Air Company raises $69M to transform CO2 into jet gas

Investors are betting large on Air Company’s efforts to chop carbon emissions from planes.

The New York–primarily based startup introduced in the present day that it raised $69 million in a Series B funding spherical led by Avfuel, an aviation gas provider, together with Lowercarbon Capital, IQT, Alaska Airlines, and different traders. That cash will go towards constructing industrial manufacturing services for sustainable aviation gas — a transfer that would assist increase manufacturing of SAF, which stays restricted in provide and costly.

“The key impression Air Company can have towards combating local weather change is we eradicate the necessity for crude oil,” Stafford Sheehan, Air Company’s co-founder and chief know-how officer, advised Canary Media.

The firm — and the SAF business basically — has a lengthy solution to go earlier than realizing that imaginative and prescient.

Jet gas combustion is accountable for 2 p.c of worldwide CO₂ emissions linked to power use. If the aviation sector transitions to utilizing SAF, complete flight emissions might fall by as much as 80 p.c.

But widespread adoption of SAF, an umbrella time period for lower-carbon fuels, has been sluggish. In 2023, 24.5 million gallons of SAF have been used to gas U.S. flights. That’s a fraction of the roughly 69 million gallons of fossil jet gas the nation burns each day. As local weather regulation and voluntary company commitments push airways to chop emissions, the demand for SAF is anticipated to develop shortly, in keeping with McKinsey.

Air Company makes its SAF utilizing a proprietary system that entails capturing carbon dioxide immediately from the ambiance and mixing the CO₂ with hydrogen to create paraffins — colorless, oily liquids that it says might be dropped into standard jet engines. Companies resembling Twelve and LanzaTech are additionally vying to repurpose CO₂ into sustainable jet fuels.

Right now, Air Company operates two pilot services within the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bushwick, each of which produce small batches of CO₂-derived gas for check flights. The startup plans to make use of its new funding to construct an undisclosed variety of ​“mini refineries,” which it goals to finish throughout the subsequent two or three years, in keeping with the founders. These refineries will ​“acquire information” to attempt to show that its know-how can work for large-scale SAF manufacturing.

“In order to actually struggle local weather change, we have to construct vegetation which might be the scale of refineries,” Sheehan mentioned in reference to grease vegetation, which might occupy as much as a number of hundred soccer fields’ value of land. ​“Getting as much as that degree of scale is what a lot of this funding goes towards.”