King Nuada brought this magnificent sword to Ireland, leading the Tuatha de Danann in the fierce Battle of Moytura. The sword's dazzling light and unmatched sharpness turned the tide of battle, making it a key artifact in Irish folklore.

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La Commission européenne a retenu SCALA, projet de Nuada porté sur la centrale biomasse Kogeban d'Idex dans la Somme, pour 14,6 millions d'euros du Fonds pour l'innovation. L'installation doit capter jusqu'à 10 000 tonnes de CO₂ biogénique par an grâce à des matériaux poreux (MOF), sans solvant et…

Carbon capture has a heat problem before it has a chemistry problem. Amine solvents need steam. Steam needs a heat source. At a cement kiln or a steel plant, that heat is often the same energy the operator is trying to sell. Nuada, a Belfast company, has spent a decade building the other version. Its AdSpire process uses a solid adsorbent to pull CO2 out of a flue gas, then releases it under vacuum. No solvent. No steam. The European Commission selected the company's SCALA project in northern France for €14.6 million from the EU Innovation Fund, announced on 22 October. The plant is designed to capture 10,000 tonnes of biogenic CO2 a year at a biomass cogeneration site run by Idex in Hauts-de-France. That is a small number next to the millions of tonnes Europe emits every day. It is also the first commercial-scale unit Nuada has built, which makes the grant a test of one engineering claim: capture can run on electricity alone and still be cheap enough to sell. ## From a Yorkshire pilot to a French plant SCALA is not a laboratory project. Nuada tested the process at enfinium's Ferrybridge-1 energy-from-waste facility in West Yorkshire, and the French installation is meant to show the same equipment works inside a working industrial site. Idex operates the Kogeban biomass plant. Nuada brings the capture unit. The company began in 2012 as MOF Technologies, a spin-out from Queen's University Belfast working on metal-organic frameworks. It rebranded as Nuada in 2023 and now employs more than 40 people at an 18,000 square foot manufacturing and development facility in Newtownabbey. QUBIS, the university's commercialisation arm, remains a shareholder. That history matters for how to read the award. This is a company with a pilot record, a small team and a grant, not a company with a commercial product and a queue of customers. The €14.6 million is project support. It is not a revenue contract. * * * ## What €14.6 million actually buys The grant covers a defined slice of the project. Nuada's announcement does not disclose total investment, and neither does the Commission. The funding agreement still has to be negotiated. Under the Innovation Fund process, selected projects move into grant-agreement preparation, and the Commission expects to announce the results of that stage in the first quarter of 2027. That gap is worth holding on to. A €14.6 million award against an undisclosed total budget tells you the EU share, not the plant cost. For a first-of-a-kind unit, the balance usually comes from the technology developer, the site host and whatever project finance the sponsor can arrange. Nuada has raised before: a €2.5 million EIC Accelerator award in 2025, and £3.4 million from BGF in 2023. 10,000 t biogenic CO2 a year #### SCALA design capture rate First commercial-scale deployment of Nuada's AdSpire process, at an Idex biomass plant in Hauts-de-France. · _Nuada, European Commission, 2026_ The capture rate is modest by design. A 10,000 tonne unit is small enough to finance and large enough to expose integration problems that a pilot hides. Fans, ducting, heat exchangers, the vacuum system, the CO2 conditioning skid: each has to work at a real site with real operating hours. Nuada co-chief executive Jose Casaban called the selection a milestone in commercial deployment and a reflection of the pilot programme. That is the standard language of a grant announcement. The useful question is what the plant will measure once it runs. First-of-a-kind projects carry a cost premium that a second plant does not. Engineering hours are spent on integration that later becomes a standard design. Equipment is sized conservatively because the operating envelope is uncertain. The Commission's money is meant to absorb that premium so the second unit can be sold on a commercial basis. That logic only works if the learning is captured. A grant that funds one plant and stops there produces a demonstration. A grant that funds a plant with a documented design basis, a measured energy curve and a repeatable procurement package produces an asset the company can sell. Nuada's pilot record suggests it understands the difference. SCALA is where that becomes visible to customers. ## Why heat, not chemistry, sets the cost Most carbon capture today is built around liquid amines. The flue gas passes through a solvent that absorbs CO2. The solvent is then heated to release the gas, and the lean solvent goes back to the absorber. The chemistry works. The energy bill is the problem. Regenerating amine solvent takes heat, usually low-pressure steam. A plant that already makes steam can sometimes spare it. A plant that buys fuel to make steam is adding a second energy cost on top of the capture equipment. That is the point where capture economics stop being a chemistry question and become a site-by-site heat balance. Nuada's process removes the heat step. A solid adsorbent captures CO2, and a vacuum pulls the gas off the material. The company says the unit runs on electricity alone and uses no chemical solvents, which cuts energy demand and simplifies retrofits. The same claim appears in the Commission's project description and in the trade press coverage that followed. Pressure-swing and vacuum-swing systems are not new in industrial gas separation. They are used to separate oxygen from air, to purify hydrogen and to recover methane. The hard part is moving the idea from a clean, high-concentration gas stream to a dirty, low-concentration flue gas at a plant that runs around the clock. That move changes the equipment. The adsorbent bed has to handle dust, moisture and acid gases. The vacuum system has to cycle reliably for years. The control system has to follow the plant's load rather than a laboratory schedule. None of those problems is exotic. Each of them is where first-of-a-kind projects lose time and money. > “Carbon capture is critical infrastructure for industrial decarbonisation, but to achieve deployment at the scale required, it needs to be cheaper and easier to integrate into existing industrial assets.”