CEMEX Ventures, CEMEX’s corporate venture capital and open innovation unit, is the newest investor of Carbon Clean. The carbon capture tech company recently raised $8 million from CEMEX Ventures and its existing investors, bringing total capital raised in the last year to $30 million.
The investment is part of CEMEX’s strategy to achieve its new ambitious climate action goals, including being net carbon neutral in concrete by 2050, under its Future in Action program. The development of carbon capture technology to make it more accessible and efficient would be an unprecedented achievement for the cement sector.
“We’re delighted to have CEMEX as an investor and its backing further confirms the growing value of our technology proposition, as well as expanding confidence of strategic investors,” said Aniruddha Sharma, Carbon Clean CEO. “It has been an exceptional 12 months and investors sense that we’re delivering on our business strategy.”
In 2020, CEMEX Ventures signed an agreement with Carbon Clean, which allowed the companies to outline a roadmap for jointly developing and implementing carbon capture technologies across cement operations.
Earlier this year, CEMEX was awarded a grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to research, engineer and develop a pilot for a breakthrough carbon capture unit. The project, anchored to the company’s Victorville, Calif., cement plant, will also work in tandem with Carbon Clean on cost-competitive solutions to completely close the loop on current carbon emissions.
“We are committed to leading the industry in addressing carbon emissions,” said Gonzalo Galindo, head of CEMEX Ventures. “Our Victorville plant will demonstrate the power of Carbon Clean’s technology at scale and with this investment we are doubling down on our belief that carbon capture is essential to addressing our industry’s impacts.”
Over the last five years, Carbon Clean has developed a novel technology (CycloneCC), which can effectively and cost-efficiently capture CO2 from industrial processes. The goal of this breakthrough scalable modular technology is to provide carbon capture at a 10 times smaller installation footprint and six times shorter build time, adding up to 50% savings in capital expenditures associated with carbon capture. Additionally, the technology would target operating expenditures as low as $30 per metric ton of CO2 at an industrial scale.
Carbon Clean’s North American footprint currently includes operations in California, Chicago, Illinois and at the University of Kentucky.
