What is Wind Capture Technologies?
Aaron Boylan - Windcapture is an Irish startup - we take an alternate approach to direct air capture (DAC). We've created a wind turbine blade that integrates solid sorbents into the blade housing, allowing the turbine to filter carbon from the air that passes through so that the power of the turbine generator regenerates the sorbent. This process allows us to create a self-contained, self-powered carbon capture machine, and we've designed our blades to retrofit onto existing turbines. We aim to purchase and retrofit older turbines. Therefore, it breathes new life into machines that would otherwise be dismantled and most likely end up in landfills. This in-power generation capability, as well as the retrofit model, helps us to dramatically reduce the unit costs of direct air capture and offer a range of products to customers, from feedstock CO2 and carbon removal stocks to direct in-setting opportunities for our customers who might have existing wind assets.
It's critical to our innovation that the sorbent can be reused - it wouldn't be economically feasible if we had someone up there every few days replacing it. Our carbon capture tiles are flat surfaces, the air flows over the tile and the carbon sticks to it; that tile is then rotated into the internals of the blade, where we have a thermal vacuum. So, a high-heat, low-pressure mechanism is there that then strips the carbon off in a gaseous form. It's then pumped down the blade into the nacelle down the tower and gone, and then that rotates back out so it can be reused, so it's a completely automated system up in that blade.
Origins
what was the inspiration that led to your carbon removal business?
Aaron Boylan - Ronan and I met in college, and about eight years ago, once I graduated, I went to the UK. I have a masters in Energy Systems Engineering and worked on creating energy from waste power plants. That's where the inspiration came from because I was shocked at the amount of engineering effort and the sheer footprint that went into treating the flue gas that came off these power plants. Looking at the resource and effort that went into pulling down carbon, NOX, sulfur, and all these things from the power generation process - that’s what sparked my interest and opened the door for carbon capture. Eventually, it led me to direct air capture, and one of the core issues that DAC had was the fundamental requirement to process vast amounts of air. If you picture a cubic meter beside you, there's less than a gram of carbon in there. If you want that gram - you have to process the entire cube. I knew from college that wind turbines had seen decades and decades of development, allowing them to process huge amounts of air, so to me, that was a lightbulb moment. I looked into how I might marry these two technologies, and I did a couple of small prototypes, dropped the part-time job, built a few more prototypes, got patents, and decided to take the leap from there. Ronan came on. We founded Windcapture in September 2022. We've been developing it every day since.
The 'Aha' Moment
Can you share that 'aha' breakthrough in your business' journey that left you especially excited about its potential?
Ronan Hearne - The big moment was when we moved from everything being theoretical to starting wind tunnel tests. We built a room-scale wind tunnel that simulates wind speeds up to 16 metres per second. We control the humidity. We controlled the temperature, and that was to start testing our blade sections. We were worried that if you try to cram the system onto a wind turbine, you won't be able to capture enough carbon for it to make sense. The theory said you should be able to do it, but we didn’t know if it would filter out into reality. In the first test, we fully emptied the chamber of CO2 in a couple of minutes. So that was a big aha moment for us, and that's what propels us forward. That transition from theory to having serious proof was the ‘aha’ moment for me.
Garnering Investment
What have you found the best way of garnering investor or buyer attention?
Ronan Hearne - We're pretty early in our own experience with it. One of the biggest things is having a unique selling point; for us, that's obvious, and we benefit a lot from having a unique twist on that. But with that comes this kind of burden of proof, which many other companies have a slightly more mature tech or are using a tech, that's generally well understood. We're trying to flip that on its head and provide a different way to do it. So that comes with the burden of proof. Getting investor and buyer interest that worked well for us was community involvement. So, over the summer, we spent a good deal of time applying to specific CDR-focused accelerators. So we got into AirMiners, remove, the climate KIC and, most recently, the Global Entrepreneurship Centre Catalyst program. We found that those accelerators centred around the CDR conversation; we were already in the room with the right people, which was a very tangible output. We got a lot more interest online. We've had many more reach outs from investors, which helps us frame our understanding of CDR as well. So, those accelerators have been essential for us.
