{"id":1975,"date":"2026-01-04T04:51:19","date_gmt":"2026-01-04T04:51:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/1975\/"},"modified":"2026-01-04T04:51:19","modified_gmt":"2026-01-04T04:51:19","slug":"welcome-to-kenyas-great-carbon-valley-a-bold-new-gamble-to-fight-climate-change","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/1975\/","title":{"rendered":"Welcome to Kenya\u2019s Great Carbon Valley: a bold new gamble to fight climate change"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"droneCella and Sirona Technologies have a pilot program in the Great Rift Valley called Project Jacaranda.<\/p>\n

SIRONA TECHNOLOGIES<\/p>\n

\u201cClimate change is disproportionately impacting this part of the world, but it\u2019s also changing the rules of the game all over the world,\u201d Cella CEO and cofounder Corey Pattison tells me, explaining the draw of Mwangi and Ndirangu\u2019s concept. \u201cThis is also an opportunity to be entrepreneurial and creative in our thinking, because there are all of these assets that places like Kenya have.\u201d<\/p>\n

Not only can the country offer cheap and abundant renewable energy, but supporters of Kenyan DAC hope that the young and educated local workforce can supply the engineers and scientists needed to build out this infrastructure. In turn, the business could open opportunities to the country\u2019s roughly 6 million un- or under-employed youths.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not a one-off industry,\u201d Ndirangu says, highlighting her faith in the idea that jobs will flow from green industrialization. Engineers will be needed to monitor the DAC facilities, and the additional demand for renewable power will create jobs in the energy sector, along with related services like water and hospitality.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cYou\u2019re developing a whole range of infrastructure to make this industry possible,\u201d she adds. \u201cThat infrastructure is not just good for the industry\u2014it\u2019s also just good for the country.\u201d<\/p>\n

The chance to solve a \u201creal-world issue\u201d <\/p>\n

In June of last year, I walked up a dirt path to the HQ of Octavia Carbon, just off Nairobi\u2019s Eastern Bypass Road, on the far outskirts of the city.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The staffers I met on my tour exuded the kind of boundless optimism that\u2019s common in early-stage startups. \u201cPeople used to write academic articles about the fact that no human will ever be able to run a marathon in less than two hours,\u201d Octavia CEO Martin Freim\u00fcller told me that day. The Kenyan marathon runner Eliud Kipchoge broke that barrier in a race in 2019<\/a>. A mural of him features prominently on the wall, along with the athlete\u2019s slogan, \u201cNo human is limited.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s impossible, until Kenya does it,\u201d Freim\u00fcller added.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"In June, Octavia started testing its technology in the field in a pilot project in Gilgil.<\/p>\n

OCTAVIA CARBON<\/p>\n

Although not an official partner of Ndirangu\u2019s Great Carbon Valley venture, Octavia aligns with the larger vision, he told me. The company got its start in 2022, when Freim\u00fcller, an Austrian development consultant, met Duncan Kariuki, an engineering graduate from the University of Nairobi, in the OpenAir Collective, an online forum devoted to carbon removal. Kariuki introduced Freim\u00fcller to his classmates Fiona Mugambi and Mike Bwondera, and the four began working on a DAC prototype, first in lab space borrowed from the university and later in an apartment. It didn\u2019t take long for neighbors to complain about the noise, and within six months, the operation had moved to its current warehouse.\u00a0<\/p>\n

That same year, they announced their first prototype, affectionately called Thursday after the day it was unveiled at a Nairobi Climate Network event. Soon, Octavia was showing off its tech to high-profile visitors including King Charles III and President Joe Biden\u2019s ambassador to Kenya, Meg Whitman.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Three years later, the team has more than 40 engineers and has built its 12th DAC unit: a metal cylinder about the size of a large washing machine, containing a chemical filter using an amine, an organic compound derived from ammonia. (Octavia declined to provide further details about the arrangement of the filter inside the machine because the company is awaiting approval of a patent for the design.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Cella and Sirona Technologies have a pilot program in the Great Rift Valley called Project Jacaranda. SIRONA TECHNOLOGIES…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1976,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[2036,2037,2040,2041,2038,2034,2035,80,2039],"class_list":{"0":"post-1975","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-kenya","8":"tag-carbon-removal","9":"tag-climate-change","10":"tag-dac","11":"tag-direct-carbon-capture","12":"tag-global-warning","13":"tag-great-carbon-valley","14":"tag-great-rift-valley","15":"tag-kenya","16":"tag-paris-agreement"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1975","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1975"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1975\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1976"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1975"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1975"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1975"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}