Former Tesla engineer leads Belgium's first DAC technology climatetech startup Sirona Technologies
Summary
As for the heat required to complete this task, the company intends to leverage the growth of solar energy and combine it with heat pumps and thermal storage to generate even more heat while simultaneously solving the sun-dependant nature of solar energy.The final phase of the process involves the compression of this captured CO\xb2 gas and its transfer to either permanent storage in geological formations or conversion into other valuable products including aviation fuels, pharmaceutical production, battery recycling processes for electric vehicles, carbon-neutral construction materials, and the production of carbonated beverages.So far, what the crew of the good ship Sirona is working on doesnt really stand miles apart from what likely competitors are working on. That is, until you look at whos at the helm: former Tesla engineer Thoralf Gutierrez and thermodynamics engineer Dr. Gauthier Limpens, Ph.D.Add a healthy dose of specialists focusing on particle physics, carbon capture, chemical engineering, and aerospace engineering hailing from CERN, Oxford University, and UCLouvain and the USP begins to reveal itself.Having led the development of Teslas big data analytics stack to increase the speed of iteration on their hardware products, and building the engineering team behind it, scaling up a hardware company in record time is in Sirona co-founder Thoralf Gutierrezs blood.Climate change is the most important problem of our era. Thats exactly what were doing, and it will be crucial to scaling our impact on climate change as quickly as possible.Its this commitment to speedy iterations that has allowed the company, only officially founded in January of this year, to build its first prototype in less than two months. Six months later, the team is now testing gen three of its product, reporting an efficacy increase of 100x over v1.During my tenure in the field, Ive come to realise the urgent need to scale up this technology right now, for it to be available tomorrow. Its not a question of choosing one solution over another as they will all be needed; rather, its about integrating DAC into our broader strategy to effectively and rapidly reduce atmospheric CO\xb2 levels in a post-fossil-energy era.The company closed a previously undisclosed $1 million Pre-Seed funding round earlier this year and is backed by XAnge, David Rowans VOYAGERS Climate-Tech Fund, Syndicate One (disclaimer: Tech.eu founder Robin Wauters is a member of Syndicate One), engineers from Tesla and SpaceX, Cowboys Adrien Roose, Aerospacelabs Benoit Deper, Eventbrite co-founder Renaud Visage, and eFounders Thibaud Elziere, and others.