Sirona Technologies
“Climate change is disproportionately impacting this part of the world, but it’s also changing the rules of the game all over the world,” Corey Pattison, CEO and co-founder of Sela, told me in explaining the concept to Mwangi and Ndirangu. “It’s also an opportunity to be entrepreneurial and creative in our thinking, because all these assets exist in places like Kenya.”
Not only can the country offer affordable and abundant renewable energy, but proponents of the Kenyan DAC hope that the young and educated local workforce can supply the engineers and scientists needed to build this infrastructure. In turn, the business could open up opportunities for the country’s approximately 6 million un- or under-employed youth.
“This is not a one-off industry,” says Ndirangu, highlighting her confidence in the idea that green industrialization will bring jobs. Engineers will be needed to monitor DAC facilities, and additional demand for renewable energy will create jobs in the energy sector along with related services such as water and hospitality.
She adds, “You are developing a whole range of infrastructure to make this industry possible.” “That infrastructure is not only good for the industry, it’s also good for the country.”
A chance to solve a “real world issue”
Last June, I drove down a dirt track to Octavia Carbon’s headquarters, just off Nairobi’s Eastern Bypass Road, on the far outskirts of the city.
The employees I met on my visit exuded the boundless optimism that is common in early-stage startups. “People used to write academic articles about the fact that no human being would be able to run a marathon in under two hours,” Octavia CEO Martin Freimüller told me the other day. Kenyan marathon runner Eliud Kipchoge broke that barrier in a race in 2019. A mural of him is prominently featured on the wall along with the athlete’s slogan, “No man is limited.”
“It’s impossible unless Kenya does it,” Freimüller said.
octavia carbon
Although Octavia is not an official partner of Ndirangu’s Great Carbon Valley venture, it is aligned with the larger vision, he told me. The company began in 2022, when Freimüller, an Austrian development consultant, met Duncan Kariuki, a University of Nairobi engineering graduate, at the OpenAir Collective, an online forum dedicated to carbon removal. Kariuki introduced Freimüller to his classmates Fiona Mugambi and Mike Bondera and the four began working on a DAC prototype, first in a laboratory borrowed from the university and later in an apartment. It didn’t take long for neighbors to complain about the noise and within six months, the operation moved to its current warehouse.
That same year, they announced their first prototype, affectionately called Thursday, on the day of its unveiling at a Nairobi Climate Network event. Soon, Octavia was showing off its technology to high-profile visitors including King Charles III and President Joe Biden’s ambassador to Kenya, Meg Whitman.
Three years later, the team has more than 40 engineers and has built their 12th DAC unit: a metal cylinder the size of a large washing machine, containing a chemical filter using amine, an organic compound derived from ammonia. (Octavia declined to provide further details about the filter arrangement inside the machine as the company is awaiting patent approval for the design.)
