17/10/2024
A new demo plant will repurpose mining waste and also capture CO2
Travertine’s Rochester, New York, demo facility will upcycle captured CO2 and discarded gypsum into sulfuric acid for use in a nearby metals company’s operations.
By Allison Prang
17 October 2024
The site of Travertine Technologies's forthcoming demonstration plant near Rochester, New York.(Travertine)
Travertine Technologies, a Colorado-based climate tech company, is building a multi-million dollar demonstration plant alongside a metals refining facility near Rochester, New York. The plant will recycle discarded gypsum to make sulfuric acid while removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
For the project, Travertine is partnering with Sabin Metal Corp., a precious metals refiner and recycler. Travertine’s new demo plant will take gypsum — a mineral that can be used in anything from fertilizer to building materials — that is sitting near Sabin’s facility and turn it into sulfuric acid using the carbon dioxide it traps through direct air capture. Travertine will then sell the sulfuric acid to Sabin to use in its metallurgical processing.
When she founded the company in 2022, Travertine CEO Laura Lammers initially planned to build a low-cost, scalable, and permanent method for trapping carbon dioxide. But in talking with lithium miners, she realized waste from the industry could be used to permanently store the greenhouse gas, she told Canary Media.
That proposition is particularly interesting in that it could simultaneously serve to recycle waste from the mining industry and remove CO2 from the atmosphere.
But Travertine’s 50 foot by 50 foot demo plant will be capable of removing only 45 tons of carbon dioxide a year on a net basis, according to Owen Cadwalader, the startup’s chief operations officer. That’s a minuscule amount compared both to what some other direct air capture facilities are able to remove and the amount that a recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report says must be removed from the atmosphere to fight global warming.
“Because of the scale of global sulfuric acid use, our process has economical gigaton-scale carbon dioxide removal (CDR) potential while simultaneously eliminating industrial sulfate waste,” Lammers said in a statement announcing the company’s new demo plant. Lammers said her goal is for the company to have a plant capable of capturing half a million tons of carbon dioxide a year within a decade.
Travertine has $10.7 million in funding to pay for the project, including $7.5 million in venture debt financing from Builders Vision and $3.2 million in grant funding from the New York State Energy Research & Development Authority, according to a news release.
“This is an ideal scenario where the feedstock is…right next to us and the use is also right next to us,” Cadwalader told Canary Media.
