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Tag: Carbon Direct Capital Management

This start-up makes vodka out of CO2 emissions, and it’s backed by Toyota and JetBlue

Posted on by dishanth
This start-up makes vodka out of CO2 emissions, and it’s backed by Toyota and JetBlue
KEY POINTS
  • Air Vodka is made of greenhouse gas emissions – specifically, captured carbon dioxide.
  • The Air Company is backed by Toyota Ventures, JetBlue Technology Ventures, Parley for the Oceans and Carbon Direct Capital Management.

 

At Bathtub Gin, a reinvented speakeasy in lower Manhattan, patrons may be pining for the past but they are drinking a vodka specifically invented for a cleaner future. Air Vodka is made in part from greenhouse gas emissions – specifically, captured carbon dioxide.

It is just one of a bevy of new products designed to make use of CO2 emissions that can be captured from various types of industry.

“We work with partners that capture that carbon dioxide before it’s emitted into the atmosphere, and then we use that CO2 in our process in creating the alcohols that we create,” said Gregory Constantine, Co-founder and CEO of Air Company, which is also producing perfume and hand sanitizer from those emissions. “It’s obviously far better for the planet in that we’re removing CO2 for every bottle that we’re creating.”

Distilling alcohol the old fashioned way not only releases its emissions, but it uses a lot of water — about 35 liters of water to make one liter of distillate. Air Vodka is made of just two ingredients, CO2 and water. It separates hydrogen out of the water through electrolysis, releasing the oxygen. The hydrogen is then fed into a “carbon conversion reactor” system with the captured CO2. That creates ethanol which, when combined with water, becomes a type of vodka.

The scientific process in the Air Company’s laboratories is valuable to the environment, but the results are not cheap. The three-year-old start-up’s vodka is a luxury brand, costing about $65 bottle. But at Bathtub Gin, the vodka is getting high praise.

 

A bartender pours a jigger of Air Vodka, a spirit made of CO2 emissions. Nathaniel Lee | CNBC

 

“Once we tell them, ’hey, this is how it’s made and it’s got a negative carbon footprint, all those really beautiful things, is what happens to make them want it even more. And then they go looking for [it[, going, ‘where can we get it?’” said Brendan Bartley, beverage director and head bartender at Bathtub Gin.

The company’s sights are set beyond just vodka and perfume. Constantine said he expects to offer new products made of CO2 as it opens its third production facility.

“Vodka for us is really a gateway towards all the other products and then the industrial applications of where our technology can go,” he said.

Carbon capture is fast becoming big business, as companies look not just to reduce greenhouse gas emissions but to keep necessary emissions from getting into the atmosphere. Captured carbon is being used to make everything from vodka to eyeglasses, laundry detergent, Coca Cola and even jet fuel.

The Air Company is backed by Toyota Ventures, JetBlue Technology Ventures, Parley for the Oceans and Carbon Direct Capital Management. It has raised just over $40 million to date.

 

 

Source CNBC

Bill Gates backs a carbon-capture start-up that uses dirt cheap material

Posted on by dishanth
Bill Gates backs a carbon-capture start-up that uses dirt cheap material

A California-based start-up has found a way to use limestone — a cheap and widely available material — to remove carbon dioxide directly from the air, potentially overcoming a major hurdle in scaling up the technology needed to avoid catastrophic global warming.

Heirloom Carbon Technologies said Thursday it raised $53 million from investors including Breakthrough Energy Ventures, a clean-technology fund led by Bill Gates, and the Microsoft Climate Innovation Fund.

As a growing number of companies have set goals to reach net-zero emissions in the coming decades, demand has surged for ways to offset their ongoing pollution. However, experts warn that cheap credits based on avoiding deforestation or building renewable energy projects tend to exaggerate their climate benefits. Technologies that actually remove carbon from the atmosphere can more credibly back the promise of capturing and storing a set amount of greenhouse gas.

But those technologies are still nascent and often require complex machinery, making them tens of times more expensive than carbon credits from projects that plant trees or build wind farms, which can cost as little as $3 per ton.

One reason for the high cost is that direct-air capture technology has so far relied on the use of expensive solvents that can separate CO₂ from the air, like iron filings to a magnet. Once the gas is bound to the solvent, it needs to be heated to a high temperature to release the CO₂, which can be captured, compressed, and buried deep underground in rock formations similar to those that hold oil and natural gas.

Heirloom uses a similar process, without the expensive solvents. The company starts by heating limestone, also known as calcium carbonate, to more than 600°C in an electric furnace that’s powered by renewable electricity — the most energy-intensive and expensive step. The process releases CO₂ — which is captured — and the leftover calcium oxide is spread out in hundreds of trays that are stacked 20-feet high and exposed to the air.

“It looks like cookies in a baking tray,” said Heirloom Chief Executive Officer Shashank Samala. “We’re trying to simplify as much as possible.”

Over months or years, calcium oxide gets converted back to limestone as it absorbs CO₂ from the air. But Heirloom says that by turning the material into a fine powder and carefully placing the trays to maintain the right conditions, it can shrink the process down to a week. Once calcium carbonate is created, the cycle is repeated 15 times or so before the material isn’t able to effectively capture CO₂.

Samala declined to provide more details on the company’s approach because some of the tweaks it has made to accelerate the capture process are quite simple and yet to be patented. The engineering work “could be easily replicated by others, even with a couple of clues,” said Julio Friedmann, chief scientist at Carbon Direct Capital Management, another fund that contributed to Heirloom’s latest investment round.

Heirloom has so far only tested the different steps in its process individually. The new money will be used to build a pilot plant by next year that will put them all together and attempt to capture a few tons of CO₂ every day. Unlike some other direct-air capture start-ups, Heirloom does not need to overcome basic science challenges, such as whether the capture process can actually work quickly, said Friedmann. The technology is based on peer-reviewed research published in 2020.

The most advanced direct-air capture companies include Switzerland-based Climeworks, which has sold credits to Gates for as much as $600 a ton, and Canada-based Carbon Engineering, which has been working for a few years with Occidental Petroleum to build a plant that could capture as much as 1 million tons each year.

Even though Heirloom has yet to build a facility of that size, technology companies Stripe, Shopify, Klarna Bank, and Wise have already paid for CO₂ it may capture in the future. Stripe said that it paid more than $2,000 a ton with the understanding that the cost will come down rapidly as the technology is scaled up. Heirloom aims to eventually lower the cost of its captured carbon to as little as $50 a ton.

 

 

Source Inquirer