NeoCarbon Opens New Chemistry Lab for the Development of High-Quality Carbon Capture Sorbents

NeoCarbon has announced the opening of a new chemical laboratory at its headquarters in Berlin to push the boundaries of CO2 removal technologies, making them more efficient, scalable, and affordable. The goal of the new lab is the development, testing, and demonstration of its in-house sorbents—the materials that are key to capture CO2 from the atmosphere in the Direct Air Capture (DAC) process.

Sorbents chemically bind and separate CO2 molecules from the atmosphere. Therefore, optimizing sorbent materials is critical to the efficiency of DAC systems, as it affects CO2 capture capacity, regeneration rate, and energy requirements. Changes in the atmospheric conditions from which CO2 is removed, such as variations in temperature, humidity, CO2 concentration, and pressure, require the development of materials that can maintain high efficiency.

Silvain Toromanoff, co-founder and CTO of NeoCarbon, comments, “The new chemistry lab is a major opportunity for us to position NeoCarbon to lead the industry in creating scalable, effective Direct Air Capture solutions. In contrast to other developers who use low-efficiency sorbents, NeoCarbon can optimize the key material to its customers' needs. The new facility not only supports NeoCarbon's immediate research and development goals, but also advances the future of DAC in terms of scalability, efficiency, and financeability.”

NeoCarbon's lab is designed for the scale-up of high-performance sorbent production. Equipped with advanced chemical and surface characterization tools, the lab verifies successful synthesis and fine-tunes surface properties that influence CO2 adhesion to sorbent particles, ensuring high quality control. A flexible test setup accommodates sorbent samples ranging from 1 gram to 1 kilogram, enabling rigorous testing of carbon capture performance with larger volumes. This in-house testing capability enables direct scaling of performance breakthroughs for NeoCarbon's carbon capture devices.

At its Berlin site, NeoCarbon produces Direct AirCapture reactors that use the waste heat from existing infrastructure to reduce energy costs.