Calgary carbon capture companies finding new markets

At its most basic, Carbon Upcycling Technologies (CUT) captures the bad stuff and turns it into good stuff that helps capture more of the bad.

Using small reactors - pressurized drums that concentrate and refine isolated carbon captured from power generation - the company is creating plastic cables for 3D printers that are now being used to make parts for another carbon capture company just a few minutes away.

"We're capturing a little bit of CO2, and we're also substituting out something like a virgin plastic that's higher in carbon footprint to get an overall CO2 reduction in the final product," said Peter Zhou, product development lead with CUT.

Their small reactors capture about the same amount of carbon in a year as a mature tree, but other, much larger reactors are now working to create a carbon product that can be used in a high-performance cement substitute.

"We're here to help with the net-zero transition to abate and decarbonize heavy industry - so whether that's cement, steel, plastics (or) petrochemicals," Zhou said.

Just blocks away, CleanO2 started out as a carbon capture company, making small capture units for commercial buildings such as recreation centres and schools.

Roughly 50 of their units are now in use.

But small or irregular parts are either expensive and subject to supply chain disruptions or are prohibitively expensive for a small company carving out a market.

"For example, the corner pieces - that's a $10,000 mould to make those corner pieces. Instead, we can use 3D printing, which costs us about $10 a piece on the corner," said Brant McDermott of CleanO2.

The company sells the units, but so far, the money seems to be in finding new uses for the captured carbon.

In one bay of a southeast industrial space, they build the capture units.

In another, they make soap, which is now available in a number of stores including Calgary Co-op.

"The next one we're working on is fertilizer," McDermott said.

According to market analysts MarketsandMarkets, the global carbon capture industry was worth US$2.4 billion in 2022 and is projected to grow nearly 20 per cent a year through most of this decade.

Carbon capture is still an expensive way to reduce greenhouse emissions, but as byproducts are found and adopted, cost per metric tonne is projected to drop.