• Octavia Carbon captures CO₂ directly from the air using geothermal energy in Kenya’s Rift Valley.
• The company plans to scale up from 10 tonnes to 1,000 tonnes of CO₂ captured annually by 2025.
• Octavia has pre-sold 2,000 tonnes of CO₂, generating over $1 million and aims to cut extraction costs drastically.

Tapping into Kenya’s volcanic heartland, a local start-up is betting on geothermal power to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere—and turn it into a marketable commodity. The company, Octavia Carbon, is pioneering direct air carbon capture (DACC) in Africa, offering a potential homegrown solution to the global climate crisis.

Operating in the Rift Valley, Octavia draws air through chemical filters that trap CO₂. Once saturated, the filters are heated under vacuum, releasing the gas, which is then stored in porous basaltic rock. The entire process runs on Kenya’s abundant low-cost geothermal steam, giving it a competitive energy advantage.

Founded in 2022, Octavia is one of only 18 companies worldwide working on DACC technology. By late 2024, it had secured $5 million to build its first commercial-scale plant. The company aims to scale up to 1,000 tonnes of CO₂ captured annually by 2025—up from just 10 tonnes with its prototype—and to slash capture costs from $680 to $100 per tonne in the coming years.

Octavia Carbon has sealed a deal with U.S.-based Cella Mineral Storage to store captured CO₂ underground. So far, the start-up has pre-sold 2,000 tonnes of CO₂, paving the way for over $1 million in revenue, and has already secured $3 million in carbon credit contracts, including some via advance payments.

With the Oxford University forecasting the need to remove up to 9 billion tonnes of CO₂ annually by 2050 to keep global warming below 1.5°C, Octavia aims to position Africa as a key player in the carbon removal economy. The company not only wants to lead in deployment but also hopes to become an OEM, manufacturing carbon removal machines on the continent.

This article was initially published in French by Olivier de Souza

Edited in English by Ange Jason Quenum