ReGen 🤝 CREW Carbon
ReGen partners with CREW Carbon to enhance the natural power of minerals to improve wastewater treatment and store carbon dioxide permanently
ReGen Ventures is thrilled to participate in CREW Carbon’s oversubscribed $5.3 million seed round led by Counteract Ventures with participation from ANIMO, Connecticut Innovations, Ponderosa Ventures, Newlab, Echo River Capital, and the Carbon Drawdown Initiative.
The background
Over 100,000 wastewater treatment plants worldwide support society and ecological systems by removing pollutants and discharging clean water (effluent) to river systems and the ocean. Wastewater passes through various treatment steps to remove nutrients and solids, break down organic materials, and destroy pathogens.
Trillions of microbes are added to wastewater in massive bioreactors to degrade organic material during the secondary biological treatment step. During this step, organic material transforms from solid carbon into carbonic acid and then biogenic carbon, which accounts for 2-5% of global emissions annually as a byproduct of microbial decomposition.
The solution
CREW Carbon is the first company to combine geochemistry and wastewater engineering expertise to target the carbon-rich fluid flowing through wastewater treatment plants. CREW’s technology doses precise formulas of natural minerals to react with CO2 produced during wastewater treatment and store it as dissolved bicarbonate ions, discharged directly to river systems and oceans and stored permanently for thousands of years.
Beyond CO2 capture, CREW’s process also reduces nitrous oxide emissions generated from wastewater treatment during nitrification and denitrification of the nitrogen present. By designing a system that seamlessly integrates into the trillions of dollars of existing treatment infrastructure, CREW is already operating at multiple wastewater plants in the U.S. and Europe and is on its way to scaling operations to remove thousands of tons of CO2 next year.
The visionaries
CREW Carbon was founded by Joachim (Jo) Katchinoff and Noah Planavsky at Yale University. Before CREW, Jo spent years as a geochemist, answering fundamental questions about the carbon cycle, weathering dynamics, biogeochemical cycles, and the interplay between these processes to regulate the climate. After landing on the idea to utilize enhanced weathering technology within wastewater treatment plants, Jo co-founded CREW with Noah, a Professor of Geochemistry at Yale and a Senior Contributing Scientist at Cascade Climate & the Environmental Defense Fund.
Where to from here
At scale, CREW has the potential to transform wastewater treatment plants from a source of gigatons of biogenic emissions annually into distributed hubs for permanent CDR.
Interested in the intersection of water, technology, and decarbonization? Check out CREW Carbon’s open roles here.