Aniruddha Sharma’s Carbon Clean Solutions is helping small companies deal with CO2 emissions at half the cost
For Aniruddha Sharma, the 27-year-old CEO of startup Carbon Clean Solutions (CCS), the event that shaped his career choice took place even before his parents got married. It was December 3, 1984, when Bhopal, Sharma’s hometown, witnessed the world’s second biggest chemical disaster. A gas leak at the Union Carbide factory led to the death of between 15,000 and 20,000 people, exposing over 500,000 to the toxic gas. On December 7, his parents got married. By the time he was born, horrific stories of the gas leak and its impact were endemic.
“I grew up acutely aware of the downside of technology, especially when it is not controlled,” says Sharma. “As a result, since childhood, I was eager to be at the cutting edge of technology use, especially where it concerns the environment.”
It is this central concern that led Sharma, a graduate from IIT-Kharagpur, to launch a company in 2009, which aimed to provide a more efficient method to capture Carbon Dioxide (CO2). “In my opinion, CO2 emissions have risen most uncontrollably and threaten to bring about cataclysmic changes in our environment if urgent steps are not taken to reduce them,” says Sharma.
In the 2012-13 financial year, till date CCS has earned revenues in excess of Rs 4 crore and expects more than a four-fold increase in FY 2015.
The secret to CCS’s steady success lies in an improved molecule, prepared by Sharma’s batchmate and CCS co-founder, Prateek Bumb. This patented molecule brings down the cost of capturing CO2 by as much as 50 percent, and uses it to make other useful products like baking soda and polymers.
CCS received a Rs 33 crore grant from the British government early in 2013, and the India arm of Solvay Chemicals started using its product. Soon after this, Hazel Mercantile (HML), which trades chemicals internationally, also signed up. CCS is in the process of signing up three new contracts that will get it to its target for FY 2015.
In addition, it has plants in five locations across the world: The UK, the US, the Netherlands, Germany and India. With the plants, Sharma says, “we are demonstrating the technology at customer sites globally to give comfort to larger markets and to create reference cases. Hence, there’s a certain impact on revenue. Also out of five, two are industrial-scale pilots. Only one plant has been operating since [the last] year-and-a-half.”
“I have been tracking their progress, and in my opinion, their formula is a significant improvement over MEA or Monoethanolamine, the dominant chemical used for carbon capture,” says Avinash Patkar, who has worked in the field of CO2 capture for 40 years and is an advisor on clean technology to a major Indian power company. Patkar believes that CCS has a better product than global giants like Dow Chemicals or BASF. Moreover, for India in particular, its product is better suited since the country has greater need for re-utilisation of CO2 (to make other usable products) instead of sequestration, as done in many Western countries. Sequestration involves pumping the captured CO2 into the ground.
THE ADVANTAGE
(This story appears in the 07 February, 2014 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)