“People just don’t want to change a routine that has been running,” says Sharma. Moreover, there is the problem of ‘inertia’ among most operators. “Senior company officials did not think that a couple of 25-year-olds can have such a solution,” says Sharma. In the first couple of years, Sharma and Bumb felt their young age work against them. With the technological aspect sorted, the key challenge then becomes convincing customers to opt for its product for the first time. Because our product does not require a new dedicated plant, it opens up a big market for us,” says Sharma. “Today there are close to 250,000 carbon capture plants globally, which use older generation molecules. This means companies can easily shift to a cheaper regime without spending six to seven times the cost of the existing plant to make a new one or waiting a year-and-a-half in doing so. Two, unlike other competing options, CCS’s product does not require building a new CO2 capture plant it can be run on an existing plant. At our price point, it becomes more viable for many polluting factories to reduce CO2 emissions,” explains Sharma. “We realised that even the technology to capture CO2 was invented in 1970, it has not been used as widely-leading, in turn, to excessive pollution-because of the cost. One is the obvious advantage of capturing carbon at almost half the cost using the molecule patented by CCS. The carbon capture industry is worth $40 billion globally and it is mostly dominated by established giants such as Dow Chemicals, BASF and Mitsubishi.īut there are two reasons why a small company like CCS may hold great promise. Sequestration involves pumping the captured CO2 into the ground. Moreover, for India in particular, its product is better suited since the country has greater need for re-utilisation of CO2 (to make other usable products) instead of sequestration, as done in many Western countries. Patkar believes that CCS has a better product than global giants like Dow Chemicals or BASF. “I have been tracking their progress, and in my opinion, their formula is a significant improvement over MEA or Monoethanolamine, the dominant chemical used for carbon capture,” says Avinash Patkar, who has worked in the field of CO2 capture for 40 years and is an advisor on clean technology to a major Indian power company. Only one plant has been operating since year-and-a-half.” Also out of five, two are industrial-scale pilots. Hence, there’s a certain impact on revenue. With the plants, Sharma says, “we are demonstrating the technology at customer sites globally to give comfort to larger markets and to create reference cases. In addition, it has plants in five locations across the world: The UK, the US, the Netherlands, Germany and India. CCS is in the process of signing up three new contracts that will get it to its target for FY 2015. Soon after this, Hazel Mercantile (HML), which trades chemicals internationally, also signed up. This patented molecule brings down the cost of capturing CO2 by as much as 50 percent, and uses it to make other useful products like baking soda and polymers.ĬCS received a Rs 33 crore grant from the British government early in 2013, and the India arm of Solvay Chemicals started using its product. The secret to CCS’s steady success lies in an improved molecule, prepared by Sharma’s batchmate and CCS co-founder, Prateek Bumb. In the 2012-13 financial year, till date CCS has earned revenues in excess of Rs 4 crore and expects more than a four-fold increase in FY 2015. “In my opinion, CO2 emissions have risen most uncontrollably and threaten to bring about cataclysmic changes in our environment if urgent steps are not taken to reduce them,” says Sharma. It is this central concern that led Sharma, a graduate from IIT-Kharagpur, to launch a company in 2009, which aimed to provide a more efficient method to capture Carbon Dioxide (CO2). “As a result, since childhood, I was eager to be at the cutting edge of technology use, especially where it concerns the environment.” “I grew up acutely aware of the downside of technology, especially when it is not controlled,” says Sharma. By the time he was born, horrific stories of the gas leak and its impact were endemic. A gas leak at the Union Carbide factory led to the death of between 15,000 and 20,000 people, exposing over 500,000 to the toxic gas. It was December 3, 1984, when Bhopal, Sharma’s hometown, witnessed the world’s second biggest chemical disaster. The patented molecule cuts the cost of capturing CO2 by 50 percent, and uses it to make other productsįor Aniruddha Sharma, the 27-year-old CEO of startup Carbon Clean Solutions (CCS), the event that shaped his career choice took place even before his parents got married.
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