Chevron leads US$318m raise for carbon capture tech firm Svante

US OIL company Chevron has led a US$318 million fundraising round for Canada-based Svante, which develops filters to capture industrial carbon emissions for storage or reuse, the companies said on Thursday (Dec 15).

Scaling early-stage technologies like carbon capture and storage is essential to helping the world reach its climate goals, and many oil majors have made this central to their net-zero strategies.

The deal is the largest North American raise for a carbon capture tech company to date, JPMorgan told Reuters. The bank acted as co-placement agent with RBC Capital Markets.

Other investors to take part in the Series E funding round include Singaporean sovereign wealth fund Temasek, Samsung Engineering and the venture capital arms of United Airlines and 3M.

Chevron said it plans to invest US$10 billion in lower-carbon projects through 2028 and has invested in Svante since 2014. Chevron’s investment this round is about half the total amount, said a source close to the matter.

Chris Powers, vice-president of carbon capture, utilisation and storage with Chevron New Energies, said Svante was “poised to be a leader in enabling carbon capture solutions”.

“Innovation is key to enabling these types of breakthrough technologies and lower carbon solutions, and we look forward to applying our experience and expertise to help drive this effort forward.”

Michael Johnson, vice-chairman investment banking at JPMorgan, told Reuters raising such sums were a crucial step in scaling carbon capture technology.

“We need to accelerate the development of these projects to prove CCS, and specifically direct air capture, can work at a rate of millions of tonnes per year.”

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Current global carbon capture is about 45 million tonnes per year, JPMorgan said, but needs to grow around 30-fold to help the world reach net-zero carbon emissions by mid-century.

JPMorgan said it had arranged around US$1 billion of private equity capital for carbon capture companies and closed 10 private capital raises for clean tech companies this year to date. REUTERS