Cella Mixes Two Approaches to Keep CO2 Solidly Underground

When Corey Pattison was working on climate initiatives at the World Bank, a consensus was building around the idea that carbon capture and storage (CCS) was key to reaching the world’s carbon goals. The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said as much in 2018, and other organizations agreed.

But Pattison noticed that progress on one front was far ahead of progress on the other.

The investments and developments of carbon capture were “vastly exceeding” the efforts being put into carbon storage, Pattison said in an interview with Hart Energy.

“It started to become obvious to me that there was a bottleneck here,” he said.

In looking to fix the problem, a startup was born.

Pattison and carbon researcher Claire Nelson co-founded Cella in 2022 to try to overcome the bottleneck. Cella injects captured CO₂ into basaltic reservoirs where it reacts and solidifies, eliminating the need for permanent storage of pressurized CO₂.

“In a nutshell, we're taking captured CO₂, we're injecting it underground and we're turning into rock for permanent storage,” Pattison said.

Cella’s been on a nice roll of late. It was one of five companies selected in late 2024 for a partnership with Halliburton Labs, a unit of energy services provider Halliburton Co. helping to commercialize clean energy and climate ventures.

Then about a month ago, it started Project Jacaranda, a pilot in Kenya with Sirona Technologies, a direct air capture firm. After Sirona captures the carbon, Cella injects it into Kenyan rock formations. The east African nation was ideal for the pilot because of those formations and available renewable energy.

Cella’s approach “is kind of a hybrid of the two different approaches that have been piloted in the world today,” Pattison said. One dissolves CO₂ in water before injecting it underground; the other injects pressurized CO₂ without water.

“Our core technology is taking the best of both of those and trying to optimize them,” he said. “We've done that by borrowing some principles and techniques from the enhanced oil recovery world."

Oil companies have used EOR for decades, injecting gas to improve oil flow.

Pattison said Cella’s hybrid approach has multiple benefits.

“One of the things that’s really exciting about our technology is first, you have the benefits of permanence,” he said. Turning CO₂ into a carbonate solid “helps address some of the long-term liability challenges that we see in the industry.”

He noted that operators of pressurized CO₂ installations have “post-closure responsibility that goes for decades” as well as long-term monitoring costs. He also mentioned community acceptance.

“There’s something about passing the buck onto future generations that I think people aren’t very comfortable with,” Pattison said. “Being able to say ‘we know that in a finite number of years this is exactly what it’s going to look like’ is a very different proposition than saying ‘we’re reasonably confident that in the future it’s going to kind of look like it is now.’”

Pattison said the work that Cella and others are doing goes beyond the individual projects.

“Our job is to improve project economics, and we think we can do that through reduced monitoring costs because of the permanence of what we're able to do,” he said. “If we can help de-risk what geologic carbon storage looks like in new markets where it doesn’t exist today, [show] that it’s more like a technology platform” that enables other technologies, then that will help the industry scale up.

“And I think we all believe that just like any other industry, the more scale we get, the more we’re going to come down the cost curve.”