DCVC announces incubation of Circularity Fuels

Tomorrow’s best ideas are often today’s best ideas inverted. The Earth revolves around the sun, not the other way around; genes propagate through natural selection, not through acquired traits; time is relative, not absolute.

In that vein, DCVC is proud to announce its incubation of Circularity Fuels, a company built around its own inversion — of the rocket engine. Rather than a rocket burning fuel to make energy, Circularity reverses the process to turn atmospheric CO₂ and renewable energy into hydrocarbon fuels in a single reactor. See great TechCrunch coverage here.

Circularity Co-Founder and CEO Dr. Stephen Beaton is an Entre­pre­neur in Residence at DCVC. Stephen’s key insight is that while storing and trans­porting hydrocarbon fuels is incredibly cheap — about 1% the cost of storing and trans­porting energy as electricity — refining it is incredibly expensive. The price per unit of energy increases by about 10-fold between crude oil and jet fuel, and for more refined products like rocket fuel, by about 100-fold. Stephen developed this insight across his time earning his Oxford DPhil in inorganic chemistry and a Stanford MBA and serving seven years as a fuel scientist in the U.S. Air Force, where he was the Lab Chief of the Air Force Petroleum Office’s deployed lab.

By directly producing pure versions of the same hydrocarbon fuels in use today in a fossil-free manner, Circularity can avoid the refineries but still leverage today’s large and efficient network of pipelines and storage — i.e., taking advantage of the best parts of the fossil-fuel infra­struc­ture while avoiding its most costly refining processes. This type of drop-in replacement is crucial for tran­si­tioning off fossil fuels because the world doesn’t have a century to build out trans­porta­tion and storage networks for other possible energy-carrying molecules (like hydrogen, ammonia, or methanol). 

Specif­i­cally, Circularity takes CO₂ out of the atmosphere or any biologic or industrial waste stream and, using renewable sources of energy, turns it into a specific hydrocarbon fuel or feedstock that can be used as is — no refining required. Circularity’s core innovation involves reducing the number of different separation steps required. By combining sorbents and catalysts into a single reactor, Circularity Fuels’ approach to converting CO₂ is more efficient and cheaper than competing methods for producing e‑fuels.

The company’s first reactors are currently producing today’s most valuable methane-based fuels — the ones that are the most refined and thus the costliest to make. Circularity’s initial market is selling its ultra-high-purity methane—which is already cheaper than fossil ultra-high-purity methane—to companies that are growing diamond, graphene, and other advanced carbon materials.

With its technical approach thus validated, Circularity is beginning the cost-down process to be able to attack broader segments of the purified methane market. At scale, the company envisions that its reactors will be as mass-manu­fac­turable as cars, and Stephen believes that Circularity’s methane will eventually be sold as a drop-in replacement for natural gas.

Circularity’s ability to use atmospheric CO₂ inherently solves a core challenge facing all carbon utilization companies: finding geographies where both CO₂ and renewable electricity are cheap. Initial models show that by utilizing any dilute CO₂ source including atmospheric CO_2, Circu­lar­i­ty’s approach could be at least 10x cheaper than other e‑methane and e‑fuel tech­nolo­gies in the long term.

In the short period since funding, Stephen has moved at an impressive clip: he has assembled a rockstar team of mechanical engineers who had previously built rocket engines, electrical engineers who built hardware for satellites, and chemical engineers who are building next-generation hydrogen fuel cells housed in a 10,000-square-foot facility in Redwood City, CA. He has partnered with the National Renewable Energy Lab for validation and scaled the reactor 1,000x — and the company has been selected for non-dilutive funding from the National Science Foundation ($275,000), ARPA‑E ($3.6 million), and the California Energy Commission ($1 million). Stephen is now designing the 20x larger version of the reactor to supply its first commercial customer by early this year.

DCVC is doing all it can to support Stephen and his exceptional team — whose success will be the world’s.