At a glance
Publicly launched: 2021
Headquarters: Jersey City, New Jersey
Technology: Direct air capture with water electrolysis to create carbon dioxide and green hydrogen for synthetic fuels and chemicals
Founder: Ryan Anderson
Funding or notable partners: $3.6 million from Aramco Ventures, Counteract Partners, Repsol Foundation, and others and additional funding from Tencent’s CarbonX Program 2.0
Stripping carbon dioxide from the atmosphere will combat emissions from hard-to-decarbonize industries like cement, steel, and aviation. But this approach, called direct air capture (DAC), is expensive.
Parallel Carbon wants to change the economics of DAC by developing an integrated system that captures CO2 and produces hydrogen in parallel, founder and CEO Ryan Anderson says. He says producing both products “in the same place, at the same time, with renewable energy” will make it economical to convert these key ingredients into all kinds of low-carbon fuels and chemicals.
The start-up’s process combines three chemical steps. First, air flows naturally through racks of large trays loaded with calcium hydroxide, which soaks up atmospheric CO2 and turns it into calcium carbonate, or limestone. In the second step, the limestone is dissolved in nitric acid, creating bubbles of pure, ready-to-use CO2.
