And the Winners are:

In order to manage global warming under 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2100, we need to start taking carbon dioxide from the atmosphere at a massive scale and store or re-use it in ways it doesn't get released back into the atmosphere. This is why last week, Shell held the seventh edition of the New Energy Challenge, focused on start-ups developing solutions to remove carbon from the atmosphere. The event was held at Web Summit in Lisbon, Portugal, with 70,000 (!) participants, one of the world’s leading start-up events.

The New Energy Challenge is an annually recurring European competition sponsored by Shell Nederland to find innovative start-ups from Europe that can accelerate the energy transition and transformation of the mobility and transport sectors when deployed at scale. Over the past several months, a team consisting of experts from Shell and our partners at Unkowngroup, Yes!Delft and Rockstart evaluated more than 90 proposals from start-ups, who were competing for a proof of concept project with Gamechanger or a collaboration with Shell Ventures and Shell’s Carbon Capture and Storage (‘CCS’) business.

The jury took a full day to listen to ten finalists pitching their carbon capture, utilization and sequestration solutions, tackling the problem from different angles, including biotechnology, biochar, mineralization, direct air capture and emission and sequestration monitoring by satellite.

What really stood out to me this year is that carbon removal technologies are maturing at speed, with some companies clearly getting out of the lab phase and reaching higher levels of technical maturity.

For example, three finalists from Germany, Energy4Future, Novocarbon and PYREG are commercializing the production of biochar to capture carbon from biomass and organic waste streams to create a soil fertilizer. Israeli start-up Airovation uses an accelerated form of mineralization – a natural process called ‘wheathering’ - to convert CO2 in useable minerals for the food-, feed-, agricultural- and glass sectors. Meanwhile, Barton Blakeley Technologies from the UK converts CO2 in hydrophobic silicas, which can be used in a range of applications.

Other solutions are still being tested at lab-scale, but show real promise for the future, such as CyanoCapture, a start-up from the University of Oxford that uses cyanobacteria and sunlight to capture CO2 from flue gases coming from power plants and other emitting industries to deliver affordable carbon sequestration solutions.

Two startups - Carbominer and RepAir Carbon are developing new technologies for cost-efficient CO2 capture from open air, a process called Direct Air Capture, or ‘DAC’. Carbominer is doing so under very, very difficult conditions in the Ukraine, facing regular power outages and unprecedented personnel and supply chain challenges. Talking about commitment... Those guys rock!

Swiss start-up Qaptis is developing a solution to capture carbon emissions from the exhaust of heavy-duty vehicles and ships. And Irish start-up CarbonSpaceTech is developing a satellite-powered platform that offers an accurate and cost-efficient tool for remote tracking of emissions and sequestration in the land sector.

Eventually we picked three winners from the ten finalists:

1.??????CyanoCapture won the Gamechanger price to do a proof-of-concept with Shell.

2.??????RepAir won the Shell Ventures’ price to further collaborate with Shell's CCS team.

3.??????CarbonSpaceTech was invited to become part of the Shell-led Energy Transition Center in Amsterdam and benefit from its partnership program.

The public present at Web Summit selected Barton Blakeley Technologies as their favorite.

As one of the jury members, it was a privilege to meet so many inspiring entrepreneurs and discuss their solutions tackling the decarbonization of our atmosphere. The energy transition requires radical change, and companies like Shell work closely with its partners in academia, its supply chain, its customer-base and with entrepreneurs and governments to make this happen.

A big thank you to all the finalists and the organizations that made this year’s competition possible: Unknown Group, Rockstart, Shell and YES!Delft.

I’m looking forward to next year's edition.

#EnergyTransition #PoweringProgress #CCS #CCUS #energysolutions #decarbonization #climatechangemitigation