Clean Power startup Arbor Energy announced that it has raised $55 million in a Series A funding round, with proceeds aimed at advancing its next-generation turbine technology aimed at delivering clean baseload power to decarbonize energy intensive industries.
Arbor was founded in 2022 by veterans of SpaceX, who have been leveraging recent advancements in oxy-combustion and supercritical turbomachinery – many of which they pioneered while developing rocket engines over the last decade – and applying them to electricity generation. The company has developed a supercritical CO2 (SCO2) turbine powered by advanced oxycombustion, with the technology capable of running on fuels from natural gas to syngas.
When running on biomass as fuel, the system can even deliver carbon-negative power.Earlier this year, Arbor announced $41 million of carbon removal agreements with Frontier, on behalf of companies including Google, Shopify, and H&M Group.
The new funding will support completion of Arbor’s 1 MW pilot system, known as ATLAS, and accelerate development of the company’s 25 MW supercritical CO2 (sCO2) power system HALCYON.
HALCYON combines oxy-combustion technology, which enables emission-free power, with sCO2 systems that enhance efficiency while reducing physical footprint. The turbines also use 3D printing to avoid global supply chain bottlenecks and can be deployed in modular units ranging from 25 MW to more than 1 GW. Arbor expects the first HALCYON turbine to come online by 2028 and plans to manufacture gigawatts’ worth of turbines by the end of this decade.
Brad Hartwig, Arbor’s CEO and Co-Founder, said:
“We have a massive opportunity to deliver abundant, clean and reliable power that keeps pace with today’s industries. This funding lets us move quickly from tech pilot to commercial deployment and shows how modular, zero-emission turbines like HALCYON can solve the greatest energy challenges faced by businesses today.”
The funding round was co-led by Lowercarbon Capital and Voyager Ventures, with participation from Gigascale Capital, Marathon Petroleum Corporation, Cantos Ventures and others.
Sarah Sclarsic, Founding and Managing Partner at Voyager Ventures, said:
“Arbor’s modular gas turbines provide the baseload capacity that data centers need, with the speed and flexibility that traditional infrastructure simply can’t match. And best of all, they are made in America, low-cost and are the first zero-emission combustion turbines on the market.”
