17-10-2024

Travertine partners with Sabin Metal to build demonstration plant in Upstate New York

Travertine Technologies Inc, an award-winning startup scaling a process for carbon-negative, minimal-waste critical element production, today announced a partnership with Sabin Metal Corporation, the largest independently owned precious metals refiner in North America, to build a demonstration plant using the Travertine Process.

The demo plant will be located at Sabin Metal's main facility outside of Rochester, New York. The location was formerly home to a gypsum mine, prior to Sabin Metal acquiring the site in 1975 and repurposing it for the recovery, recycling, and refining of precious metals from secondary waste streams.
 
The Travertine Process demo plant combines three major unit operations, salt-splitting electrolysis, caustic direct air capture, and mineralization, to convert gypsum previously mined at the site and carbon dioxide from the air into sulfuric acid, green hydrogen, and calcium carbonate. The carbon-negative process will supply sustainable, fossil-free sulfuric acid for Sabin Metal's recycling and refining business. Future expansion could supply green hydrogen to replace natural gas for high-temperature industrial heat at the site.

Engineering for the demo plant is already under way, with anticipated commissioning in mid-2025. Once operational, the plant will be capable of upcycling hundreds of tons per year of waste gypsum and removing tens of tons of carbon dioxide per year from the atmosphere — all while producing sulfuric acid, green hydrogen, and the mineral calcium carbonate (a permanent store of carbon).

"This demo plant is an exciting next step as we scale up the Travertine Process, which can decouple critical element extraction and refining from fossil-derived sulfur. Because of the scale of global sulfuric acid use, our process has economical gigaton-scale carbon dioxide removal (CDR) potential while simultaneously eliminating industrial sulfate waste," said Laura Lammers, PhD, founder and CEO of Travertine. "We're thrilled to partner with a mission-aligned and innovative company like Sabin Metal."

For nearly eight decades, Sabin Metal has focused on recovering, recycling, and refining precious metals from byproducts of the petroleum, chemical, pharmaceutical, electronics, and hydrogen industries, with environmental responsibility as a core tenet of the company. Integrating the Travertine Process into its main facility in Scottsville, New York, will enable Sabin Metal to bring even greater circularity to its operations. The demo plant is sized to satisfy 50% of Sabin Metal's annual sulfuric acid needs.

"Our commitment to the planet extends beyond recycling precious metals from industrial feedstocks," said Sam Sabin, strategic advisor at Sabin Metal. "We are proud to host Travertine's demo plant at our New York site, not only to increase circularity and sustainability in our operations, but also to show the world the tremendous potential of their core process."

This project is supported by New York State Energy Research & Development Authority with $3.2M in funding for the demo plant buildout. On March 15, 2024, NYSERDA announced more than $16M to accelerate innovative solutions in clean hydrogen and to promote the use of clean hydrogen in industrial processes, clean transportation, energy storage, and for grid support.

The demo plant is also supported with $7.5M in venture debt from impact platform Builders Vision. Builders Vision invested in Travertine through Builders Bridge, which fuels an investment portfolio at Builders Vision focused on catalyzing capital and scaling market solutions into essential, underserved opportunities across the platform's three focus areas, including oceans, food & agriculture, and energy.

The combined funding follows $8.5M in financing Travertine announced earlier this year to commercialize its core process. Holcim MAQER Ventures co-led that financing, with participation from the Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the Environment and venture capital firms Clean Energy Ventures and Bidra Innovation Ventures.

"Supporting FOAK pilots in hard-to-abate sectors is essential for scaling critical climate solutions, and we see massive potential for the Travertine Process to address difficult decarbonization challenges, including producing fossil-free sulfuric acid, green hydrogen, green cement, and cost-effective, large-scale carbon removal," said James Lindsay, investment director at Builders Vision. "Travertine's platform technology uses a true systems approach that can significantly contribute to a healthier and more sustainable planet. We are excited to champion this groundbreaking process."

In addition to metals recovery and refining, the Travertine Process is applicable across a range of critical element production processes central to the energy transition and other industries, including lithium, nickel, and phosphorus, as well as cement.