A London company behind cost-effective carbon capture solutions has closed a huge £123 million Series C funding round.
Carbon Clean has been backed by existing investor Chevron, who led the round, alongside CEMEX Ventures, Marubeni Corporation and WAVE Equity Partners and new investors, AXA IM Alts, Samsung Ventures, Saudi Aramco Energy Ventures and TC Energy.
It closed its $30m Series B investment round in August 2021.
The funding will support Carbon Clean’s goal of becoming the world’s leading provider of carbon capture solutions for heavy industry, which accounts for around 30% of global emissions. To achieve this, Carbon Clean will work in collaboration with industrial partners and governments to manufacture and ship hundreds of standardised, fully modular carbon capture units to industrial facilities every year.
“Carbon Clean’s vision is to deliver global industrial decarbonisation on a gigatonne scale, and we are now on track to do this by the mid-2030s,” said Aniruddha Sharma, chair and CEO.
“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.
“Making carbon capture technology accessible for hard-to-abate sectors is a huge opportunity. We will use this new funding to scale production of our breakthrough fully modular technology which will overcome the biggest challenges facing widespread adoption of CCUS – cost and scale.”
In the past 12 months, Carbon Clean has achieved several significant milestones. The business reached the landmark of 1.5 million tonnes of carbon captured, launched CycloneCC – the world’s smallest industrial carbon capture technology, and signed partnerships with global industrial players like Veolia, CEMEX and Chevron, as well as with one of the most mature carbon capture and storage and hydrogen projects in the UK, the Acorn Project.
Now the focus is on delivering carbon capture on a gigatonne scale for heavy industry, achieving what solar did between 2010 and 2020: a +1,663% scale up in deployment.
Carbon Clean’s latest technology, CycloneCC, launched in October 2021, can be a game changer for hard-to-abate sectors like steel, cement, energy from waste, refineries and upstream/midstream oil and gas. CycloneCC has a footprint 10 times smaller than conventional carbon capture, making it easily deployable in less than eight weeks.
The solution has the potential to reduce CapEx and OpEx by up to 50% and drive down the cost of carbon capture to $30/tonne on average, which would make the economic case for CCUS undeniable.
As part of the new investment made during this round, Carbon Clean and Chevron are seeking to develop a technology demonstration pilot that will test CycloneCC at one of Chevron’s co-generation plants in San Joaquin Valley, California.
Chris Powers, VP CCUS for Chevron New Energies, said: “Chevron is proud to lead Carbon Clean’s record Series C funding round, and we look forward to partnering with Carbon Clean to help advance Chevron’s pursuit of lower carbon solutions.
“We have a long history of supporting the development and commercialisation of breakthrough technologies, and we’re especially excited about the potential for CycloneCC to revolutionise the industrial carbon capture sector.”