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As I put it in Tuesday’s edition, startups are back in season now that the summer is over. And here’s our first startup of the season.

Readers with a good memory might recall a first mention of PeroCycle and its approach to drastic carbon reduction in steelmaking a few months ago. But today we’re doing a proper deep dive in true PreSeed Now fashion.

Know a startup we should feature? Drop me a line.

– Martin

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PeroCycle has a clever plan to slash the steel industry’s carbon output… and save it money too

The steel industry is a major contributor to carbon in the atmosphere but changing that fact is far from easy.

The traditional blast furnace process at the heart of steelmaking is inherently CO2 intensive, relying on coal. Alternative blast furnaces based on hydrogen or electrification are at an early stage of development but require significant investment to construct and deploy in replacement for the existing hardware.

Enter PeroCycle, which wants to make existing blast furnaces far cleaner and greener, while providing them with more fuel.

“We’re developing a technology that uses a thermochemical reactor with an active material to convert carbon dioxide into carbon monoxide,“ explains CEO Grant Budge.

“That allows us to provide a closed carbon loop, effectively. We can take blast furnace gasses, convert them into carbon monoxide, re-inject them back into the blast furnace, and in doing that, we can offset the need for fossil fuels like coal and coke.

“In a steel mill, we could get up to 90% reduction in carbon emissions. The steel industry currently represents about 8% of the global CO2 emissions. So it's a technology that could have a significant and serious impact.”

Budge is keen to keep the details under wraps but he explains that PeroCycle’s tech takes processed gasses, separates them into more purified streams, and then processes the carbon dioxide through its own low-temperature thermochemical reactor, which includes a proprietary active material.

And while direct integration with blast furnaces is the main way Budge perceives the tech being used, he says it could also be used in other parts of a steel mill.

“Steel mill configurations vary globally. There are sources of CO2 that we could also treat, like the basic oxygen furnace, which does conversion from iron into steel…. It's flexible, we can integrate with DRI [direct reduced iron] solution too…. It really does depend on how far we want to take it, and how far a mill wants to integrate it,” he says.

The story so far

PeroCycle’s technology has its roots in the work of Dr Harriet Kildahl at the University of Birmingham. Kildahl and her PhD supervisor, Professor Yulong Ding, were contacted by deep tech venture builder Cambridge Future Tech.

Cambridge Future Tech identified the commercial potential of the research and got British multinational mining giant Anglo American involved, allowing PeroCycle to be spun out of Birmingham on a solid foundation.

Cambridge Future Tech CEO Owen Thompson gave PreSeed Now a preview of PeroCycle way back in February when we interviewed him. Back then they were in the process of finding a suitable CEO to head up the venture.

They selected Budge, a mining engineer by academic background. He joined in June. He has spent his 25-year career so far largely focused on the steel industry and its decarbonisation, with entrepreneurial journeys into the worlds of mental health and broadband along the way.

Budge says he was attracted to PeroCycle as “a simple, elegant solution to a very big problem. And as every engineer will tell you, that's utopia.”

PeroCycle has a bench-scale prototype which it is currently testing. It is also working on a unit scaled up from that first prototype by a factor of 10. This is expected to be ready by the end of this year.

Thanks to the startup’s partnership with Anglo American, they’re well placed to move into field testing.

“We’ll take forward development of a pilot module and a 1,000-tonnes-of-CO2-per-annum pilot plant, which we're looking to test at a couple of locations in Europe,” says Budge.

Read on to find out even more about PeroCycle…

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