Taking on the world’s most potent emissions: meet Climate-i

CarbonFix is proud to announce its funding partnership with UK-based Climate-i, a climate venture tackling fluorinated gas (F-gas) emissions. Founded by Elinor Wakefield, who spent 9 years leading international climate teams in the UK Government and served as Deputy Envoy for COP26, and Sam Lanyon MIET, an electronic engineer with over 20 years of experience building innovative technology solutions, they have their eyes trained on a hidden climate issue.

Flourinated gases: really big, really bad

To be honest, not all of us were aware of the existence of these F-gases, but they are the world’s most potent and fastest growing category of greenhouse gas emissions: a family of compounds that includes sulfur hexafluoride (SF6) which is 24,300 times more potent (!) than CO₂ as a greenhouse gas.

They represent around 5% of global emissions and their prevalence has grown by a staggering 350% since 1990.

Enter Climate-i. They’re developing a novel, low-power technology to capture sulfur hexafluoride from leak sites. With Climate-i’s solution, electricity grid and generation companies will be able to dramatically reduce their environmental impact without compromising reliability.

Though Climate-i’s 2030 goal is a modest 0.1 MT CO₂eq of mitigation, their ultimate goal is to reduce F-gas emissions by 10 MT of CO₂ eq. per year. For context, that’s almost twice the current world CO₂ emissions of our collective data usage. And the successful introduction of their tech globally could significantly reduce the €60 billion annual environmental cost of SF₆ emissions.

Climate-i was founded in 2023 and backed by the Carbon13 Venture Builder. CarbonFix is leading their pre-seed round which also includes Cranfield University’s Seed Fund.

It goes without saying, we’re very excited to fund them. Climate-i’s approach to F-gases represents the kind of bold, practical innovation that can help make electricity networks fit for the future. And perhaps even truly net zero one day.

You can read an extended interview with Elinor Wakefield in our news section.