- Verdox recently raised $80 million in committed capital. These are the details.
Verdox – an electric carbon capture and removal company – launched recently and announced $80 million in committed capital from a syndicate including Breakthrough Energy Ventures (BEV), Prelude Ventures, and Lowercarbon Capital. This investment will be utilized to develop and deploy the company’s novel electrochemical carbon capture technology.
The atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations reached a record high of 420 ppm last year, on a path to easily exceeding the IPCC’s estimated 2°C warming threshold of 450 ppm. And based on nearly 40 billion metric tons of current annual carbon dioxide emissions, this level would be reached in the next 10 to 20 years. The need for an emissions drawdown is so large that it requires a multi-pronged approach of both natural and technological solutions, including capture from emission sources and the air.
Verdox’s core technology was developed by Prof. T. Alan Hatton and Dr. Sahag Voskian at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). And Prof. Hatton now serves on the Scientific Advisory Board and Dr. Voskian is the company’s CTO. Prof. Hatton and Dr. Voskian rethought carbon removal by combining the efficiency of electrochemistry with the tunability of organic chemistry. This unique pairing enables for the targeted use of electrical energy to capture and release carbon dioxide at any concentration and unparalleled selectivity.
This approach eliminates the need for the large amounts of heat and water upon which current carbon dioxide removal solutions rely. The technology breakthrough was first published in 2019 in Energy & Environmental Science: “Faradaic electro-swing reactive adsorption for CO2 capture.”
KEY QUOTES :
“Combating climate change requires the world to prevent further increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations and eventually return them to pre-industrial levels. Many industries, however, still lack a plan for complete decarbonization, because of the high cost and energy consumption of currently available capture technologies. Unlike these predecessors, Verdox’s technology has the potential to capture carbon from any industrial source or the air – and at up to 70% relative energy savings, giving us the ability to intervene completely.”
– Dr. Brian Baynes, Founder and CEO of Verdox
“The high energy efficiency and scalability of Verdox’s technology could enable the company to play a major role in addressing the carbon removal challenge. This innovation has provided a paradigm change for both industrial and air capture – and the Verdox team has made great strides to reduce the concept to economical commercial practice.”
-Carmichael Roberts from BEV
