MCi Carbons' Revolution of Sustainable Technology

MCi Carbon (MCi) was the winner of the Clean Technology Award in the 2022 NSW Sustainability Awards.

MCi is a world-leading Australian clean technology company that transforms carbon dioxide into building materials and other valuable industrial products for the circular economy.

This company uses the Earth's natural process of storing CO2 called mineral carbonation, or weathering. This process of absorbing CO2 into minerals usually occurs over millions of years geologically, but MCi has sped up that process to a matter of hours in an industrial setting.

MCi Carbon’s patented technology is safe, permanent and profitable, and has the potential to lock away billions of tonnes of CO2 emissions every year. The technology leads a new cleantech field called CO2 Utilization or Carbon Capture and Use (CCU) which treats CO2 as a resource and not a waste.

Used in many construction, consumer and manufactured products, these carbonates reduce the carbon footprints in products, supporting the circular economy. This double carbon reduction delivers a negative carbon lifecycle benefit and produces high quality, verifiable and permanent carbon offsets.

MCi has received global recognition for its R&D, including the 2018 Resource Innovator of the Year award at the New Materials Summit in Berlin, being featured at which is he World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2020 and the WEF Pioneers of Change Summit 2021.

MCi recently won Clean Energy Start-up Pitch Battle at COP26 in Glasgow. They have an industrial headquarters in Newcastle and a global reference Pilot Plant, at the Newcastle Institute for Energy and Resources (NIER).

MCi’s global reference Pilot Plant validates a growing pipeline of global commercial scale opportunities. Following 15 years of intense R&D with substantial Australian Government and industry investment, MCi is scaling its technology and working with customers and partners to identify the best industrial locations to build its first Industrialscale Carbon Plants to capture CO2 emissions and convert them profitably into solid materials called carbonates.

MCi Carbon’s semicontinuous research Pilot Plant facility is one of the first-of-its-kind in the world and conducts intensive industrial programs to refine the patented mineral carbonation process, deliver customer projects, and generate low-carbon materials for product testing.

The CO2 used in the MCi process does not need to be high purity- in fact MCi can carbonate direct flue gases. MCi takes CO2 from industrial sources and can also partner with Direct Air Capture technologies.

MCi combines the CO2 with a feedstock, usually an industrial waste like steel slag, mine tailings or quarried minerals. MCi produces magnesium carbonate, calcium carbonate and silica which can be processed into cements, concretes, plasterboards, papers, glass and many more applications.

The team at MCi are engaged in partnerships with global products companies, developing new low carbon product formulations.