Two Sydney entrepreneurs who want to create “artificial lungs for the planet” have received a significant financial boost in their quest, with a successful Seed fundraising led by high-profile eco-investors.
Mac Thompson and Dr Luke Marshall – founder and first employee respectively of Sun Cable, which building the world’s largest solar plant – now have their own clean energy mission, dubbed Fugu.
The Sydney-based startup is developing a novel technology solution in the emergent carbon removal sector: they want to produce mass-manufacturable artificial lungs for the planet that sustainably suck carbon from the atmosphere.
“CO2 is an enormous market,” explains Thompson. “Thousands of companies around the world use it in its pure form to make chemicals, beverages and pharmaceuticals.”
While some companies are working on ways to bury carbon deep underground, where it will turn into rock to be permanently removed from the atmosphere, others like aircraft maker Airbus are investing heavily in turning carbon into sustainable fuels for jets and global shipping.
“Fugu is gearing up to be the key supplier of clean CO2 from the atmosphere for these offtakers.”
Technology inspired by solar farms
Thompson and Marshall are applying lessons learned from building the world’s largest solar farm to their carbon-sucking mission. Built with mass-manufactured parts, Fugu’s carbon removal machines are highly scalable and – at about the size of a shipping container – easily deployable to sites anywhere in the world.
The kicker is that this technology represents a viable way to reduce the cost of extracting carbon from the atmosphere to the point that green CO2 becomes cost-competitive with energy derived from fossil fuels.
Investors agree. The Seed funding round was led by Apac-based VC Investible and included participation from Australian investors Jelix and Electrifi Ventures, and Counteract, a London-based VC specialising in carbon removal.
Thompson and Marshall say the funds will enable Fugu to scale up its unit production and sell CO2 to its first customer in Sydney. The company aims to build 2000 extraction machines from each of its production sites annually, for location in all of the planet’s major carbon dioxide markets. By 2032, Fugu targets extracting a gigatonne (that’s 1 billion metric tonnes) every year.
Above: Fugu co-founders Mac Thompson, left, and Dr Luke Marshall.
Ben Lindsay, investment manager at Investible, described Thompson and Marshall as “bold and capable founders”.
“Fugu is creating cost-effective and energy-efficient solid direct air capture (S-DAC) systems. These systems are designed for rapid deployment, leveraging existing supply chains to serve a variety of industries, including green fuels, food and beverage, and more,” he said.
A race against time
Quoting data from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Marshall says despite the widespread adoption of solar and wind power society will struggle to prevent climate change without also adopting geo-engineering solutions to fix the problem directly. IE: artificial lungs for the planet.
“This challenge is extremely difficult. To hit our climate targets, we will now need to plant approximately three new Amazon rainforests by 2050, on top of decarbonising industry and society – that will be incredibly hard to do in such a short timeframe,” he explains.
“We need new technologies that can accomplish this task at a fraction of the cost and difficulty.”
He adds that some industries will never be completely decarbonised so it is essential to develop a green, low-cost solution for them.
“Many companies are trying to do this now but their technology is often difficult to implement in the real world due to cost, deployability or manufacturing limitations.”
