Carbon removal and storage has become one of climate tech’s hottest sectors in recent years, with European governments setting aside billions of euros to capture and store carbon emissions.
Startups across Europe are tackling the issue in various ways: Zurich-based Climeworks is using direct air capture to extract carbon from the atmosphere; UK-based Carbon Clean is transitioning carbon to materials used as fuel or storing it as carbon-heavy gas in abandoned gas wells; while pan-European Paebbl is capturing carbon from industrial facilities to develop a carbon-negative material for construction.
So far, however, only one company is storing carbon in our roads: Norway’s former Y Combinator participant Carbon Crusher.
So far Carbon Crusher says it has refurbished 1.5m sqm of roads, sequestering more than 10k tonnes of carbon dioxide — and, with its US expansion in full flow, it hopes to sequester billions more to reach the coveted ‘gigacorn’ status.
The big idea
There are 64m km of roads in the world and most are filled with bitumen — a sticky form of crude oil, which holds the asphalt in place.
Carbon Crusher’s big idea is to replace that bitumen with a carbon adhesive that stores carbon and doesn’t use a non-renewable resource. To do that, the company — as you might guess from the name — uses a heavy-duty crushing machine to break up the top layer of roads that need repairing, and glue it all back together with its carbon adhesive.
It uses a carbon-heavy byproduct from paper mills, biochar and volcanic rocks to make the adhesive.
“We had never thought about roads before but roads are the biggest man-made structure if you look from the sky,” says Haakon Brunell, cofounder and CEO of Carbon Crusher — and Norwegian impact accelerator Katapult. “If you can use roads to solve the climate challenge, then it should be possible to reach a gigatonne [of Co2 removed from the atmosphere].”
Investors and customers are keen to give it a shot: since finishing Y Combinator in 2022, Carbon Crusher has raised an undisclosed amount from Chris Sacca’s Lowercarbon Capital. It also has 15 active customers across the US and the Nordics, and 10 new projects lined up in California, Arizona and some of the neighbouring states.
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“The biggest barriers right now are regulatory hurdles and customer stickiness to existing methods,” Brunell says. “It takes some time, but with our customers in the US, we scale by 5 to 10x from our first project to follow-on projects with the same customer.”
How it works
Carbon Crusher is developing the next generation of its machine which should, when ready, look something like a moon tractor. For now, however, it’s using an eight-tonne machine mounted on an actual tractor.
It’s also invested in a team of scientists to develop even better materials to bind carbon in the roads — “we only work with things that make roads better,” says Brunell — and is collaborating with academic institutions across Europe and the US. With one patent pending and four more to submit by the end of this year, the startup wants to be a pioneer in the field, Brunell says.
“We’re now perfecting the way we are applying the material and then continuously making additional improvements to it. Now we have 20 different biocarbons that we can either use separately or in combination to provide roads that will give higher load-bearing capacity,” he adds.
“Every square metre that we refurbish, between five and 15 kilos of carbon is taken out of circulation, depending on which product we use.”
The startup is also developing software — “crusher as a service” — to show current and prospective customers which roads need refurbishing.
“We’re using a mix of dash cams, satellite imagery and hot air balloons and for some remote locations, we just send out someone with a camera. We then use our AI to diagnose the roads.”
Carbon Crusher supplies the crusher, binder and software but also partners up with local companies who want to offer a carbon-negative product in their market, similar to a franchise. This way, the company can scale without having a huge team. It has 23 employees, mostly based in Norway.
Increasing demand
Carbon capture and storage is becoming increasingly popular across Europe. The UK committed £20bn to early CCUS (carbon capture, utilisation and storage) deployment in 2023. Denmark also announced last year that it has earmarked 26.8bn DKK (€3.6bn) over the next 15 years for CCS projects, and in 2020 Norway announced it will put aside NOK 16.1bn (€1.4bn) for CCS projects.
Despite the interest in CCS, the regulatory requirements of road refurbishing in Europe have made it difficult for Carbon Crusher to scale. Last year, Carbon Crusher expanded to the US, where regulations are more relaxed.
“There are always exemptions to tests or R&D, but when you’re approaching scale, you need to deal with the regulatory environment that you’re in. When we tested the US we found that it was easier to scale with partners there — it was quicker to overcome the regulatory landscape,” Brunell says. “But Europe is still definitely there for us.”
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/yc-climate-tech-carbon-crusher/
