Carbon capture, utilization and storage has a dirty little secret that divides its proponents and opponents: capturing CO2 out of the air is cheap, but then releasing it from its capture solvent into a purified tank is up to 10x more energetically and financially costly. This is one of the reasons why opponents argue we’ll never remove enough carbon cheaply enough to be economically viable. 

Carbonade can put this argument to rest, because they’ve figured out how to skip the expensive “releasing” step, and go straight to utilization. How? Because their electrochemical cell operates at the lowest ever recorded energy required for “cracking the CO2 molecule.” The technology comes out of Professor Ronny Neumann’s lab at the Weizmann Institute, where they’ve developed a proprietary electrocatalyst that transforms the CO2 while it’s still in the capture solvent. So in one step, Carbonade captures the CO2 from ambient air into its solvent, and immediately converts it to a usable carbon substrate (e.g., carbon monoxide), while also producing green hydrogen, all without having to purify the CO2 and ship it to another “utilization” provider. This is all to make products like sustainable aviation fuels (SAFs) for jets, a topic the CEO knows a thing or two about, as a retired F-16 pilot.