The world is in a pickle: Human activity continues to dump too much CO2 into the atmosphere, raising the risk of catastrophic global warming.
At the same time, the most climate-friendly way to keep using fossil fuels, carbon capture, has hit a rough patch. Only around 40 facilities worldwide are capturing some of the carbon dioxide they generate, according to the International Energy Administration. Because the installations are too expensive to build and operate, they’ve trimmed global carbon emissions by just 0.01% per year.
But one startup thinks that it has found a way to slash the cost of carbon capture using a simple salt that’s been tweaked for industrial duty.
“The chemistry that we’re using — the carbonation and decarbonation reaction — that’s what I call prehistorical chemistry. It was there before us, and it will be there after us,” Clément Cid, co-founder and CEO of Mitico, told TechCrunch.
Others have proposed using potassium carbonate, but most have avoided it for two reasons: For one, solid potassium carbonate essentially dissolves after one use. “It turns into mush after you use it, which sucks if you want to keep reusing your material over and over as a sponge,” Cid said. The other option, dissolving the salt in water and bubbling the gas through the solution, isn’t any cheaper than the alternatives. Mitico went the first route, adding a binder to prevent the pebbles from turning to mush.
The potassium carbonate pebbles can capture more than 95% of the carbon dioxide in an exhaust stream, Cid said. Once the material is saturated, it’s heated to release the CO2, which can then be stored or used to make plastics or e-fuels. Mitico’s approach, at commercial scale, should be able to capture a metric ton of carbon for much less than $85, Cid said. If it works out, any plant qualifying for the relevant federal tax credits could profitably capture carbon from day one.
One of the startup’s first pilots is attached to a boiler at a refinery in Thailand. For now, the company plans to woo similar customers that rely on industrial-scale boilers. “There is very little technology available right now for those customers, and a lot of those customers have ESG requirements,” Cid said. “They have no economical option other than using natural gas.”
Once it has a foothold in industrial boilers, Mitico is hoping to install its carbon capture equipment at any major emitter of carbon dioxide. Cid said the real target is natural gas power plants.
There, the company would find a much larger market. Natural gas power plants currently provide 43% of electricity in the U.S., according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, and the technology has received a surge of interest as the AI boom has data center operators searching for power wherever they can find it.
To build larger pilot plants, Mitico raised a $4.3 million seed round, the company exclusively told TechCrunch. The round was led by Exergon with participation from AP Ventures, Deepbright Ventures, Freeflow Ventures, Halliburton Labs, the SoCal Alliance for Innovation, SOSV, and W. L. Gore & Associates’ ventures team.
“At the end of the day, whether the CO2 is coming from fossil or non-fossil sources, what we care about is the fact that we shouldn’t emit as much,” Cid said. “Post-combustion carbon capture is where we could have the most impact.”
