As pressure mounts for immediate climate action, new technologies to capture the greenhouse gases from the atmosphere with a view of removing them are equally being developed worldwide.

In Africa, a leading effort in that space comes in the form of a Direct Air Capture startup called Octavia Carbon. Two years ago, Octavia was founded in Kenya to build DAC machines it uses to capture carbon, the greenhouse gas responsible for the biggest chunk of global warming from the air for underground storage.

Octavia, which started collecting carbon in February after a several-month development phase for the tech, now looks to build additional machines to complement its two existing devices with a carbon capture capacity of 50 tonnes per year. That is as the startup seeks to scale carbon removal in Kenya after closing a $3.9 million seed round and, it says, $1.1 million in the advance sale of carbon credits.

It raised equity funding in a round co-led by Lateral Frontiers and E4E Africa, Catalyst Fund, Launch Africa, Fondation Botnar, and Renew Capital.

Octavia's co-founder and CEO, Martin Freimüller, said the startup will reach a capture capacity of 1,500 tons per year when running at capacity in 2025, assuming a storage site run by partner company Cella Mineral Storage comes online.

We've been developing the tech and now we're taking it out of the lab for carbon removal at scale in the field," said Freimüller, who co-founded the startup with Duncan Kariuki, a mechanical engineer.

Freimüller explained that while Octavia captures carbon from air and liquefies it, the startup has teamed up with Cella, a carbon sequestration startup that will inject it into the ground for storage.

The injection of the startup's first captured carbon is expected to occur before the end of the year. In his words, the project would be among the first in the world to turn captured carbon into rock underground.

"Once we have that liquid carbon dioxide, we give that to our storage partner, and they would sort of inject it underground at high pressures to seep into volcanic rock pores, and those are quite rich in calcium and magnesium that reacts with the CO2 to form carbonate minerals like calcium carbonate or limestone," said Freimüller. "Naturally occurring materials, naturally occurring process and we're just accelerating that in geologic areas where that hasn't really happened over long periods of time."

Competitive advantage
"Africa, specifically Kenya will have a competitive advantage." Note- 50-year old company in the US was effectively competing against the new startup but yet still came second.

Geology was one of the reasons the startup set up operations in Kenya, according to Freimüller, as the country's Rift Valley region has the right kind of rock formation for carbon storage.

"Kenya is very unique having the East African Rift Valley, and that is very important for two reasons. The geology is great because it has porous rocks, volcanic rocks — specifically basalts. that actually can store CO2 underground.And the capacity of that geology is huge.". You could store all the cumulative CO2 released by humanity to date in just Kenya, essentially, because we have something like 8,600 cubic kilometers of that pore space in the East African Rift Valley," he said.Carbon capture from air is also energy-intensive, and for Octavia, an abundance of renewable energy, especially geothermal, in Kenya was the other factor that inspired the founders to set up operations in the East African country. They say using renewable energy gives Octavia a competitive edge over its peers in the developed world that use fossil fuels for their DAC operations, then buy renewable energy credits-which is counter-productive. These 0.01 Mt CO2/year DAC plants have been commissioned in Europe, North America, Japan and Middle East in the world. Only Climeworks Orca plant in Iceland, the Global thermostat headquarters plant in Colorado and Heirloom facility launched last year in California are capturing more than 1,000 tons of CO2 per year from these plants. More are expected to come with the growth of the industry. Indeed, 130 DAC facilities are being developed worldwide to capture 65 MtCO2 per year-a capacity needed by 2030 to realize net zero emissions by 2050. It won't be easy, admits Freimüller, but possible.

"Who would have thought that you can move an SUV around on batteries? That has been done too and that's ultimately the power that engineering has to sort of change the perimeters within what's possible," he said.

Freimüller worked previously at Dalberg, a global consulting firm, focused on international development strategies. It's where he first came across the massive opportunities that the climate sector presents.

Since the outset, his start-up company has grown up to a team of 60 people, amongst which 40 are engineers on the side of research and development. The rest of them develop bench scale chemistry and test the materials, methods, and chemical processes.

As an Xprize Carbon Removal finalist, Octavia scales its operations to offer more DAC and storage carbon credits to grow its revenues. The Danish carbon removal marketplace Klimate is, the startup says, its biggest client: to date, 12 across the board.

"For a deep tech company, that's unusual to have that many customers at seed stage," said Freimüller. "It took a lot of work to do to bring on these customers, but it's also fair to say that there's a lot of demand in the market for what we're doing."