Carbon Bared

Carbon Bared Factory was established in 2003, located on the eastern side of the Tehran Oil Refinery, where it directly collects CO2 emissions to produce pure liquid CO2 for industrial and food grade applications. This factory is the very first plant in the country which produces pure liquid carbon dioxide by performing a recovery method, unlocking the possibility of enabling the Tehran Oil Refinery to achieve zero flaring and reduce its overall CO2 emissions. Therefore, the potential in the essence of the activities of this factory and the significant positive environmental impacts it entails, arose the interest of Dana Energy, resulting in engagements in support of Carbon Bared. Dana Energy’s investment in Carbon Bared brought about a revolutionary change in the company. Within less than 9 months, strategic actions such as CEO replacement and changing the head of the technical team led to sustainable operations, production rates increased by approximately 10 times (reaching 80% of nominal capacity), and the company successfully recovered CO2 from the refinery plant.

Prior to the emergence of Carbon Bared activities, Tehran Oil Refinery emitted all of its flaring pollutants into the atmosphere, exacerbating local air pollution with a negative impact on the environment. However, subsequent to the start of the Carbon Bared operations, out of the 270 tonnes of emissions, 85 tonnes are now directly fed into Carbon Bared utilizing a pipeline with a length of 1.5 km. This procedure allows for a 31% reduction in CO2 emissions of the refinery, which reinforces our pledge toward a more sustainable future.

The production unit consists of extensive purification processes through which CO2 is purified up to the highest levels achievable of about 99.9%. The purified CO2 is compressed and chilled to be liquified and stored in appropriate storage tanks for distribution. There are currently about 18 industries that utilize CO2 in their applications and productions, such as coolant, disinfectant, pharmaceutical, edible, welding, fire extinguisher, fertilization and automotive industries.

The current nominal production capacity of Carbon Bared is 100 tonnes of liquid CO2 per day with an actual production rate of 75-80 tonnes of liquid CO2 per day, with an efficiency of about 75-80%, running 24/7 with no days off. In addition, the vision and plans of Carbon Bared shareholders, in line with Dana Energy’s policy toward supporting and investing in green technologies, encompasses the expansion of the facility with enhancements of equipment to escalate actual CO2 recovery rates from 75 tonnes of liquid CO2 per day up to 150 tonnes per day. There are also forthcoming plans for broadening production items to other secondary products, such as dry ice. Ultimately, the long-term strategy of this factory, accompanied by close collaborations with Dana Energy, envisions the capturing and recovery of the entire CO2 flares of the Tehran Oil Refinery to increase carbon offsets of Dana Energy further, while strengthening our sustainability strategy.

Based on the data provided by EcoTree and European Environment Agency (EEA), various types of trees with different maturity levels can absorb about 10 to 40 kg of CO2 per year on average. In contrast, this number is approximately 22 kg of CO2 per year for a typical mature tree. