Chevron-Backed Cleantech Firm Gets Up to $100 Million From Canada

(Bloomberg) -- Canada’s new green technology fund is putting as much as $100 million into a carbon-capture firm that’s backed by Chevron Corp. to help it commercialize its technology.

Svante Technologies Inc., based near Vancouver, has developed filters to catch carbon dioxide out of the air and concentrate it for other uses. The Canadian government’s Canada Growth Fund has agreed to inject $50 million through a convertible note, with a further $50 million potentially available for future projects. 

The fund is a C$15 billion ($11 billion) vehicle created by the government in 2022 to stimulate private sector investment and reduce emissions, managed by Canada’s Public Sector Pension Investment Board.

Svante, founded in 2007 and named after the Swedish scientist who was the first to use models to link atmospheric carbon dioxide levels to Earth temperatures, closed a $318 million Series E funding round led by Chevron in December 2022. Svante Chief Executive Officer Claude Letourneau said the financing gave it a “unicorn” valuation surpassing $1 billion.

The Canadian company has also drawn investment from Singapore state investor Temasek Holdings and the venture arms of manufacturing conglomerate 3M Co. and United Airlines Holdings Inc., the latter because of the potential to use extracted CO2 in sustainable aviation fuel.

The new funding will help Svante make the jump from trials to real, large-scale carbon capture projects, which it also could co-invest in, according to its CEO.

“The use of funds from Canada Growth Fund will basically allow us to support the development and construction of what we call these first-of-a-kind commercial carbon capture projects,” Letourneau said in an interview. 

How It Works

The goal is to extract CO2 from the ducts of carbon-heavy industries like oil and gas, steel, and cement-making. Svante has also partnered with a Swiss firm called Climeworks on direct-air capture machines, aimed at sucking excess CO2 directly out of the atmosphere.

Svante coats and bakes sheets with a proprietary chemical formula, stacks them in thinly-spaced layers to form gill-like racks and installs those into rotary drums which can be as big as a house, to process carbon-heavy air.

The dried chemical paste forms a computer-refined crystal structure with minuscule, fishnet-like gaps designed to snare carbon dioxide out of the air and let the rest flow through.

The company is building a new facility in Burnaby, British Columbia, aimed at large-scale, automated production. With R&D in mind, the plant includes smaller versions of its technology to iterate and improve designs.

“Svante has the opportunity to work with the Canada Growth Fund on a multitude of different solutions as it is required over time,” Patrick Charbonneau, the fund’s CEO, said in an interview. “We’re really trying to accelerate that transition from a good technology — a pilot — towards commercialization.”

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