We are scientists and engineers on a mission to tackle climate change

In the search of new materials to boost the efficiency of solar panels, by accident, one of the samples becomes highly porous. To his lucky surprise, this is the moment that Hans De Neve realizes how it could be used for the sake of direct air capture…
Back in 2010, Hans De Neve attends a Christmas lecture by Richard van de Sanden (DIFFER) on the future of renewable fuels. This is the moment where he realizes that e-fuels are the missing link between renewable electricity and a renewable world.
In 2018, a small team of researchers at TNO runs a series of experiments to validate Hans’ idea to use the porous material, that he created by accident, for direct air capture of CO2. The first results are very promising and TNO investigates the option to create a spin-off company to further develop the technology and bring it to the market.
In 2019, Hans De Neve founds Carbyon in close collaboration with TNO and other stakeholders in the Brainport Eindhoven region. Carbyon joins the HighTechXL venture building program. HighTechXL is a deep-tech start-up incubator founded by, amongst others, ASML and Philips to support start-up companies in the area of high-tech mechatronics.
Carbyon opens up its first labs at the High Tech Campus in Eindhoven. These labs host specialized equipment to validate the adsorption and desorption behaviour of the membrane as well as equipment to validate specialized mechatronic components of the machine design such as the gas seals.
Elon Musk realizes the importance of carbon removal to combat climate change and calls upon the world to come up with new ideas for scalable and cost-effective solutions. Carbyon is fully committed to this very purpose and participates in the XPRIZE Carbon Removal challenge.
Carbyon has proven all aspects of the technology, bringing it beyond Technology Readiness Level 4. The next step is to learn from our integrated prototype and start with the development of the full-scale machine.
This integrated prototype are two lab-scale machines able to filter CO2 from ambient air and hosting all essential components of the final machine. This prototype is needed to validate all aspects before building the first pilot machines.
The full-scale machine is aimed to have a capacity of around 100 tons/year and will be developed with the knowledge that we gain from our integrated prototype. The development phase will have to be executed in great detail and will require an expansion of our team.
The machines will be deployed in various locations and applications around the world. The piloting and testing phase is crucial to prove deployment in different outdoor conditions as well as the integration with storage or fuel synthesis infrastructure.
Our products are designed with mass manufacturing in mind to maximize impact towards our purpose. In the scale-up phase, production lines will be built allowing for the mass manufacturing of the machines, growing towards gigaton scale.
Carbyon supports the ambition of the European Commission to reduce emissions by 55% by the year 2030. The use of direct air capture for the offsetting of emissions in hard-to-abate sectors like long-distance transport and buildings will help to drastically reduce these emissions.
By 2050, humanity should no longer add any excess CO2 into the atmosphere. From then onwards we can start to reduce and restore the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere.
By the end of this century, we hope that CO2 levels have been brought back to pre-industrial levels such that climate change comes to an end. To illustrate how daunting a task this is, one should know that all IPCC scenarios on the 1.5 °C target rely on the removal of large volumes of CO2: up to 730 gigatons by 2100!
Direct air capture will continue to be used for the sake of e-fuels and renewable chemistry, using CO2 as a green and circular feedstock molecule, leaving any fossil carbon sourced untouched forever.
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