Efficiently extracting CO2 from the outside air in order to combat global warming: that was the major challenge for entrepreneur Hans de Neve, owner of the Eindhoven company Carbyon. It’s impossible, he was told. Too expensive and cannot be rolled out on a large scale. But that only motivated him. A million-dollar helping hand from Elon Musk has now opened doors for his company worldwide.
With success, because recently a test setup has been installed at Carbyon on the High Tech Campus in Eindhoven that the world is ‘waiting for’, in his words.
De Neve’s idea is a filter to which CO2 sticks while the rest of the air blows through. If the layer to which the CO2 sticks is subsequently heated, the CO2 releases again and can be stored. So it is fished out of the air.
“On average we emit about ten thousand kilos, ten tons, of CO2 per person per year,” says De Neve. “With our test set-up we can filter two thousand kilos of CO2 from the outside air per year,” he calculates. With more than twenty colleagues, De Neve is now busy improving the technology further. Next year they hope to have a test setup that can remove 100 to 200 tons of CO2 from the air per year.
“It is risky to only focus on behavioral change.”
A solution that removes CO2 from the air is desperately needed. Certainly as important as ensuring that no extra CO2 ends up in the air, as many sustainable measures aim to do, De Neve agrees. “Of course I advocate behavioral change, but I think it is risky to focus solely on that to solve the climate problem,” he explains. “That’s why I think we need to play it safe and develop technologies to remove the CO2 we’ve been emitting over the past 100 to 150 years.”
Last year, Carbyon won a million dollars in the XPRIZE competition, organized by Tesla boss Elon Musk. That certainly gave a helping hand. “It has opened doors for us. Also in the United States, for example. Great, because the more people are involved in this and the more research is done into removing CO2 from the air, the better for all of us,” he says.
“Deadline for $50 million from Musk is probably too early for us.”
There is also a ‘mega bonus’ linked to the XPRIZE competition. For example, Musk has promised an amount of $ 50 million to the company that succeeds in developing a machine that can remove a thousand tons of CO2 from the air on an annual basis, in 2025. “For us, that deadline of 2025 is very likely too early,” says The Neve. “And I understand from colleagues that this applies to many more companies. We therefore hope for some postponement of that deadline.”
His ‘Carbyon solution’ could already be used commercially on a large scale in 2030, the entrepreneur expects. But he does not think that we will see these types of filter installations everywhere in Brabant. In the first instance, he says, the installations will be placed in places where solar and wind energy are cheap. The filter units are powered by green electricity.
According to De Neve, some remote areas are therefore more obvious than Brabant. Take Iceland, for example. In the Netherlands, he initially sees opportunities for this type of installation in the North Sea.