Partnering with Mission Zero Technologies to catalyse CO2 removal from the atmosphere.
Climate change is the defining challenge of our time; one that requires a transformative shift. That’s because the amount of CO2 in the earth’s atmosphere today is around 417 parts per million1; almost 40% higher than pre-industrial levels of 280 ppm2.
According to the latest report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), published in April 20223, carbon emissions must peak before 2025 at the latest, and be reduced by 43% by 2030 to limit global warming to around 1.5°C. IPCC Working Group III Co-Chair, Jim Skea, said that without “immediate and deep emissions reductions across all sectors, it will be impossible.”
At Anglo American, our commitment to being part of the solution is embedded across our business, with dedicated stretch goals – included in our Sustainable Mining Plan – centred on decarbonisation; in the areas where we have direct control (our Scope 1 and 2 emissions) and those where we can influence the reduction of emissions across our value chain (our Scope 3 emissions).
Improving the commercial and technical viability of new and as yet unproven technologies is critical to our ability to achieve this. Anglo American has a long and successful history in this space, with more than 10 years’ experience in venturing and building a portfolio of climate positive companies, and advancing technological development and innovation.
As well as investing in emerging enterprises, we have worked to multiply customer businesses by building the supporting value chains around them, and by growing and sustaining demand through commercial collaborations. Our experience also extends to early-stage venture building, focused on specific opportunity areas.
While these efforts have so far predominantly focused on market development activities for our platinum group metals (PGMs), in 2021 we started building on this work with the ambition to address the decarbonisation space more broadly. Our aim is to deliver a set of strategic investments in low carbon technologies that, today, don’t exist at scale – some linked to Anglo American’s value chain and others that are not.
One portfolio member is Mission Zero Technologies (MZT), a company developing a radical approach for CO2 removal via direct air capture technology.
Re-writing the script for scalable direct air capture technology
With the size of the task in hand, the world faces the challenge of not just reducing emissions, but also the need to remove CO2 already present in the atmosphere. The IPCC’s report outlines the need for extensive carbon dioxide removal in the energy and industrial sectors as being part of the solution to achieving negative net emissions.
This can be achieved in two ways – the first, by enhancing carbon storage in natural ecosystems via afforestation and reforestation. While this will recover some CO2 from the atmosphere, alone it is not adequate or reliable over time. Capturing carbon directly from the atmosphere and safely storing it – underground or by turning it into products such as construction materials, provides another means by which to tackle the problem.
Direct air capture (DAC) technologies extract CO2 directly from the atmosphere. However, removing 417 particles (of CO2) from one million particles of air can be an energy intensive process; one that currently, can generate nearly as much CO2 as it captures. Despite its potential, DAC is currently at a medium technology readiness level, according to the IPCC, while the International Energy Agency (IEA) reports that just 18 DAC facilities – in Canada, Europe and the United States – were operating worldwide as of April 20224. In the IEA’s Net Zero Emissions by 2050 Scenario5, DAC is scaled up to cover more than 85 Mt CO2/year by 2030 and about 980 Mt CO2/year by 2050, a level of deployment reliant on significant investment being made in research and development in order to refine the technology, and to reduce capture costs.
MZT is an emerging player in this space; an early-stage start-up set to revolutionise the CO2 value chain. At scale, its DAC solution can play a major role in achieving a net zero future, by capturing atmospheric CO2 at well under $100/ton and delivering it on-site to end users or sequestration facilities.
The company’s electrochemical DAC solution sets out to eliminate cost and scale-up constraints that exist in today’s technology. Fully electric to leverage growing renewable and low-carbon electricity supply globally, it can continuously provide high-grade CO2 that easily integrates downstream, with a highly compact footprint allowing greater utilisation of available land.
An innovative solution, it minimises complexity – the result of an end-to-end DAC operation that consists of just two processes (or unit operations); air contacting and electrochemical solvent regeneration. This contrasts with multi-stage industrial processes where many more pieces of major equipment, such as reboilers, distillation columns, reactors and heat exchangers, are needed. This allows MZT’s plants to have far fewer failure points and a more compact footprint, as well as being simpler to design and build – hugely important when it comes to the technology’s scalability.
Bringing in the stability of existing manufacturing supply chains has helped to de-risk the growth potential of MZT’s technology. Many DAC technologies today rely on some combination of novel materials as well as new processing equipment to carry out operations which can pose challenges in supply. For MZT, these are not areas of concern. Its solvent blend is fully-composed of materials produced in bulk today, while every part of its process directly uses established equipment designs that have been manufactured at industrial scale or for other applications, for decades.
Last year, MZT secured £240,000 funding from the Department of Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy’s (BEIS) Net Zero Innovation Portfolio to carry out engineering design work to pilot its technology by 2025. The first phase of the project involves designing a 120 tons/year DAC pilot plant and its integration with various use cases – including using atmospheric CO2 to convert fly ash to carbon-negative building materials.