— Conor Hamill, co-chief executive, Nuada Electricity is not free. A vacuum-swing process trades a heat load for a power load, and the power price at the site decides whether that trade wins. In France, where the plant sits, the grid is relatively low-carbon and industrial power contracts are available. That is a favourable test bed. It is not proof that the same unit works in a market with expensive electricity and a cheap source of waste heat. The solid adsorbent has its own constraints. Metal-organic frameworks are tunable and selective, and they can be damaged by moisture, trace contaminants and the mechanical cycling of a real flue gas. The company describes the material as the product. The pilot campaigns are the evidence that it survives. SCALA is the evidence that it survives at scale, on a commercial duty cycle, for years rather than weeks. That is why the 10,000 tonne figure matters less than the operating data behind it. Energy per tonne of CO2, adsorbent life, availability and maintenance hours will decide the second plant. The grant buys the first plant. ## A €3.4 billion round with a startup problem SCALA was one of 77 projects selected from 358 applications in the latest Innovation Fund call. The call attracted €17.5 billion in requests against a budget of €2.9 billion, and the Commission ultimately allocated €3.4 billion across the selected list. The gap between requests and money is the clearest signal of how many industrial decarbonisation projects are chasing a fixed pool. Category| Projects| Funding ---|---|--- **Large-scale**| 12| about €1.58 billion **Clean-tech manufacturing**| 12| almost €895 million **Medium-scale**| 17| about €458 million **Pilot projects**| 16| about €394 million **Small-scale**| 20| about €124 million October 2026 Innovation Fund round, 77 projects in total. Source: European Commission, via The Brussels Times, 19 October 2026. The round had two firsts. It included a small modular nuclear reactor project and a direct air carbon capture and storage project, which tells you the Commission is widening the technology list rather than narrowing it. It also included six critical raw materials projects tied to the Net-Zero Industry Act and the RESourceEU action plan. Startups are a minority inside the list. EU-Startups counted 20 of the 77 projects as involving startups, scaleups or younger technology ventures. Nuada sits in that group: a small company with a first commercial unit, competing for attention against large industrial sponsors with mature engineering teams. The money itself comes from the EU Emissions Trading System. The Commission says the Innovation Fund is leveraging an estimated €40 billion of ETS revenue over 2020 to 2030, which makes the programme a recycling mechanism: carbon costs paid by emitters become grants for technologies meant to reduce those costs. The portfolio now stands at around 320 projects. That structure explains the selection bias. Projects that can show a credible path to commercial deployment, a measurable abatement and a sponsor with the balance sheet to finish construction tend to win. A first commercial unit from a 40-person company fits the learning-by-doing brief. It does not fit the scale brief, which is why the award is small relative to the large-scale category. The Commission estimates the 77 selected projects could avoid around 290 million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions over their first decade of operation. That number is an estimate across the portfolio, not a guarantee for any single plant. It is also the figure that makes the programme politically legible: €3.4 billion now, a decade of claimed abatement later. Another 84 projects passed evaluation but missed funding. They received the STEP Seal, a label the Commission says can help them raise money elsewhere. The label does not settle a grant agreement. For those projects, the seal is a credential and a queue position, not cash. ## Biomass carbon and a missing destination The Idex site burns biomass. That changes the carbon accounting. CO2 from recently grown plant matter is biogenic, so capturing it and storing it permanently can produce negative emissions rather than merely avoiding new ones. The Commission's project list places industrial carbon management alongside renewable energy and clean-tech manufacturing, and SCALA is a biomass capture case inside that category. Negative emissions only hold if two conditions are met. The biomass has to be sustainably sourced. The captured CO2 has to be permanently stored or used in a way that keeps it out of the atmosphere. Nuada's announcement does not say where the 10,000 tonnes of liquid biogenic CO2 will go. The Commission's project description does not either. That omission is the largest open question in the project. A capture unit without a transport and storage route is a machine that produces a product nobody has contracted to take. France has been building out CCUS infrastructure, and the Hauts-de-France region has industrial clusters that could host a storage or utilisation route. None of that is specified in the materials published so far. As we wrote in September, the question at Yara's Sluiskil project