American Supercritical, a Denver startup, has come out of stealth with an $8 million pre-seed round and a clear goal. “Our first goal is to make wasteful simple cycle gas turbine installations obsolete,” says CEO and co-founder Simon Shuham. Silent Ventures led the round. Riot Ventures, Harpoon, Reveille VC, Hillwood, Mana Ventures, Climate Capital, Alumni Ventures and angel investors joined.
The waste problem
A simple cycle gas turbine burns fuel, spins a generator and sends its very hot exhaust straight up the stack. Combined cycle plants recover that heat with a steam system, but steam equipment is big, slow to build and expensive. So peaker plants, and a growing number of turbines installed to power data centers quickly, just throw the heat away.
American Supercritical recovers that heat with supercritical carbon dioxide (sCO2) instead of steam. Above its critical point, CO2 behaves like a very dense fluid. That lets turbomachinery be dramatically smaller for the same power. The company calls it the first serious replacement for steam-based power cycles in 200 years.
What it claims
- Up to 50% more power from the same turbine, with no extra fuel
- Equipment about one-tenth the size of an equivalent steam system
- No changes to the existing turbine and no re-permitting
- Potential to cut about 20 million tons of CO2 a year from US gas turbines
The last two points matter most commercially. A bolt-on upgrade that doesn’t touch the turbine or its permit can go in far faster than a new plant. And with data centers short of power, 50% more output from turbines that are already installed is a lot of capacity.
The team
CTO and co-founder Matt Carlson has worked on sCO2 for a decade, at Sandia National Laboratories, Heliogen and Kairos Power. The team also includes people from Echogen, Blue Origin and Southwest Research Institute. The company runs a 25,000-square-foot test and production facility in Denver and is hiring engineers.
Gas turbines come first. Later targets include small modular reactors, geothermal, concentrated solar and industrial waste heat. Any of them turns heat into power, and sCO2 can do that in a much smaller package than steam.