ReGen 🤝 Banyu Carbon
ReGen partners with Banyu to scale light-driven carbon dioxide removal
ReGen Ventures is excited to lead Banyu Carbon’s $6.5m Seed round with participation from The Grantham Foundation, Propeller VC, United Airlines Ventures, and Carbon Removal Partners to scale light-driven carbon dioxide removal.
The background
The IPCC’s latest report asserts that limiting warming to 1.5°C, which will still cause harm to people and the planet, translates into around 6-10 Gt of direct carbon dioxide removal (CDR) per year starting ASAP.
Adopting solutions that evolve societal behaviors to reduce emissions won’t be enough to avoid catastrophic outcomes. Meanwhile, the potential supply capacity of every existing carbon project, including those in the pipeline, barely breaks a billion tons of CDR every year. Thus, we must act quickly to deploy nature-based solutions to restore nature and scale high-quality forms of CDR that can remove surplus emissions.
Over the last decade, many companies have strived to build direct air capture (DAC) facilities that require massive amounts of land, infrastructure, and energy to absorb dilute CO2 from the air. Meanwhile, the global ocean naturally absorbs nearly a third of all carbon dioxide emissions from natural and human sources, contains about 50 times more carbon than the amount in the atmosphere, and plays an outsized role in mitigating climate change at the planetary scale.
The solution
Enter Banyu Carbon, a Seattle-based company developing the first sunlight-driven process to strip carbon dioxide from seawater, a natural carbon sink, while generating more renewable electricity than it consumes. Banyu’s low-energy approach also yields a measurable, high-purity carbon dioxide stream that can be permanently stored in geological formations or used in industrial processes. Once Banyu scrubs carbon dioxide from the seawater, decarbonated water is returned to the sea at a slightly more basic pH than it started, counteracting ocean acidification locally.
The visionaries
Banyu Carbon was founded in 2022 by Alex Gagnon and Julian Sachs, former Professors of Chemical Oceanography at the University of Washington. Before deciding to spin their life’s work out of the lab, the duo spent over a decade as field research collaborators in the South Pacific studying how ocean acidification would impact coral reefs. Together, they have written +130 peer-reviewed publications and raised over $10m for ocean carbon and climate science research.
Where to from here
We envision a world where Banyu’s light-driven CDR process radically reduces the land, energy, and cost required for carbon dioxide removal. In doing so, they will dramatically accelerate the transition to a net-zero economy while restoring our oceans.
You can check out Banyu’s open roles here.