Cytochrome: Accelerating cost-effective carbon capture and storage through ocean-based Enhanced Rock Weathering Technologies
Global trends in carbon capture and storage make it very clear that there currently is, and will continue to be, for decades to come, a profound, global need for cost-effective, permanent, and safe storage solutions for carbon. The status quo options for storing CO2 typically involve injecting it in wells for geological storage. It is very cost-efficient as it involves energy-intensive workflows such as concentrating, transporting, and injecting the CO2.
Furthermore, the global supply of well injection sites is prohibitively limited compared to the global demand and still offers risks with long-term leakage. Other carbon storage technologies, such as carbonation, are also supply-limited and are even more costly and less effective than geological storage.
Permanent carbon storage of solutions for scale-up and commercialization
Cytochrome is an R&D company that develops permanent carbon storage solutions for scale-up and commercialization. Our technologies leverage state-of-the-art knowledge in geochemistry, synthetic biology and mineralogy to enhance the weathering of silicate minerals in self-contained reactor systems for the purposes of permanent CO2 storage in the oceans. Cytochrome’s innovative approach involves reacting these minerals with CO2 through an engineered and proprietary slurry, thus catalyzing the formation of very high concentrations of alkalinity and dissolved bicarbonate. This method is environmentally sustainable and integrates very well in a circular economy due to the inherent recovery of valuable by-products like nickel, cobalt and chromium as the minerals dissolve.
Reactor-based systems
Compared to geological storage, Cytochrome’s reactor-based systems eliminate the added costs of CO2 purification, transport and injection by co-locating with emitters, off taking low-purity CO2, and leveraging the abundant supply of seawater and minerals to permanently store CO2 in the oceans in a single-step process. Cytochrome’s technologies consist of modular reactor systems that catalyze the weathering of specific carbon-reactive minerals. This enhanced weathering process generates alkalinity, which stabilizes dissolved CO2 into bicarbonate, a salt that is stable in the oceans for > 50,000 years.
Martin Van Den Berghe, CEO and Founder
These technologies build directly upon the technical expertise of Cytochrome’s CEO and founder, Martin Van Den Berghe, who studied environmental engineering and carbon capture science throughout his academic and professional career. Martin Van Den Berghe has a B.Sc. Hon. in geology, with a specialty in igneous petrology, a M.Sc. in environmental geochemistry, focusing on contaminated site remediation, and a Ph.D. in geobiology, focusing on mechanisms of enhanced mineral weathering for carbon capture and storage.
Professionally, he has worked in the mining sector as an exploration geologist, as an environmental consultant, and as a community development agent in remote mining communities.
