Astracite are turning emissions into the batteries that power the electric vehicle revolution

10 questions with Christian Fink, co-founder of Astracite

Astracite is making graphite out of CO₂ emissions and embedding silicon in it to boost battery capacity by 500%. Powered by green electricity, this process has a 99% smaller footprint than the conventional process, and is carbon negative when using CO₂ from carbon capture. 

The kicker: it’s made in Europe, solving a geopolitical headache for battery makers who currently source 93% of their graphite from China. Read on to find out from Christian Fink, along with co-founders Joel Omale and Sander Arnout, how they struck upon this exciting pathway. 

1. Hi! Can you explain what Astracite does? 

We’re turning CO2 emissions into high-performing batteries that will power the electric vehicle and green electricity revolution.

Our material will have greater than 5x the capacity of what’s on the market right now, which is mostly synthetic graphite, and we want to make it even lower cost. It also has a 99% smaller CO₂ footprint than conventional material. 

Another plus: it will be made in Europe. European battery makers currently rely on China for almost all their graphite, much of which is synthesized from fossil fuels. 

Last autumn China started controlling exports on anode material as well as tech and furnaces for synthesizing it. They could raise prices or even blacklist countries. We’re at their mercy, and that’s not a good place to be. 

It’s also not the best idea to ship it halfway across the world. About 30-50% of the weight of every battery is graphite, which means it’s something like 50kg for a big battery.  

2: Why are batteries so crucial? 

Batteries are an absolutely pivotal tech for decarbonization. Without storage, you’d need to generate electricity exactly where and when it’s consumed — which just isn’t feasible. That’s why battery storage is so important.

But today’s lithium-ion batteries have a dirty secret: 30% of battery graphite comes from mining and 70% is synthesized from petroleum coke at extreme temperatures. We replace that with something carbon-negative. And the downstream reduction in emissions they unlock, particularly in transport, dwarf even that. 

Decarbonizing road traffic is one of the main levers for decarbonization — and in Europe we’re still not making huge strides in it. Other regions are further ahead.

3: What inspired you to work on it? How did you get here? 

The three of us — I, Sander, and Joel — met at the Carbon13 Venture builder, where we were all interested in making something valuable out of CO₂ to enable CO₂ removal. 

What first captured our imagination was the idea of taking CO₂ and turning it into something solid to store it forever. First, we dreamed of filling up the holes hollowed out of the landscape by coal mining. But that’s not commercially viable. Or you can make diamonds, but that’s a relatively small market. 

Then we struck on the idea of doing it with battery graphite. We were thrilled: it has a high enough value, and we can create an engine that sustains itself. We decided to make it a silicon-graphite composite to avoid competing on price with pure graphite anode material from China. 

We wanted to create a superior product for a large and growing market, with a low production cost, while reducing emissions and boosting European supply chain security.

It’s also a great fit for our competencies: Sander has a background in material science and 15 years of experience optimizing high-temperature processes in industry; Joel is a material scientist and chemical engineer with experience in battery material production; and I bring the commercial perspective after spending most of my working life in consulting.  

4: You’re the first company to combine silicon-graphite composite production from CO₂. Can you explain how your tech works?   

Every battery has two electrodes: a cathode and an anode. We do the anode side. Most anodes are made with graphite, but silicon has 10x the capacity.

However: silicon expands threefold when you charge it and then it shrinks again. Charging it over and over degrades the capacity of the battery. So, you could only have max 10% of the battery as silicon — until recently. 

That’s what we’re trying to solve. We’re trying to develop a composite material which embeds the silicon in graphite, to accommodate silicon’s expansion. We believe we’ll be able to embed up to 40% of the silicon in the graphite, which will boost the material’s capacity by 500%.

We’re taking CO₂ which would have been emitted and reducing it to carbon in the form of graphite. As part of the same process, we reduce silicon dioxide, which is an abundant material, and co-deposit the silicon with the carbon.

A couple of competitors are working on reducing CO2 to graphite, but very few are working on silicon-graphite. Making silicon-graphite composites from CO₂ is really difficult and not established. That’s what we’re trying to crack! 

5: What have you achieved so far? 

We have produced graphite silicon material from CO₂, demonstrated that the process works, and have deposited material with a range of silicon concentrations. 

In 2025 we won the Advanced Material Competition by INAM, and we also just received a €330k research grant from Flemish innovation agency Vlaio. 

We’ve already signed two LOIs with two battery start-ups. And we’re making steps towards commercial production.

6. Where are you going to get your CO₂ from? 

It’s attractive to plug into a CO₂ pipeline because then we’re not dependent on a single emitter, but we can also imagine being co-located on the premises of a facility like a cement plant. They’ll be able to offload some of their CO₂ to us instead of paying for storage. In the future we may source our CO₂ from Direct Air Capture (DAC). 

We can produce anywhere in the world where there’s a stable source of CO₂ and green electricity. Silicon is abundant in the form of quartz sand all over the world, so we can theoretically set up production wherever it makes sense. 

7: What will you do with CarbonFix’s investment — and does it allow you to do something you otherwise couldn’t? 

It’ll help us continue to develop our material and design our pilot.

The pilot is the first step on the ladder towards commercial production, and it’ll help us produce enough material to start collaborating with battery manufacturers.

8: What’s your end goal? What’s your vision of the ideal outcome?

We aim to create anode material with more than 5x the capacity of graphite and a long cycle life* at lower production costs than for synthetic graphite in Europe. 

Our vision is a world that runs on green electricity, powered by batteries, using our materials.

*Cycle life: number of charge-discharge cycles that the battery can endure before its capacity has degraded to a certain level (typically 80%).

9: What will make this project challenging? What are the barriers to success?

There’s a number of technical challenges in maximizing the silicon content and avoiding impurities. We’re working with a very high temperature process to embed the silicon, so you can’t really look into the reactor to see what’s going on in there. It comes out as a black powder and you need to check what’s actually been deposited. 

10: What do you wish people outside the climate space knew?

That a decentralised renewable energy system where everything, including heating and mobility, is electrified, is not only cleaner and more resilient, but even cheaper than a fossil-fuel based system.