Sydney startup Fugu Carbon has raised $1.67 million in a Seed round to ramp up production of its low-cost CO2 capture technology.
The round was led climate tech-focused Sydney VC Investible, with support from Andrea Gardiner’s Jelix Ventures, as well as Melbourne climate tech fund Electrifi, and Counteract, a London-based VC specialising in carbon removal.
The capital will allow Fugu – named after the notorious pufferfish that’s a Japanese delicacy, but potentially toxic – to scale up their units and sell CO2 to their first customer in Sydney.
The team is expanding at their Glebe-based R&D facility, with plans to build thousands of machines that will suck millions of tonnes of CO2 from the air by 2030
Fugu cofounders Mac Thompson and Dr Luke Marshall were key players in the wildly ambitious $30 billion Sun Cable renewable power project as cofounder and first employee. Sun Cable, originally backed by Atlassian’s Mike Cannon-Brookes and Fortescue’s Andrew Forrest hopes to pipe electricity from the NT to Singapore. It ended up in voluntary administration 18 months ago after its billionaire backers fell out. Cannon-Brookes ultimately regained control of Sun Cable.
Thompson and Marshall remain ambitious with plans for Fugu to produce 2000 shipping container-sized machines annually at manufacturing facilities around to world extract a gigatonne (1bn metric tonnes) of CO2 from the atmosphere annually by 2032. They’ve selected VCs of more modest means but specialist knowledge to help them get there.
Dr Marshall is blunt is declaring that the challenge they’ve set themselves “is extremely difficult” if it’s to halt global warming.
“To hit our climate targets, we will now need to plant approximately three new Amazon rainforests by 2050, on top of decarbonising industry and society – that will be incredibly hard to do in such a short timeframe,” he said.
“We need new technologies that can accomplish this task at a fraction of the cost and difficulty. Furthermore, some industries will never be completely decarbonised so we must provide a green low cost solution for them. Many companies are trying to do this now but their technology is often difficult to implement in the real world due to cost, deployability or manufacturing limitations.”
The duo say they’re applying lessons learned building the world’s biggest solar farm to this new carbon-sucking mission.
Fugu’s machines are made of mass-manufactured parts, making them highly scalable and deployable for projects anywhere in the world, at a lower cost to other solutions. Then they ship it to users.
Most importantly they can bring the cost of carbon from the atmosphere down to the point that green CO2 becomes cost competitive with fossil-derived energy.
The addressable market for carbon capture in the US is predicted to be worth A$150 billion by 2030, rising to $890bn by 2050 and Thompson is conscious of the opportunity that presents, not just in terms of removing it, but also redeploying it in carbon-hungry industries.
“CO2 is an enormous market. Thousands of companies around the world use it in its pure form to make chemicals, beverages and pharmaceuticals,” he said.
“There are many others who want to stick it deep underground, where it will turn into rock to be permanently removed from the atmosphere. And big global players like Airbus are investing heavily in turning it into sustainable fuels for jets and global shipping.
“Fugu is gearing up to be the key supplier of clean CO2 from the atmosphere for these offtakers.”
Part of the company’s pitch is: “cheap green carbon at scale for the dawn of the e-fuel age”.
Fugu is as much a recycling startup as a carbon capture one.
Investible investment manager Ben Lindsay described Fugu’s tech as “artificial lungs for the planet” from a team of bold and capable founders who understand mass-manufacturing.
“Fugu is creating cost-effective and energy-efficient solid direct air capture (S-DAC) systems,” he said.
“These systems are designed for rapid deployment, leveraging existing supply chains to serve a variety of industries, including green fuels, food and beverage, and more.”
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