Rimere, a climate solutions company with proprietary plasma technology, announced the closing of a $10m strategic investment from Clean Energy Fuels Corp, according to a news release.
The funding will accelerate development and field testing of Rimere’s two independent devices, the Reformer and the Mitigator, that reduce climate change emissions and enable the use of natural gas to accelerate the transition to a clean hydrogen future.
The Reformer uses proprietary sequential hybrid plasma technology to transform natural gas into clean hydrogen and high-quality graphene, without creating any CO2 emissions. When renewable natural gas (RNG) is used as the feedstock, hydrogen produced by Rimere’s Reformer can achieve a negative carbon-intensity rating, making it substantially lower-emission than even renewable electrolysis.
The Mitigator is a plasma thermal oxidizer that reduces the greenhouse gas (GHG) potency of fugitive methane emissions. It offers a low-cost solution for abating methane emissions that escape from the natural gas infrastructure, particularly compressors and pneumatic controllers located along natural gas pipelines.
“The world continues to consume more natural gas annually for everything from producing electricity to heating our homes. However, this globally abundant, low-carbon and affordable resource can also pose greenhouse gas emissions challenges from pipeline transmission, storage and other operations. Importantly, Rimere’s technology not only cleans up the infrastructure but also repositions and revalues natural gas reserves as a vital solution for climate change and our clean energy future by producing both zero-emission hydrogen and valuable graphene. This investment by Clean Energy enables us to accelerate development of these proprietary technologies that could have an immediate impact on the world’s effort to address climate change,” said Mitchell Pratt, CEO of Rimere.
Rimere’s patented and patent-pending technologies deconstruct methane (CH4) at a molecular level, first exciting it to an ionized state, and then high voltage and high frequency arcs are used to crack the ionized gas under an induced electromagnetic field. Rimere’s Reformer and Mitigator provide important solutions to change the long-term outlook for natural gas leveraging a cleaner extensive infrastructure to deliver clean hydrogen and graphene to end use customers.
“Clean Energy has always been striving to address environmental issues since it was founded over 26 years ago. First, it was to reduce harmful and unhealthy pollutants caused by large vehicles operating on diesel. More recently, we saw the opportunity of turning fugitive greenhouse gas emissions at agricultural facilities into an ultra-clean transportation fuel. It is a logical next step to make this investment in Rimere which is tackling the challenges facing the natural gas and hydrogen industries to produce cost-effective solutions without emissions,” said Andrew J. Littlefair, president and CEO of Clean Energy.
Rimere is currently an equity method investee of Clean Energy and has raised $18.25m of committed capital to date since its formation in 2020.
