$10.7BN is currently spent annually on fossil fuel-powered industrial gas boilers for low and mid-grade heat. ~$150BN is spent annually on fuel. The obvious alternative is heat pumps, but despite their higher efficiency, existing designs have similar or higher opex to gas boilers because of the cost of electricity. This is in addition to the fact that available heat pumps can cost 4x the capex of gas boilers. But volatile gas prices and pressure to reduce emissions make this an unstable equilibrium.

HotGreen's design combines 2x TRL 9 technologies in a novel array to achieve efficiencies that are up to double the efficiency of existing solutions whilst also driving down capex, allowing total decarbonisation, reduced energy costs and greater cost-base predictability: all with a payback of less than 2 years.

To keep up with sustainable infrastructure demand, we need to increase the rate of metal extraction in 2040 by 350%. Nickel supply needs to grow by 19X, as key component in energy storage technologies. Not only will supply need to grow, but we will also need to increase the rate of metal extraction by 350% to keep up with demand. Meeting these projections will face challenges such as falling ore quality, environmental impacts and lead times of e.g. 15 years for establishing new non-brine mines.

Nickel mining without excavation, crushing or moving rock at all. Uses instead electrochemical crack formation. This can reduce environmental footprint 95%, leaving ground intact, allow 5x scale up of nickel extraction and price reduction of 30%.

Decaying biomass represents 10% of CO2 and 20% of CH4 emissions. Around 10Gt of biomass is produced annually as waste, of which ~80% is landfilled or burned. We often have little choice - biomass is rarely readily recyclable - it’s often wet, contaminated or already decaying by the time it is collected. Putting biomass into landfill or onto farmland or incinerating it is ever-less viable - nobody wants landfill or incineration sites near where they live, leaching into their water systems and polluting the air their children breath.

Kairos uses supercritical water oxidation in order to enable permanent ‘biotic’ carbon removal. This approach approach can <$50 /tCO2t by leveraging the efficiencies of natural CDR and the quality of engineered CDR, is extremely energy efficient (<100kWh/t and potential to be energy positive), can recover 100% of carbon, works with wet biomass of any water content, produces clean water, destroys toxic ‘forever’ pollutants like PFAS and recovers valuable inorganics like phosphorous

We could shut down every fossil power plant, every gas-powered vehicle, every refinery, every cement plant, and every smelter and the planet will continue to warm–albeit at a slower rate–from the carbon we’ve already put into the atmosphere. And we’re nowhere near eliminating emissions, especially in hard to decarbonize sectors like chemical manufacturing or steelmaking. Carbon capture and sequestration is no longer a choice: it’s a necessity.

Aquarry will remove 1GtCO2 from the atmosphere and permanently store it by 2040, with costs <$70/tCO2. They apply ocean carbon capture techniques in flooded open-pit mines, turning these environmental hazards into carbon sinks. They’re optimizing their process using a GIS platform which maps pit lakes, geology, materials sources, roads, and rail lines to maximise efficiency and minimize associated emissions. They work directly with pit lake owners to reduce their remediation costs and help them decarbonize.

As you'll have read in the descriptions for our other DAC companies: it's not enough to slow the rate at which we're filling the bathtub: we need to pull the plug too. Almost all realistic pathways to 1.5C warming over pre-industrial levels or less require carbon to be removed from the atmosphere. And if we're removing it, we should be remove it on the same terms as which carbon dioxide is being added: we should remove it permanently.

Yama use process integration of scalable heat sources to reduce the energy required for direct air capture. Their hybrid thermal and electrochemical CO2 desorption reduces energy consumption by 40% and capex by 25%. Yama requires 20% of the land required by other DAC processes, with 80% less water. Yama are targeting deployment of a 1Mt per year plant by 2030, on the path to 1Gt by 2045.

Downtime from roller chain breakages is often the single largest source of unexpected expense for manufacturers. The “roller chain” has not been re-designed in more than 300 years and suffers from a number of limitations: wear means they must be made out of high density metal, lubricated regularly and cannot be reduced beyond a certain size.

New Motion Labs are re-designing power transmissions with a re-designed chain that is compatible with existing systems, but lasts ten times longer before breaking, can be made of materials other than metal (carbon fibre, plastic, reducing weight), does not need to be lubricated (reducing maintenance costs) and can be miniaturised.

Decarbonisation of heating systems has proven more challenging than providing electricity from clean energy sources: heating buildings, largely with natural gas, accounts for nearly a quarter of UK emissions. More effective insulation can reduce the energy required to heat these buildings but this has traditionally come at the expense of fire-safety and price.

Thermulon develops aerogels for building insulation. Aerogels are the most insulating materials known to man. Thermulon's aerogels are the first to beat the tradeoff between fire-safety, thermal performance and price.

CO2 is not only an environmental issue: it is also a commodity, however today is produced exclusively as a waste product of other processes. This makes supply of CO2 inelastic to volume and location of demands.

Inspired by how the human body distributes CO2 from tissues to the lungs, Mission Zero produces high-grade CO2 continuously, on-demand and on-site. It is entirely electrically powered, consumes 3-4x less energy than existing thermal regeneration approaches, and leverages existing, scaled, mature technologies such as cooling towers and electrochemical water purification.

Direct air capture (DAC) systems are needed to limit warming to 1.5C, but DAC in development today uses vast amounts of energy and rare materials,often requiring fossil fuels to run.

Parallel Carbon has developed renewable mineral looping for scalable direct air capture at rock-bottom costs, a virtually limitless low energy DAC solution. Once constructed, no further inputs are required. Sunshine, wind and minerals are combined in a renewable loop to remove CO2 from the atmosphere.

Green hydrogen is necessary for our energy transition, but current approaches to generate green hydrogen are not economic and subsidy-dependent. The biomass in wastewater is a great source for green hydrogen which remains untouched today. Current wastewater treatment processes primarily convert biomass to sludge, CO2 and methane, contributing 3% of global greenhouse gas emissions.

Aquature generates green hydrogen by treating wastewater and removing 99% of organics in it, by splitting it into energy, CO2, nutrients and clean water. Energy is recovered as hydrogen at 85% efficiency and nutrients and CO2 are converted into green chemicals and treated water. Customers gain access to green hydrogen from £2/kg with a service fee 40% lower than average.

The development of viable catalysts is the critical bottleneck in key net zero technologies, holding back new carbon neutral processes in everything from chemicals to mineral extraction. Today, catalyst development takes 20 years and up to $30m per candidate, with search spaces of up to 10^60 possible combinations for each process.

Dunia is developing the world’s 1st self-driving lab for CO2 Utilisation Catalysis, reducing time &amp; cost to market by up to 90%. They are targeting critical chemical pathways such as CO2-to-Ethylene first, where no viable process exists and potential savings for the customer run into the hundreds of millions.

Hydrogen is critical for the decarbonisation of hard to abate sectors such as fertiliser, steel and cement. Currently the production of hydrogen is reliant on steam methane reforming or electrolysers that deliver gas at low pressure, requiring further compression to be useful, whether that’s for storage, transport or usage.

Supercritical is developing the world’s first high pressure, ultra-efficient electrolyser, for the production of hydrogen and oxygen from water, with zero emissions. By using heat and pressure, their proprietary design exploits the benefits of supercritical water and delivers gases at over 200 bar of pressure, without the expense or challenges of hydrogen compressors.