“We are sequestering carbon using cooling towers”

Markus: Which specific problem are you solving and how? 

Silvain: The goal here is to remove CO2 from the atmosphere, so ambient air and “filter it out“ through Direct Air Capture. The way to do this is typically a cycle of sorts. First, you start by pouring air through your system, which puts the air in contact with a chemical, and that chemical can either be liquid or - like in our case - solid. And that chemical has to have a very high affinity with CO2, so it gets kind of trapped on the surface. The reason why this is very costly is also because even though it's really bad for climate, there's only like about 0.04% of CO2 in the air we breathe. So, if you want to remove billions of tons as we're supposed to do, you need to process and blow enormous amounts of air through your system. One needs very large fans and run them which is both slowly to build and costly to build and run.

After blowing air through the system, a chemical that's coated with CO2 is left and needs to be filtered off. This also requires a lot of energy, in most cases you use heat with which the bonds between the chemical and the CO2 that was just created are broken. The result is pure CO2 that you can either store away permanently or reuse, and your chemical that's ready to go again.

"There's a lot of things you can do in your personal life"

Markus: For someone who works in the climate crisis solution field, what do you think can we as individuals and communities do to save the planet and what future challenges do we need to tackle now?

Silvain: I've been a personal activist for a long time. There's a lot of things you can do in your personal life. Saving energy in private life is important, but they have very little impact compared to what you can do with technology.

It's basically for the four main things that you can do as a person: 1) Stop eating meat, which is becoming a lot more common, especially in my bubble in larger cities. 2) Not flying. I think everyone knows about this, but we're still far from a good solution there. And of course, I'm myself still guilty of flying. What’s important is to not preach that everybody has to be too perfect, but just kind of keeping it in mind and do the best one could. 3) Not owning a gasoline car and then the 4) is very controversial, which is not having kids. On the latter, I don't have an opinion.

And we all can be vocal about the climate crisis, especially in situations where companies or politicians will listen. I think that's where people can get the big machine to react. And that's what we have to do, and we have to do it  right now. 

A purpose driven start-up

Markus: Everyone talks about the great resignation and how difficult it is to find people. Does a purpose driven startup like NeoCarbon also face this problem?

Silvain: In Berlin it's extremely difficult to hire right now as there's this so-called talent war going on. For us, it hasn't felt like this that much. We're looking for chemical engineers, or mechanical engineers. These positions in start-ups are maybe not that fought over.

We get people just knocking on our door, and go like: “Hey, guys, I want to work for you“. Those are i.e. MBA students, or people that are tired of their old jobs and want to work for a company with a purpose. I would say for us it is easy compared to other companies, but still not necessarily like we can find everybody in a second either.

Our company is built all around trust and transparency, which is my Nordic/Finnish influence, I guess. We tried to build a company where people come to work because they want to stand for something. We try to let people work as they prefer. We don‘t have official work hours, as long as we all respect meetings and commitments to each other. If you want to work in the evenings or in the night… go for it, who are we to tell you how to do things?

"2023 will be the year of our first product"

Markus: What is your most important milestone in 2023?

Silvain: We're playing a race against time, both with the climate crisis and at our company. For us 2023 will be the year of our first product. Right now, we're finishing our very first prototypes - very small scale in a controlled environment. Our machines should be ready, and we plan to have the first test results in early October. And that's going to capture around three tonnes of CO2 per year, which is quite small scale.

The main milestone is taking that out of the lab and scaling it up. 100 / 100 plus tons of CO2 per year on a real customer site, so on a real cooling tower would be the challenging goal.

And like in many other start-ups, raising more money to be able to scale up will be on the plan for the next year.