As well as marking one of the first demonstrations of DAC integrating with a use case that utilises and permanently removes (sequesters) carbon6, with buildings identified as the largest source of carbon emissions globally – accounting for 40% of total emissions7 – this will mark an important step forward in pursuit of a zero-carbon built environment.
In addition to reducing the carbon footprint of new buildings, the pilot will also seek to tackle two major sources of waste – CO2 and fly ash. Further, by locating the DAC technology on-site, the potential sources of pollution associated with the transportation and storage of CO2 will also be reduced8. The second phase of the project will focus on the commissioning and operation of the plant, thereby proving the feasibility of integrating MZT’s DAC technology and bringing the technology to commercial maturity.
In parallel, MZT recently announced a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with 44.01, a carbon sequestration service provider operating in Oman, to deliver Project Hajar as its first commercial scale deployment. With an initial planned capacity of 1000 tons/year, and access to significant wind and solar energy resources, this is expected to be the first such carbon removal project in the Gulf region9.
In recognition of the technical soundness and attractive business case yielded by an initial feasibility study, the project was recently recognised as one of fifteen global Milestone Award winners in the XPRIZE Carbon Removal competition10. With the project due to come online in 2024, MZT is on track to rapidly proliferate its technology internationally while working directly with other actors in the carbon removal arena.
Working together to deliver the clean energy transition
Scaling a technology start-up is no easy task. There are several hurdles to overcome – from securing financial backing, to finding the right partners, and the right infrastructure or applications required to improve a solution’s commercial and technical viability.
To drive innovation at pace, Anglo American has been working in collaboration with leading venture studios Rainmaking Venture Studios (RVS) and Deep Science Ventures (DSV), to turn impactful ideas into ‘venture-able’ products, services and companies.
MZT is one such example. Through our partnership with DSV, we identified the company’s potential, providing pre-seed investment to enable them to begin scaling and designing their first pilot plant. More recently, together with Breakthrough Energy Ventures (BEV), we supported MZT through a USD $5m seed financing round.
This new investment will allow the MZT team to expand and accelerate the scale-up of its R&D activities and business operations, and to support the implementation of the company’s first pilot plant and Project Hajar as it gets underway.
Anglo American will continue to work with MZT as it advances its DAC solutions to meet the goal of global net zero emissions.
Dr Gaël Gobaille-Shaw, Chief Technology Officer and Co-Founder, Mission Zero Technologies:
“MZT has combined mature technologies with innovative yet simple chemistry to create a heat-free, modular, and energy-efficient DAC process that is economical and works at ambient conditions. By making use of existing technology and widely available chemicals, we can rapidly scale-up and deploy our plants to contribute to the large-scale removal required within our tight planetary deadline.”
Dr Shiladitya Ghosh, Chief Product Officer and Co-Founder, Mission Zero Technologies:
“The thought leadership in early-stage venture development shown by Anglo American has been something sorely missing in the sustainability space. With their early support, we have been able to unlock some of the traditional barriers to commercialisation, and look forward to continuing our partnership as we develop economically and technically viable solutions to address the world’s climate change and sustainability challenges.”
Benny Oeyen, Executive Head of Market Development, Anglo American
“The transition to a lower carbon energy system is a complex, multi-dimensional challenge; one with technological transformation at its heart. Our collaboration with Mission Zero Technologies is a great example of Anglo American’s market development approach and our commitment to advancing early-stage innovation. We are excited to be working with them to realise the transformation potential of this technology, and to drive the commercial and technical viability of innovation in the carbon removal space.”
1 Global Monitoring Laboratory: https://bit.ly/3IuUMFL
2 ‘What is the ideal level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere for human life?’, MIT Climate Portal, May 18, 2021: https://bit.ly/3qpc94J
3 ‘Climate Change 2022 - Mitigation of Climate Change’, Working Group III contribution to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC, 8 April 2022: https://bit.ly/35NGpza
4 Direct Air Capture – Technology Report – April 2022, IEA: https://bit.ly/3M6iJWg
5 ‘Net Zero by 2050, A Roadmap for the Global Energy Sector’, IEA, May 2021: https://bit.ly/3ja7Iqs
6 Mission Zero-led consortium wins £240,000 from UK Government for breakthrough DAC technology - Mission Zero Technologies - Home & News
7 Architecture 2030: https://bit.ly/3uijCDJ
8 Carbon Removal Deep Dive: Mission Zero, Na’im Merchant, The Carbon Curve, 8 September 2021: https://carboncurve.substack.com/p/mission-zero?s=r
9 Mission Zero and 44.01 team up for Project Hajar, 14 April 2022: https://www.missionzero.tech/news/mission-zero-and-4401-team-up-for-project-hajar
10 XPRIZE and The Musk Foundation award $15m to prize milestone winners in $100m carbon removal competition, 22 April 2022: https://bit.ly/39z1XAR
DAC Insight Brief: https://www.third-derivative.org/insights