A climate tech startup is announcing a major milestone that is proving the concept of its process. NeoCarbon is a Berlin-based startup that’s taking a retrofitting approach to scaling direct air capture (DAC) devices.
It captures the CO2 from cooling towers, performing a direct air capture process. The company claims its DAC approach is up to ten times lower in costs and time, which makes it mass-market-ready.
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NeoCarbon announced its milestone last week that it finished its Minimum Viable Product (MVP) and captured the first CO2. The company ran the capture process from start to finish with a prototype that captured CO2 from its workshop’s air.
The startup began the design of the carbon capture modules only eight months ago and now it proves its concept, taking the leap from theory to reality.
Back in September 2022, NeoCarbon announced a €1.25M ($1.25 million) pre-seed round, co-led by PropTech1 and Speedinvest. The funding is planned to be used for the next phase of development – turning its current, lab-based proof of concept into a pilot prototype in a commercial facility early next year. It will also expand its engineering team.
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The initial target is to retrofit DAC to smaller-scale industrial cooling towers rather than the large ones seen at power stations. Longer term, the company wants to move towards tech for really large towers. Its philosophy is to start small and build its way to larger scale to capture meaningful quantities of CO2.
According to co-founder and CTO Silvain Toromanoff, it wants to target 1-10 megawatts of cooling towers in the next 2-3 years which are in the thousands of tonnes of capture potential per year. The potential to reduce DAC tech ten times also promises a faster scale-up which proves carbon removal holds an untapped opportunity to lead to massive emissions reductions.
