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The assembly and production line at CarbonQuest’s Spokane facility. (CarbonQuest Photo)
Spokane, Wash.-based startup CarbonQuest raised new capital to expand the reach of its carbon capturing devices. The cash is coming from Riverbend Energy Group, a Houston investment firm. The companies on Thursday did not disclose the amount invested in the Series A round.
CarbonQuest sells a technology that pairs with buildings and smaller natural gas operations such as gas boilers, fuel cells and industrial activities. It developed a filter that the startup says can pull out approximately 90% of the carbon dioxide from an emission source’s flue — trapping the plant-warming pollutant before it reaches the atmosphere.
Carbon capture devices are more commonly used by larger power plants, but CarbonQuest is going after the smaller emitters, which includes 800,000 distributed emission sources in North America alone.
“We are one of the few carbon capture companies with commercial products on the market today, and this investment will enable us to continue bringing distributed carbon capture to a wider swath of the market,” said Shane Johnson, co-founder and CEO of CarbonQuest, in a statement.
The company is the third Spokane-based startup for Johnson and a core team of founders. The group’s first business was World Wide Packets, a telecom company that sold in 2008 for about $290 million. That was followed by Demand Energy Networks, a distributed power storage business that Enel acquired in 2017 for about $250 million.
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CarbonQuest has been largely self-funded since launching in 2019.
As of May, the startup had 23 employees, with engineers in Spokane and a commercialization team in New York City.
Two years ago CarbonQuest began deploying its technology in New York, capturing carbon released from building flue exhausts at six sites by the year’s end. It has also expanded to serve industrial boiler applications.
There are 14 investment-backed companies internationally working on point source carbon capture, according to a report from PitchBook. Others include British Columbia-based Svante, Carbon America, ReCarbon and Ardent. The sector raised more than $1.2 billion from investors from 2018 through the first quarter of this year.
As part of the investment in CarbonQuest, Joe Passanante and Eric Danziger, two managing directors of energy transition at Riverbend Energy Group, will join the startup’s board of directors.
