Startup Aims to Tackle Climate Change with Innovative Carbon Capture Technology
Preventing environmental disaster requires significant effort, from reducing emissions to finding ways to actively remove carbon from the atmosphere. Reforestation and ocean-based carbon capture initiatives are promising, but new innovations are always welcome.
Tech startups worldwide are developing new technologies to address the climate crisis. One such innovation, unveiled at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 by SpiralWave, might offer a unique solution to carbon capture.
This technology centers around a visually striking, pulsating column of light, inside of which remarkable chemical reactions take place. According to SpiralWave CEO Abed Bukhari, interviewed by TechCrunch, the process involves a series of microwave pulses:
“With every pulse, it breaks down CO2. The first one breaks down CO2 into CO, the second one breaks down H2O into H and OH, and the third one is to join them into methanol.”
In essence, carbon dioxide (CO2) goes in, methanol comes out.
Methanol has various applications. It is easily broken down, can be used in combustion engines, and can be refined into jet fuel. Critically, converting carbon dioxide into methanol offers an efficient way to remove excess CO2, a key contributor to climate change.
This potential motivated Bukhari, also a co-founder of SpiralWave. The company is working on several iterations of the technology, from a prototype Nanobeam and Microbeam around one to two meters tall to the planned-for Megabeam and Gigabeam designs, which will reach up to 100 meters in height.
A Gigabeam, the company claims, could remove one megaton of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere annually. Bukhari emphasized the urgency of the project:
“I needed to build something that can stall the biggest challenge we have on Earth these days, which is removing a huge quantity of CO2. To fight climate change, we need to remove 10 gigatons of CO2 per year. With ten, 20-foot containers, we would have the largest e-methanol plant to date.”
With these “light-up columns,” the ambitious goal of large-scale CO2 removal may be closer to realization.
