Mission Zero’s DAC deployment efforts received notable recognition from the industry this June. We’re thrilled to share that Project DRIVE was awarded the Low Carbon Industrial Project of the Year, and our Head of Product, Kripa Balachandran, has been named Rising Star of the Year at the Green Business Awards.
The annual awards celebrate the top voices of the UK’s sustainable economy — showcasing innovation and excellence driving the transition towards a greener economy.
Building the future to deliver carbon removal
Permanently removing carbon via building materials production has been a strategic application of our technology since 2021. Mission Zero’s DAC tackles the hard-to-decarbonise construction sector by providing building materials innovators one of the world’s most sustainable sources of CO₂, used to produce low-carbon and carbon-negative sustainable building materials at scale.
Through Phases 1 and 2 of the UK Government’s Direct Air Capture and Greenhouse Gas Removal (GGR) Innovation Programme, we partnered with O.C.O Technology at their site in Norfolk to deliver our second direct air capture plant, bringing online the UK’s first DAC-enabled carbon removal facility, tied directly into O.C.O’s Manufactured LimeStone (M-LS) production process and demonstrating the world’s first fully integrated DAC-to-building materials production.
For advanced circular economy approaches like M-LS production, reliable access to CO₂ is what makes the business case work. Traditional commodity CO₂ supply chains, however, remain vulnerable ot market shocks and disruption — a gap direct air capture is well placed to close. It’s precisely this thinking that led a forward-looking partner like O.C.O Technology to invest in our relationship, understanding that early scale-up is as much a derisking exercise as it is a deployment.
A project’s real value often lies in what it makes possible next. For Mission Zero, this was the opportunity to apply our learnings to subsequent deployments overseas, such as our deployment in Canada, while also informing and refining our scale-up engineering work for other key circular economy projects like Starling, the UK’s first DAC-enabled industrial-scale eSAF plant, being developed with our partner Carbon Neutral Fuels.
We’re grateful that our early journey of deployment — and everything we learned along the way — was recognised by the Awards’ judges as an exemplar of a successful low-carbon industrial project. But the good news didn’t stop there.
Reflections on the product execution journey
Much of the success of our second deployment comes down to Kripa and her team. As Head of Product, she has led the delivery of Mission Zero’s first-of-a-kind DAC systems across every key vertical we operate in.
Before joining Mission Zero, Kripa delivered multi-million-pound technical and product programmes at leading international automotive companies, scaling complex hardware from prototype to production. That background has proven highly transferable to scaling DAC — particularly when it comes to building the right teams and relationships to get it done.
“Winning this award isn’t just about personal recognition,” says Kripa. “It’s a tribute to the incredible people at Mission Zero, and our partners, who take on the unglamorous, difficult, critical work of climate change day by day. It’s everyone’s determination not to sit back, but to help change the status quo, that has enabled me to lead the execution of our product vision so far.”
