New emissions solution a ‘double whammy’ for heavy industry
Carbon capture is great, but this duo wants to do more and become our first climate unicorn firm with their tech that converts industrial CO2 emissions into bricks and glass.
It’s a race, a sprint, a mad and desperate scramble, with everything at stake. “There are 38 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide being pumped into the atmosphere every year,” says cleantech entrepreneur Marcus Dawe. “We’ve got to stop that right now.”
Carbon-capture technology is great, he says, but we must put the pedal to the metal in the global charge toward net-zero emissions.
Enter MCi Carbon, a pioneer in carbon capture and utilisation (CCU). MCi, headed up by Dawe and his half-sister Sophia Hamblin Wang, has developed a revolutionary technology that doubles carbon reduction.
The duo’s work has seen them included in the Top 100 Energy Players published on Friday in The Australian’s special The List magazine.
Instead of just storing captured CO2 (a process known as carbon capture and sequestration, or CCS), MCi’s carbon plants can take industrial CO2 emissions and convert them into solid carbonates.
These can then be turned into building materials including bricks, plasterboard and glass, as well as household products such as shampoo.
“By coming up with a way to remove their emissions and create materials for their own supply chains, it’s like a double whammy for heavy industry,” says Dawe.
“It’s an accelerator.” And time is of the essence. “There are lots of great ideas, like recycling tyres and planting trees, but they are actually only making a dent,” he says.
“The big game now is scale. The investments we need to make are in those industrial sectors that can’t readily go to renewables or will take too long to change their processes.”
By focusing on hard-to-abate sectors, such as cement and steel manufacturing, MCi’s mission is to remove one billion tonnes of CO2 every year by 2040.
The third list selected by a special panel features entrepreneurs, adviser, advocates, policy makers and leaders of renewable energy projects.
Judge Simon Currie, founder of Energy Estate, an advisory and consulting firm, says the Top 100 shows the “passion, purpose and perseverance” of the sector which needs leadership at every level. Says Currie: “We need people who can cut through the noise and design solutions that will provide and embed enduring benefits.”
The Australian’s business editor, Perry Williams, also a judge, says the list is a “unique snapshot of people and businesses bringing about change at a time of unprecedented upheaval across the many sectors featured”.
MCi was co-founded by Dawe and fellow Canberra entrepreneur John Beever in 2013, following six years of university-based scientific research into mineral carbonation, a chemical engineering method that accelerates the geological process of rock weathering.
Dawe, as chief executive officer, convinced Hamblin Wang to leave her PhD at Australian National University to become chief operating officer.
Since then, Hamblin Wang has helped to shape the climate conversation globally, presenting at COP26 in Glasgow and representing Australia at the 2020 World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos. She was named one of the WEF’s Young Global Leaders for 2022.
The company has enjoyed significant growth in recent years, following a $14.6m federal grant to build a mineral carbonation demonstration plant at Orica’s ammonium nitrate facility on Kooragang Island in Newcastle.
In 2021, Japan’s Itochu Corporation took a multimillion-dollar stake in the company and pledged to develop market applications for carbonates technology in Japan.
Earlier this year, MCi signed up Austrian company RHI Magnesita, a world-leading manufacturer of refractory products, as its first global commercial customer and plans to have a carbon plant up and running there within three years.
Dawe is bullish about becoming a major player in the circular carbon economy. “Mineral carbonation stands out on its own as something that can make money on the pathway to net-zero,” he says. “It’s not enough to just have rebates and government incentives; what we need is climate capital. The game right now is to make money out of climate change, because that’s actually how the world works.”
Once companies realise they can turn a profit from their CO2 emissions, it will just be a matter of scaling up.
“The game for us now around CCU is how many carbon plants we can get built around the world before about 2030,” Dawe says. “And from there we can go on and build hundreds because we’re ready; we’ve got no obstacles, there are no breakthroughs we need to make, it’s just about building more plants, that’s the challenge.”
He describes the 50-strong Canberra-based MCi team as extraordinary. “It’s amazing when what brings people together is purpose rather than pay or prestige,” he says.
“I’m so proud of the team that’s come together to pick up our mission, which is to put away a billion tonnes of CO2 safely, permanently, every year by 2040. We really want to be Australia’s first climate unicorn and we want to be a big part of the climate solution.”
