Public Funding for Neo-fossil Ltd

Human activity has caused planetary climate change, increasing global temperatures by 1.1 °C. To reduce the strength of climate impacts we have to limit warming to below 1.5 °C. In addition to phasing out fossil fuels, we will need to remove 3.4 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by 2050, which will require a 1300x increase in the current rate of atmospheric carbon dioxide removal (CDR) (1). We are engineering cells to produce durable, storable carbon biopolymers from carbon dioxide; creating an engineering biology equivalent of direct air capture. Using engineering biology in an attempt to create novel CDR technology is incredibly new, but will be able to take advantage of the scalability of industrial engineering biology, established cellular engineering knowledge and tools, and advances in metabolic engineering modelling and machine learning. The engineered cells produced from this project will be used to raise investment, growing the engineering biology startup ecosystem in the South West. Future rounds of investment and potential revenue in the range of millions of pounds, could employ and upskill up to 30 people within 5 years and build a pilot fermentation facility in the UK, competing for a portion of the estimated \> $1 trillion market for atmospheric carbon dioxide removal from states and corporations net-zero obligations. This would contribute both to the UK Government's national vision for engineering biology and its legal-binding net zero commitments, and reduce the impacts of climate change for UK citizens.