Sustainable concrete

Based in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, Canada Website - https://www.carboncure.com/

CEO - Robert Niven. Robert Niven has been in the carbon and construction industries since 2007, when he founded carbon sense solutions, a carbon management consulting firm focused on construction. He founded CarbonCure in 2011.

Buildings and construction are one of the biggest sources of carbon emissions, responsible for 39% emitted worldwide.

Robert Niven set out to do something about that when he started CarbonCure, which produces sustainable concrete, which has recycled CO2 injected into it.

As a result, the next time an airport or airline looks at an infrastructure project, they may want to look at CarbonCure.

One household name that is doing so is Amazon. According to Axios, by January 2022, CarbonCure’s contractors had used

162,000 yards of the company’s CO2 injected concrete at 13 Amazon construction sites across North America.

Breakthrough Energy Ventures, which has funding from both Amazon and Bill Gates is in fact one of the investors in CarbonCure.

Last year, CarbonCure was one of two winners of the $20 million NRG COSIA Carbon XPRIZE.

This was a global competition that took place in three rounds over 54 months. It challenged participants to develop breakthrough technologies to convert carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions into usable products — with the ultimate goal of tackling climate change.

At the start of this year, CarbonCure was also named a 2022 Global Cleantech 100 Company out of a candidate pool of more than 10,000 entrepreneurs (Carbon Engineering and Climeworks, also in this report, were likewise on the list).

70 large carbon capture plants by 2035 CARBON ENGINEERING

Based in Squamish, BC, Canada Website - https://carbonengineering.com/

CEO - Daniel Friedmann. Daniel Friedmann has been chairman of the board of Carbon Engineering since 2018 and in January of this year additionally assumed the role of CEO. Previously, he spent 37 years at satellite and robotics company MDA, including serving as the company’s chief executive for over twenty years.

Canadian company Carbon Engineering is one of the more high profile players in this market, and one with big ambitions.

Investors include Microsoft founder and cleantech supporter Bill Gates, Chevron, and Low Carbon Ventures. According to Daniel Friedmann, it was Gates who originally told him to go away and redo his plans, so that it allowed for scale.

Carbon Engineering is working closely with Occidental Petroleum via its subsidiary 1pointFive. Getting back to the point of scale, the aim is to build 70 carbon capture plants by 2035, with the first likely to be in Texas, where the aim is for it to take one million tonnes out of the atmosphere a year.

As mentioned earlier in the report, Airbus and a group of partner airlines have signed an MOU with Carbon Engineering and 1PointFive for carbon removal, while Air Canada is examining the possibility of both carbon storage and e-fuels with Carbon Engineering.

Virgin Atlantic has also signed up to be a customer of a DAC facility being built in the North East of Scotland with partner Storegga

It’s the emphasis on e-fuels, or as Carbon Engineering calls it “Air to Fuels” that should be of particular interest to aviation executives.

Carbon Engineering first had an “Air to Fuels” pilot plant that produced clean fuel in 2017, and has since been working on the solution.

Physical construction of an ‘Air to Fuels’ facility should start in 2023, with the goal being to produce 100 million litres of ultra low carbon fuel a year.

Last year, Carbon Engineering announced that it would collaborate with biotech company LanzaTech (which has an SAF subsidiary, LanzaJet) in creating Project AtmosFUEL which will investigate the feasibility of a large-scale, commercial air-to-jet facility in the UK that will likewise produce more than 100 million litres of SAF each year.