Eni and BP among investors in Mantel Capture, a carbon capture technology company – Chemical Engineering

September 10, 2024 | By Mary Bailey

Mantel Capture, Inc. (Mantel), a provider of molten borate carbon capture system technology, announced that it has raised $30 million in Series A funding co-led by Shell Ventures and Eni Next. Other participating investors include Engine Ventures, New Climate Ventures, Hartree, bp Ventures, Arosa Ventures, Vale Ventures, Newlab, MCJ Collective and others. The funding will be used to implement a demonstration project at an industrial facility and help pave the way for full-scale commercial deployment of Mantel’s high-temperature carbon capture systems. The company’s technology has already demonstrated laboratory-scale carbon capture at a rate of half a ton per day, and the upcoming project will be approximately 10 times larger and rated to capture 1,800 tons of CO₂ emissions per year in an industrial facility.

Carbon capture is the collection of CO2₂ produced from large sources such as power plants and other industrial facilities. The captured CO₂ It is then compressed, transported and used for various applications or stored underground, preventing its release into the atmosphere. As decarbonisation initiatives mature, the momentum around carbon capture continues to grow. However, the International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates that carbon capture capacity in 2030 will only be 40% of the 2050 net-zero emissions target of capturing and storing 1 Gt CO2 per year. To achieve this target, significantly more carbon capture deployments are needed.

“With the support of investors and industry leaders, we are eager to showcase Mantel’s technology in industrial applications and demonstrate its potential to be the lowest-cost path to net-zero emissions for our industrial customers,” said Cameron Halliday, co-founder and CEO of Mantel. “This investment enables us to move from the success of our lab pilot to working with customers to design and prepare for full-scale commercial implementation.”

“Shell Ventures is pleased to support Mantel and the development of its innovative carbon capture technology,” said Hector MacQuarrie, Director at Shell Ventures. “We believe that carbon capture and storage offers a way to reduce emissions, particularly in hard-to-abate sectors. However, for widespread adoption of carbon capture to be feasible, it must be cost-effective. Mantel’s innovative solution has the potential to significantly reduce the cost of carbon capture and can be applied across a range of sectors, including gas-fired power plants and hard-to-abate industries such as cement, steel and chemicals.”

“For Eni Next, carbon capture and storage is a key lever for the energy transition. Mantel’s technology offers the potential to significantly reduce the cost of capture thanks to an innovative solvent. Making carbon capture affordable is key to its deployment in hard-to-abate industries,” said Clara Andreoletti, CEO of Eni Next. “Eni Next looks forward to working with Mantel to make it a success.”

Mantel uses molten borates, the only high-temperature liquid-phase carbon capture material, to capture CO₂ at the source of emissions. By operating at high temperatures, Mantel systems recover high-quality heat while capturing CO₂ (absorption), compensating for the energy needed to regenerate the molten borate material (desorption). This allows Mantel to capture CO₂ from industrial emissions, reducing capture costs by more than half compared to conventional amine-based carbon capture technologies, making it economically feasible to install Mantel carbon capture technology at heavy industrial facilities. As more carbon capture equipment is installed, it is expected to result in greater infrastructure investment, further reducing the costs of carbon capture, transport, and storage.

“Point-source carbon capture is a key part of cost-effectively decarbonizing heavy industry,” said Michael Kearney, Mantel board member and general partner at Engine Ventures. “With new capital and commercial opportunities emerging around the world, Mantel is positioned to rapidly scale its low-cost carbon capture technology.”

Mantel was founded in 2022 by Halliday, Danielle Rapson, and Sean Robertson as a spin-out of the Hatton Research Group in the Department of Chemical Engineering at MIT. That same year, the company raised $2 million in a seed round and joined the Breakthrough Energy Fellows program.