C-Zero Inc. announced that it has raised $11.5 MM in a Series A funding round co-led by Breakthrough Energy Ventures and Eni Next, with participation from Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI) and AP Ventures. The funding will accelerate the first commercial-scale deployment of C-Zero’s drop-in decarbonization technology, which will allow industrial natural gas consumers to avoid producing CO2 in applications like electrical generation, process heating and the production of commodity chemicals like hydrogen and ammonia.

C-Zero’s technology, which was initially developed at the University of California, Santa Barbara, uses thermocatalysis to split methane – the primary molecule in natural gas – into hydrogen and solid carbon in a process known as methane pyrolysis. The hydrogen can be used to help decarbonize a wide array of existing applications, including hydrogen production for fuel cell vehicles, while the carbon can be permanently sequestered. When renewable natural gas is used as the feedstock, C-Zero’s technology can even be carbon negative, effectively extracting carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and permanently storing it in the form of high-density solid carbon.

The various methods of hydrogen production have recently been associated with different color codes for easy identification. Conventional production via steam methane reforming (SMR), referred to as “gray hydrogen,” SMR with CO2 sequestration is referred to as “blue hydrogen” and hydrogen produced by splitting water via electrolysis is known as “green hydrogen.” Hydrogen produced via methane pyrolysis processes like C-Zero’s is increasingly being referred to as “turquoise hydrogen,” as it combines the benefits of both blue and green hydrogen by being low cost and low emissions, respectively.