Impact theme
Decarbonising hard-to-abate sector

Sector
Industry

Stage

Affiliation
DTU Physics

Team
Bjørt Óladóttir Joensen, Electrochemical engineer, Co-founder, PhD candidate, and CTO
Christian Bach Lundgaard, Mechanical engineer, Co-founder, PhD, and CEO

Why it Matters

To overcome one of the most pressing technical challenges of our time — the green transition — being able to produce chemicals in a sustainable way is essential. We have developed a technology that has the potential to solve this challenge, and we are now seeking help, funding and advice to mature this technology industrially and bring it to market. We are on a mission to develop technology and business to transform CO2 emissions into high-value, sustainable chemicals. Via CO2 electrolysis technology, we want to produce sustainable ethylene from captured carbon emissions at competitive prices to fossil-based equivalents.

The global ethylene supply chains face two critical problems: High dependence on volatile fossil fuels prices as well as highly centralized production and dependence on geopolitical unstable countries and regions. Nobracat wants to solve both of these problems. By optimizing the operational costs of the electrolyzer, we are planning to decarbonize the production of ethylene at competing prices to conventional processes. We forecast that this will trigger a fast adoption even in regions with limited carbon reduction incentives.

Working on

Our technology is a low-temperature electrolyzer system that efficiently converts captured CO2 (CO derived from CO2), water, and renewable electricity into high-value chemicals like ethylene. The electrolyzer operates using an electrochemical device where CO2/CO is introduced through a gas diffusion layer (GDL) at the cathode and reduced to ethylene on a copper catalyst under an applied voltage. Designed as a zero-gap electrolyzer, the system minimizes ohmic resistance while maximizing CO2 mass transport for enhanced efficiency. Below is an illustration of our technology.

The current status of the technology is that we can operate our system with a stable ethylene production. To date, the largest active electrolysis area we have demonstrated is 100 cm2. Moving forward, we plan to scale up the electrolyzer area and develop a stack system to further increase the production rate. By 2025 we are planning to have an active area of 1000 cm2 capable of producing a minimum 0.5 kg of ethylene per day.