New Zealand firm seeks capital for international expansion

International expansion is most likely the next step for Carbonscape, as it may not be able to attract New Zealand investors. 

Having proved its microwave method of producing charcoal is feasible, Carbonscape’s now looking for the right investors to globally expand, according to sticknz.

As a start-up New Zealand business, whether those next investors are NZ-based is both problematic and indicative of the growth and expansion challenges faced by many of our entrepreneurs. Doubly so in Carbonscape’s case, as the technology’s very new.

The challenge is to attract strategic investors who can pony up with the $2-$10 million to give a push to its microwave technique which can convert essentially any organic waste such as sawdust, into valuable products.

This includes activated carbon (AC) form of charcoal, a product for which demand is growing at a compound basis at 5% a year. AC’s large surface area gives it a wide range of uses in many industries, and it is also an extremely stable absorber of carbon dioxide, which in turn can be sequestered/buried and take the greenhouse gas out of the atmosphere.

By tweaking the microwave heating parameters, valuable gases and oils can also be recovered from the feedstock, instead of, as in other charcoal-production processes, being part of the burning process itself.
It is what can be considered an “enabling technology.”

“Our global expansion speed will be a function of our access to capital,” says Carbonscape co-founder, Nick Gerritsen. Having proved the work, and establishing datasets around the AC, gas and oil production, “we’ve had a lot of interest from around the world,” he says.