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,” Cella CEO and cofounder Corey Pattison tells me, explaining the draw of Mwangi and Ndirangu’s concept. “This is also an opportunity to be entrepreneurial and creative in our thinking, because there are all of these assets that places like Kenya have.”
Not only can the country offer cheap and abundant renewable energy, but supporters of Kenyan DAC hope that the young and educated local workforce can supply the engineers and scientists needed to build out this infrastructure. In turn, the business could open opportunities to the country’s roughly 6 million un- or under-employed youths.
“It’s not a one-off industry,” Ndirangu says, highlighting her faith in the idea that jobs will flow from green industrialization. Engineers will be needed to monitor the DAC facilities, and the additional demand for renewable power will create jobs in the energy sector, along with related services like water and hospitality.
“You’re developing a whole range of infrastructure to make this industry possible,” she adds. “That infrastructure is not just good for the industry—it’s also just good for the country.”
The chance to solve a “real-world issue”
In June of last year, I walked up a dirt path to the HQ of Octavia Carbon, just off Nairobi’s Eastern Bypass Road, on the far outskirts of the city.
The staffers I met on my tour exuded the kind of boundless optimism that’s common in early-stage startups. “People used to write academic articles about the fact that no human will ever be able to run a marathon in less than two hours,” Octavia CEO Martin Freimüller told me that day. The Kenyan marathon runner Eliud Kipchoge broke that barrier in a race in 2019. A mural of him features prominently on the wall, along with the athlete’s slogan, “No human is limited.”
“It’s impossible, until Kenya does it,” Freimüller added.
OCTAVIA CARBON
Although not an official partner of Ndirangu’s Great Carbon Valley venture, Octavia aligns with the larger vision, he told me. The company got its start in 2022, when Freimüller, an Austrian development consultant, met Duncan Kariuki, an engineering graduate from the University of Nairobi, in the OpenAir Collective, an online forum devoted to carbon removal. Kariuki introduced Freimüller to his classmates Fiona Mugambi and Mike Bwondera, and the four began working on a DAC prototype, first in lab space 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 had moved to its current warehouse.
That same year, they announced their first prototype, affectionately called Thursday after the day it was unveiled at a Nairobi Climate Network event. Soon, Octavia was showing off its tech 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 its 12th DAC unit: a metal cylinder about the size of a large washing machine, containing a chemical filter using an amine, an organic compound derived from ammonia. (Octavia declined to provide further details about the arrangement of the filter inside the machine because the company is awaiting approval of a patent for the design.)
