, modular units that capture carbon emissions from industrial smokestacks and other sources. It claims it can capture as much as 97% of carbon dioxide released by steel and cement factories and power plants.
Since its co-founding by Aniruddha Sharma and Prateek Bumb in 2009, Carbon Clean has removed more than 1.5 million metric tons of carbon from 44 facilities worldwide.
The company specializes in scalable carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS) technologies for the steel, cement, refinery, energy, and biogas industries.
Demand for its technology and services has drawn the notice of several high-profile and deep-pocketed investors. Bloomberg reported that Carbon Clean’s most recent funding round came on May 11, when it raised $150 million from the venture arms of Chevron, Saudi Arabian Oil Co., and Samsung Group. To date, Carbon Clean has raised $195 million.
Proceeds from the latest funding round will be used to help Carbon Clean scale up its operations, with the ultimate goal of becoming the world’s leading provider of carbon capture solutions for heavy industry, which accounts for about 30% of global emissions. To get there, the company will join forces with industrial partners and governments worldwide to manufacture and ship hundreds of carbon capture units to industrial facilities every year.
“Carbon Clean’s vision is to deliver global industrial decarbonization on a gigatonne scale, and we are now on track to do this by the mid-2030s,” Sharma said in a press release. “We are at the forefront of sector innovation, delivering products that can genuinely change the world. Today’s funding round is testament to the confidence of industry and global investors in our technology and its importance to reach net-zero goals.”
One of Carbon Clean’s strategies will be to test the storage of greenhouse gasses in partnership with Chevron. This work will take place in California, where Carbon Clean aims to capture as much as 30,000 tons of CO2 annually. So far, none of the 1.5 million tons of CO2 it has captured has been stored away permanently.
Carbon Clean also offers a much lower price than competitors by taking advantage of its modular approach, which can more easily fit into existing factories than custom-built carbon capture plants. The company says it can do the job for as little as $30 per ton vs. about $100 per ton charged by others.Carbon Clean took a big step forward in October 2021 when it launched the world’s smallest industrial carbon capture technology. Called CycloneCC, the technology has a footprint that will be ten times smaller than conventional carbon capture, making it easily deployable in less than eight weeks. CycloneCC addressed one of the most significant barriers to carbon capture adoption – the size of the technology – and also significantly drove down the cost.