was who pays for the transport and storage leg. The same question applies here. A capture plant is the front half of a chain. The back half has its own capex, its own permitting and its own business model. The Sluiskil case showed how much of the cost sits outside the capture unit itself. The Hauts-de-France region is one of the places where a chain could form. It has heavy industry, port infrastructure and a cluster of emitters close enough to share a collector. A shared pipeline changes the unit economics for every capture project attached to it, because the transport cost is spread across several plants. Nuada's project is small enough that it would be a minority shipper on any shared line. That is not a criticism of the plant. It is a description of the sequence. Capture units come first because they are modular and can be installed at a single site. Networks come later because they need anchor volumes and long-term contracts. The companies that build both halves are rare, and most capture developers are betting that someone else builds the network. In August we covered the research layer around AI-designed capture catalysts. Better materials can lower the energy penalty. They do not solve the storage question, and they do not create an offtake contract. SCALA is a hardware and integration story, not a materials breakthrough story. ## What would make SCALA a reference plant The grant is a start, not a verdict. Four things decide whether SCALA becomes a template or a one-off demonstration. 📊 **Signals to watch** Energy per tonne of CO2, measured at the plant and not extrapolated from the pilot. The grant agreement and total project budget, due to be finalised in the first quarter of 2027. A named destination for the liquid CO2, with a transport and storage contract behind it. A second commercial order from an emitter outside the biomass niche, where the heat balance is different. The first signal is the most important. A vacuum-swing process competes with amine capture on total cost per tonne, and the electricity bill is the variable that decides the winner at a given site. If SCALA publishes a credible energy figure under commercial duty, the case for the technology gets stronger. If it does not, the market will treat the plant as a pilot with a grant attached. NUADA ADSPIRE — TRL 7/8 ───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── TRL 1–3 TRL 4–6 TRL 7–8 TRL 9 ✓ research ──── ✓ pilot ──── ◉ NOW ──── ○ market ───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── [████████░░] 80% · First commercial-scale unit funded; full market deployment not yet proven Source: Nuada pilot campaigns and SCALA selection, 2026 The second signal is commercial, not technical. Nuada has worked with cement producers, and cement is the harder market: higher flue gas volumes, more contaminants, tighter margins and a heat balance that often favours solvent systems with waste heat. A biomass cogeneration plant is a friendlier first site. The company needs a cement or steel reference before the technology can be sold as a general industrial tool. Cement also has a structural advantage for any capture developer: a large share of its emissions is process CO2 released by calcination, which cannot be avoided by switching fuel. That makes capture the default abatement route for the sector, and it makes a credible cement reference the most valuable commercial proof a capture company can hold. Steel is moving in the same direction, with several low-emission routes competing for the same capital. A capture supplier that can show a working unit at a cement plant, with measured energy use and a storage contract, has a product. A supplier with one biomass unit has a demonstration. The third signal is the chain. Without a storage or utilisation route, the plant's output is a cost centre. With one, it becomes a product with a price, and the ETS revenue that funds the Innovation Fund becomes the same mechanism that pays for abatement. That circularity is the point of the programme. It is also the part most likely to slip. > “These projects show that Europe's innovators are turning climate ambition into industrial leadership.”— Wopke Hoekstra, European Commissioner for Climate, Net Zero and Clean Growth The fourth signal is repeatability. A first-of-a-kind plant is a learning asset. A second plant sold to a different emitter, at a different site, with a different heat and power balance, is a product. Nuada's €14.6 million buys the first. The second is the one that tells you whether the model works. Europe has now put public money behind a heatless capture process at commercial scale. The engineering claim is specific and testable. The plant will either produce a defensible energy number and a CO2 destination, or it will produce a very expensive set of lessons. The grant agreement lands in the first quarter of 2027. The operating data comes after that, and it will matter more than the announcement. ## Sources European Commission: €3.4 billion for 77 net-zero technology projects The official selection list, the 358 applications and the €17.5 billion in requests behind the October 2026 Innovation Fund round. European Commission Primary source for the round size, the category split and the grant-agreement timetable. Nuada: SCALA selected for €14.6 million in EU Innovation Fund support The company's own account of the AdSpire process, the Idex site and the 10,000 tonne design output. Nuada Company source: useful for the technology description and the quotes, less so for the project economics it does not disclose. Queen's University Belfast: spin-out wins €14.6m EU grant for carbon capture University context on the 2012 spin-out, the QUBIS stake and the earlier EIC Accelerator award. Queen's University Belfast Institutional confirmation of the company history and the award, with the university's own framing.

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