Qaptis – CO2 free trucks

Why is this project important?

Road freight is responsible for 15% of Europe’s carbon emissions. Globally, 27 million heavy-duty trucks on the road produce 1.2 billion tons of carbon a year.

That’s a lot of trucks and a lot of pollution.

And things don’t look like they’ll change anytime soon. While alternatives (in the form of hydrogen and electric) are available, they’re expensive and development is slow. Experts predict that at least 50% of the engines will still be diesel in 2050. We can’t wait that long.

What would happen if we could capture that CO2, recycle it, and reuse it?

How does Qaptis work ...

In 2018, Prof. François Maréchal (out of the Industrial Process and Energy Systems Engineering lab at EPFL) and his colleague Shivom Sharma pulled together a team to create a technology to reduce the impact of road transport thanks to on-board CO2 capture and storage.

Fast forward three years, Qaptis was born.

We’ve developed a kit which is attached to heavy-duty trucks and captures CO2 directly from the exhaust. This is then liquefied and stored on-board until it can be unloaded and then recycled.

Hang on, I hear you say, carbon can’t be recycled. But you’d be wrong. Technology is changing things. Carbon can be recycled into a range of things – from building materials, synthetic fuel, to plastic bottles, even to clothes or proteins. And while a shift to electric or hydrogen vehicles will take decades, we can deploy our solution now. And we can start having a positive effect on the environment now.

But we need your help.

Why do we need your support?

We know our technology works. But it’s time to scale up. We need to build our first full-scale prototype. With this, we can show companies this simple way to accelerate the reduction of their impact on the world around them without having to replace their whole fleet right away.

We know what we need to do. We know what materials we’re using. We know how to build it. But we need your support to make it happen.

With CHF 25,000, we can close the budget to create our prototype

With CHF 50,000, we can transform our first truck into a low-carbon vehicle

With CHF 75,000, we can experiment on a boat engine to open a new market and have even more impact.

It’s not a small ask, we know we still have a long way to go. But every single contribution can make a real difference.

We believe we can change the future of our planet. It’s time you believed in us.