Tamar Hallerman
GHG Monitor
6/28/13
Skyonic Corp. said this week that it has secured $128 million in funding to support the construction of its carbon capture and mineralization retrofit of a cement plant in San Antonio. The Austin, Texas-based technology development company said June 25 that it has recently secured equity investments from groups like BlueCap Partners, Toyo-Thai Corporation Public Co., Energy Technology Ventures and Cenovus Energy. In addition to money from other heavyweight investors like BP and ConocoPhillips, Skyonic said it has secured a total of $48 million in its latest investment round, in addition to $80 million in loan financing from Apollo Investment Corp. and Maxus Capital Group to finance its CO2 utilization project. Skyonic said some of the money will also go to expanding the company’s R&D operations and intellectual property portfolio for carbon capture technologies.
Skyonic said it will be breaking ground this summer on the Capitol Aggregates cement plant in San Antonio after being delayed for several months. The company said earlier this spring that it was hoping to break ground on the plant in April. “The Capitol SkyMine plant will mark the first time that carbon-negative chemistry has reached the commercial stage … this is a crucial step towards a cleaner global manufacturing industry,” Skyonic Founder and CEO Joe Jones said in a statement this week. With the help of a $28 million grant from the Department of Energy’s National Energy Technology Laboratory, Skyonic is looking to capture 83,000 tons of CO2 from the cement plant, as well as acid gases and heavy metals found in the flue gas, and mineralize them into products that can be sold on the market like sodium bicarbonate, or baking soda, as well as hydrochloric acid, currently in high demand as a natural gas fracking fluid.
Skyonic has been marketing its technology as well-suited for carbon capture in areas of the country where the geologic sequestration of CO2 is impractical or too expensive. The company is currently in talks with several international groups from companies in countries like China, Canada and Russia to set up partnerships linked to its mineralization technology. Jones said he expects the Capitol Aggregates project to turn a profit within three years. “Because the plant operates at energy-efficient conditions and produces valuable products using low-cost chemical inputs, SkyMine captures CO2 at a substantially lower cost than other carbon capture technologies, allowing industrial emitters to turn a profit from reduced emissions,” Skyonic said in a release this week. The company hopes to have the project’s capture operations in-service by late next year.
