Mission Zero Technologies has been awarded a £3 million government contract to pilot its direct air capture technology.
The London company, which raised £4 million seed financing earlier this year, developed the tech with support from the government’s Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy, funded through the Net Zero Innovation Portfolio.
MZT was created in 2020 from a collaboration between global mining company Anglo American and venture creators Deep Science Ventures (DSV) which aimed to identify impactful ideas for accelerating decarbonisation pathways across key industries.
Phase 1 of the project saw the completion of the R&D work, FEED activities and deployment planning exercise, while phase 2 will see this realised into a working pilot plant alongside partners Optimus and O.C.O Technology Ltd.
The project’s £3m funding is part of a wider pool of funding for emerging climate technologies recently released through BEIS.
DAC is a carbon capture technology approach that focuses on removing CO2 directly from the atmosphere around us. Typically this requires significant amounts of heat and electricity and large commitments of capital, making the economics and commercialization timelines challenging.
MZT’s modularised DAC technology is projected to reduce both energy consumption as well as capture costs by over four times compared to today’s commercial offerings, with a roadmap to dropping below the $100/ton price point at commercial scales.
Through partnership with Optimus and O.C.O, phase 2 will extend the application of this technology to reuse of the CO2 in the creation of Manufactured LimeStone, a valuable building material.
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Shiladitya Ghosh, co-founder and chief product officer, said: “This programme is pivotal in our shared progress towards creating valuable materials from CO2 captured from the air.
“This has a monumental impact on the UK’s and the world’s journey to net zero and a carbon negative future.”
Chris West, CEO at Optimus, said: “Reversing climate change is the imperative of our generation, what could be more exciting to be involved in than a process that efficiently hoovers CO2 directly from the atmosphere.
“Having worked with Mission Zero now for almost two years, we have been inspired by their purpose from day 1 and are very excited to make our engineering design contribution towards the realisation of the pilot plant in phase 2 of this race.”
Further to this, the use of sequestered carbon in creating limestone will be a breakthrough in providing circular use cases for captured CO2. This is significant for providing a market for captured CO2 usage and creating building materials which permanently capture the CO2 and can be used for critical infrastructure.
Richard Skehens, chairman, O.C.O Technology, said: “There is no doubt carbon capture has huge potential and we are very excited to be involved in the next stage of this development.
“Combining Mission Zero’s DAC technologies with our own ability to to use the CO2 in the manufacture of a carbon negative aggregate, is both a positive step for the environment and delivers practicality in the form of sustainable building materials for the future.”