Sora Fuel secures $6 million in oversubscribed seed-round funding
Sora Fuel, an eSAF startup producing sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) using water, air and renewable energy, announced Aug. 1 that it has raised an oversubscribed $6 million seed round.
The Engine Ventures led the round with Wireframe Ventures and others participating.
The funding will be used to expand Sora Fuel’s Boston-based team, develop commercialization partnerships and further advance the company’s novel technology.
“Aviation emissions have quadrupled since the 1960s, with aircraft currently accounting for 2.5 percent of global CO2 emissions and approximately 4 percent of global warming,” Sora Fuel stated.
As demand for air travel continues to surge, SAF will play a crucial role in decarbonizing this hard-to-abate sector.
“Existing SAF production processes are fundamentally constrained, requiring vast amounts of energy, feedstocks and investment to make a meaningful impact,” the startup stated. “For example, today’s only commercially viable SAF, the hydroprocessed esters and fatty acids (HEFA) process, relies on limited waste-oil feedstock that alone can cost $3.50 per gallon, while the alcohol-to-jet process competes with agriculture and leads to soil degradation. Waste gasification and point-source power-to-liquid processes are less reliant on valuable resources, however, both provide limited greenhouse-gas reduction potential, as the underlying feedstocks of both processes contain [or] rely on nonbiogenic sources of carbon.”
Sora Fuel said it offers a new path for producing SAF by capturing and using atmospheric CO2 at costs that are an order of magnitude lower than existing processes.
The company’s technology includes a liquid-bicarbonate electrolyzer that delivers direct air capture (DAC) CO2 at just $20 per ton, according to Sora Fuel, operating in a fully closed-loop system that uses only water and renewable electricity to produce syngas.
Compared to incumbent DAC solutions, Sora Fuel’s DAC-to-fuels approach dramatically reduces overall energy inputs, eliminates the need for feedstocks (other than air and water), and provides a scalable process for efficiently and cost-effectively producing SAF and any other downstream products of syngas, according to the company.
“Sora Fuel’s technology eliminates 90 percent of the energy currently required in standard DAC processes, opening up an entirely new and more sustainable path for producing carbon-negative fuels,” said Gareth Ross, co-founder and CEO of Sora Fuel. “Our patented, closed-loop system enables the direct generation of an economical product and overcomes widespread feedstock constraints, allowing us to produce SAF at prices comparable to current Jet A fuel.”
Michael Kearney, general partner at Engine Ventures and Sora Fuel board member, added, “There’s no path to meeting our climate goals without managing to reduce the carbon intensity of aviation. Fuels are the backbone of that sector because of their energy density, and decarbonizing fuels requires new pathways for capturing and utilizing CO2 to scalably produce SAF. The company’s innovative electrolyzer technology will enable the operation of highly profitable SAF plants that are unconstrained by location—a crucial feature considering that 500 million metric tons of SAF are needed by 2050 to meet the global aviation industry’s environmental targets.”
Sora Fuel was conceived within The Engine Ventures based on technology from Curtis Berlinguette’s lab at the University of British Columbia.
The company’s chief science officer, Patrick Sarver, earned a doctorate in chemistry from Princeton University, completed his postdoctoral research at MIT and worked as a venture associate at The Engine Ventures prior to co-founding Sora Fuel.
Ross was previously an executive in residence at The Engine Ventures, supporting portfolio companies across the clean-energy landscape and spent 15 years as an executive at MassMutual, where he most recently oversaw technology and operations.
Sora Fuel is actively hiring for its Boston-based team and initiating partnerships and offtake agreements with purchasers of jet fuel.
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