Startup Verdox gets US$80mil from Bill Gates

New method: A man working at an archaeological site near a coal-fired power plant in central Serbia. There is growing interest in technologies that can permanently sequester CO2 already in the atmosphere. — AFP

NEW YORK: A Massachusetts-based startup that captures carbon dioxide directly from the air has raised US$80mil (RM335mil) from investors, including Bill Gates-led Breakthrough Energy Ventures.

Founded in 2019, Verdox Inc’s technology is still only operable at lab scale.

But chief executive officer Brian Baynes said that a recent breakthrough with the key material used to trap the greenhouse gas has given investors confidence to invest such a large sum at an early stage in the startup’s development.

As the world gets serious about reaching net-zero emissions within decades, there’s growing interest in technologies that can permanently sequester CO2 already in the atmosphere.

Nature-based offsets such as forests have become a wildfire risk-ironically due, in part, to climate change-and could release any CO2 they might have stored.

Direct air capture technology offers more hope that the offset will do away with the promised amount of greenhouse gas for thousands of years.

Carbon capture works by separating CO2 from the air or exhaust gases from factory smokestacks. The majority of current technologies use liquid solvents that attract CO2 like a magnet.

Once the liquid captures the gas, it’s heated to a temperature that allows the the CO2 to be released. The CO2 can then be compressed and injected deep underground for permanent storage.

All these steps take a huge amount of energy, which contributes to making the technology expensive.

Despite decades of work, the cost of this conventional approach remains too prohibitive to scale up to capture the hundreds of millions of tonnes of CO2 annually needed to put the world on a path to net zero.

Verdox has a different approach that it claims to be more efficient and therefore cheaper. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) spinoff has developed a special type of plastic that can selectively pull out CO2 from a mix of gas – in air or exhaust – when charged with electricity. Once trapped, a change in voltage releases the CO2.

The startup said its material could cut the total energy used in direct air capture by 70% or more. The startup will have to rely on low-carbon electricity to power the process.

An early version of the material, developed at MIT, worked well at capturing CO2 but it also ended up capturing oxygen. Air is composed of 21% oxygen and only 0.04% CO2.

But in the past year, Verdox has landed on a material that Baynes said is 5,000 times more attractive to CO2 than oxygen.

“That’s the most significant accomplishment in the last two years,” said Baynes. He declined to share any other details about the material.

A lot of the work that got Verdox to this point “was pretty darn close to fundamental research,” said Eric Toone, technical lead at Breakthrough Energy Ventures, which has invested in two other carbon capture startups, Sustaera Inc and Heirloom Carbon Technologies. — Bloomberg