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Alternative Energy - Friday, March 7, 2008

Climos Funded To Work Have Plankton Suck Down Green House Gas

San Francisco's Climos has raised a $3.5M Series A round of financing led by Braemar Energy Ventures alongside angel investor Elon Musk (aka Paypal, Tesla Motors-man). We wrote about the startup a year back when it was forming.

Founded in 2005, Climos is exploring a number of processes for naturally removing large amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere. The first technology they plan to develop - ocean iron fertilization (OEF) - which the startup claims has the highest greenhouse gas mitigation potential of all available methods.

What is OEF? The idea is to apply trace amounts of iron to the deep ocean surface in order to enhance phytoplankton growth and as a result to trap atmospheric carbon dioxide in the deep ocean. If you are not a plankton scientist, the back story is that during natural plankton blooms, it has been observed that plankton remove greenhouse gas carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere as they grow. Subsequently, some of the plankton sink trapping greenhouse gas beneath the water.

It sounds like a promising project but how does such a project put money in its pockets we wonder. The company seems to be banking on carbon offset projects where companies will bankroll Climos projects to help take care of their own emissions. That economy has yet to take shape so but we would expect Climos to be able to take significant funds from large corporations while the market matures.

Climos's Chief Science Officer is Dr. Margaret Leinen, most recently Asst. Director of Geosciences at the National Science Foundation. The company's CEO Dan Whaley was Founder and CTO at GetThere which did an IPO in 1999 and was sold to the Sabre Group (NYSE: TSG) in 2000 for $750M.