Knoxville-based Holocene gets acquired by oil and gas giant: Oxy
Occidental Petroleum, through its subsidiary, Oxy Low Carbon Ventures, acquired the the Direct Air Capture (DAC) company, causing an eruption of celebration throughout the community.
Another great success story for the Knoxville entrepreneurial community with the official announcement that Holocene has been acquired by the oil and gas giant: Oxy.
Rumors of the acquisition circulated in the Knoxville community and were finally confirmed by Holocene’s Co-Founders Anca Timofte, Keeton Ross, and Tobias Rüesch on Wednesday evening.
“That cat is out of the bag! What an epic journey,” Ross wrote on his LinkedIn post. “Most start-ups fail… let alone hard-tech, let alone DAC (Direct Air Capture), let alone in these market conditions. I’m THRILLED to share… that we’ve been acquired and are joining the Oxy / 1PointFive family as the next stage of our scale-up journey!”
Holocene has been a key success story in the Knoxville region – first recruited to the area through the Innovation Crossroads program at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, then supported through the Spark Innovation Center in both the Accelerator and Incubator programs. Since the company moved to Knoxville, Holocene has secured government grants from the Department of Energy (DOE), built a pilot plant off Papermill Drive, was named as a Breakthrough Energy Fellow portfolio company, and landed a first-of-its-kind deal with Google to purchase carbon removal credits from direct air capture (DAC) at a record low price of $100 per ton
Now, with the acquisition by Oxy, the dreams of seeing Holocene’s DAC technology deployed at scale is much closer to becoming a reality. At the current plant off Papermill drive, the Holocene pilot can currently scrub just 10 tons of CO2 from the air per year. The goal was to scale up to a much larger space, with a large pilot, and with Oxy, that is going to happen.
“I’m proud of the team and of all our work in getting here, and grateful that Oxy recognized our potential and the possible synergies between our technologies,” Timofte said in her LinkedIn announcement. “It’s now been more than 13 years since I started working in direct air capture, and I’m as committed and impatient as ever to see DAC facilities running worldwide, at scale, and making a dent in atmospheric CO2 concentrations.”
So, what’s next for the company? Ross previewed what the community can expect with the acquisition. According to his post, Oxy is committed to deploying DAC technology and has a track record in building STRATOS (another carbon capture company). Plus, Oxy has invested in a number of other carbon engineering technologies.
“I’m as confident as it gets that this new combined future creates the most likely path to getting the Holocene technology into the world’s hands,” Ross said.
Both he and Timofte thanked community partners and supporters like Breakthrough Energy, ORNL, TVA, Spark Incubator, LaunchTN, XPRIZE, Stanford, the DOE.
Congratulations Holocene and Oxy.
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