UP Catalyst secures additional €2.3M to accelerate scale-up of battery raw material production from CO2 emissions
22 August 2024
Estonia-based UP Catalyst, a developer of sustainable carbon material production directly from CO2 emissions, has successfully closed a €2.36-million seed extension round. This follows the initial seed round raised last December which amounted to €4 million, bringing the total seed funding to €6.36 million.
The funding round saw equal participation from Warsaw Equity Group, a leading private investment firm in Central and Eastern Europe, and Estonia’s state fund SmartCap, which also contributed to the previous seed round. Existing investors, including Extantia, Sunly, Little Green Fund, Scottish Baltic Invest, and UniTartu Ventures, continue to support UP Catalyst’s mission to scale its production capabilities.
The funding will accelerate the construction of its first-of-a-kind industrial production unit, positioning UP Catalyst as the largest provider of CO2-grown carbon materials globally.
With this investment, the company is set to expedite the development of an industrial pilot reactor capable of processing 100 tons of CO2 annually, yielding 27 tons of advanced carbon materials such as graphite and carbon nanotubes. The technology built on molten salt electrolysis not only aims to achieve price parity with traditional carbon sources but also significantly reduces the carbon footprint associated with raw material production.
UP Catalyst’s production process has a carbon footprint of just 0.07 ton of CO2-eq per ton of graphite—20 times lower than conventional graphite production—and 0.7 ton of CO2-eq per ton of carbon nanotubes—242-times lower than the emissions from the traditional Chemical Vapor Deposition (CVD) method.
By 2030, the EU will require 3 million tons of carbon materials for electric vehicle batteries. Despite having the potential to utilise 11 million tons of CO₂ through existing technology, the EU currently invests in underground storage and imports fossil-based materials from China. The technology is ready—we just need the investment to scale up as a crucial step toward utilizing at least 200 thousand tons of CO2 annually by 2030.
—Dr Gary Urb, CEO of UP Catalyst
UP Catalyst has also started to move into a new facility hosting the industrial production unit activities, located right next to the Tallinn waste incineration plant. This enables future direct access to hard-to-abate CO2 emissions.
The new plant will boast a production capacity ten times larger than the current setup, marking a significant milestone towards the construction of a full-scale industrial reactor unit. This innovative approach not only alleviates the EU’s dependence on foreign fossil fuel imports but also offers industrial partners a pathway to utilize their CO2 emissions, potentially reducing the need for purchasing allowances from the EU Emissions Trading System (ETS) or mitigating carbon tax burdens.
SmartCap Green Fund is financed by the European Union NextGenerationEU.
Founded in 2019 by a team of scientists with the goal of revolutionizing the raw materials sector, UP Catalyst aims to enhance the properties of 4 million electric car batteries through sustainable carbon by 2030. In the past years, the company secured more than €10 million in grants and equity funding and has expanded its customer base beyond Europe.
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