Manu Pillai, Co-Founder and CEO, CarbonBridge
CarbonBridge converts gas into marine energy, cleanly, using microbes. This ultra low carbon methanol allows for highly economical compliance through blending. This enables a constant decrease in carbon footprint, down to net-zero.
Since winning the award this year, CarbonBridge has moved from Newark NJ to Harlem, NY, into Harlem Biospace. The property, developed by JLL, is beautiful, functional, located perfectly for transit and access to talent – walking distance to Columbia and CUNY- ASRC with an amazing inventory of accessible instruments. CarbonBridge Harlem, NY
Before investing in expensive steel, we built an acrylic test version. A bit messy, but we learned from this. An improved version is being built right now. This is a 30x scale up in surface area compared to our starting point. It is a big deal for us – scaling up has brought issues that we’ve had to solve on the fly.
For even faster testing, we made a smaller unit from HDPE. We are now getting quotes from US based vendors for our steel version.
Fundraising
ARPA-E funding was delayed. As a result, we are extending our bridge round from an abundance of caution. Our caution can be your upside. If you like what we are doing and want to be a part of our journey, please reach out and book some time here. We have received investment from NY Ventures (owned and operated by NY State).
Asks
We are pitching at the ARPA-E Summit, the NREL IGF; both in March.
We expect changes along with the new administration. While our first product, methanol, is targeted to meet and beat fossil prices without subsidies, it is still unclear about our path forward. We will be reaching out individually to our supporters as we work through our options.
For more information about CarbonBridge here is a link to a podcast style interview by Brinc that digs deeper into our solution. CarbonBridge: Solving the Energy Crisis on a Planetary Scale | On the Brinc