Scalability
How are you approaching scalability, and what tools or strategies have proven most effective in levelling up your solution?
Ronan Hearne - We've come out of our extensive technology development phase. We did a couple of MVPs and are now transitioning into piloting and testing our commercial model. That's where we are on our roadmap, but we are looking ahead to what our solution does differently: it scales its blade length. Where we focus on scalability, we focus on scaling up our actual blade lengths rather than just jumping straight into mass manufacturing them. We do that because if you double the length of the wind turbine blade, you'll quadruple the amount of carbon that flows through it. So it's a naturally scalable solution, and the benefit is that if you jump your blade length from 20 metres up to 40 metres, you get an increase in the CapEx, but you're minimising that over time because you go back to an exponential increase in carbon capture. The goal for this year is to develop our pilot turbine. We're in the middle of the fundraising round to implement that, and are grateful to have already received backing from Enterprise Ireland. We aim to get that up at the end of the year, which should capture 20 tons per year. Then, we will quickly move up that blade length to a 20-metre blade that'll capture about 600 tons. That's the first one we will put into mass production. And start leveraging that retrofitting model. And then we'll move up to that 40-metre blade again. So we step up quickly in the blade length.
Regional Advantages
Are there any ideal regions or specific geographies where your solution works particularly well? Is there a stage of the wind turbine lifecycle where the installation must either be taken down, replaced and recycled?
Ronan Hearne - It's a great question. The wind turbine industry is global. At this stage, our focus areas would be the US and Europe. They're relatively easy markets for us to get started in, which is particularly attractive in some regions of the US, particularly along the Midwest along the Rockies, because of some exceptional wind conditions there. Wind farms can regularly hit a 40-50% capacity factor, which is important for our solution. We need to ensure that we're close enough to sites that we can sequester the carbon; that is a factor we need to be conscious of. We're looking at methods of mineralisation where you can basically do it in situ or mineralising in abundant minerals. Those are the two factors we’re keeping an eye on: it's accessible to the wind capacity and the ability to get close to our sequestration site.
Aaron Boylan - In America right now, there are about 5,000 turbines that would be suitable for our retrofits and globally, that's about 20,000. The critical thing is that as the entire sector grows and the whole wind sector moves offshore, that curve rises. Based on the timelines, it's estimated that in the next five years, about 80,000 suitable turbines will be ready for retrofitting worldwide. So there is considerable availability there, but as Ronan alludes to, siting them appropriately, sequestration costs and transport needs to be considered.
Benefits
What are the benefits of a wind turbine company turning over to your solution versus just creating another energy-generating wind turbine in that area because, as I understand it, your operation doesn't allow you to suck down carbon and produce energy at the same time.
Ronan Hearne - We would ideally like to build up our assets of that we can own and operate, but we're also looking at the ability to inset or provide these kinds of systems to existing wind farm owners. It's not an ideal business model for us. It's not a great way to get to Market because we have to convert their business model effectively - convincing them to swap over a business model. So we prefer acquiring and running ourselves. But their value proposition is that the carbon in the air is worth more than the energy in the air, and we've reliably predicted that to be between 40 and 200% depending on market conditions (based on site conditions, fluctuating energy and carbon prices) over the next 10-20 years.
Challenges
What's the biggest challenge your business/the industry at large is facing in 2024, and what do you think is required to solve it?
Aaron Boylan - A lot of things keep us up at night. Someone mentioned to me the other day that when you're at this startup stage, you should sleep like a baby, i.e., waking up every two hours crying. From an industry perspective, the challenge is to differentiate offsets from what we do, which is high-durability carbon removal, mainly when those removals are much more expensive. So, for high-margin impact-oriented companies, it’s a far easier sell. But if you look at the largest emitters and want to make the highest impact, they have a serious challenge - because their margins tend to be a lot tighter, and it's a lot more difficult for them to make the economics of removal work. Now, for us this weighs into our partnership drive. We're currently looking for pilot partners, and as Ronan said, we've begun to explore the opportunity to provide insets. The advantage is that the companies can secure much lower carbon removal costs up front and basically own the rights to the removed carbon and, at the same time, also own that asset.
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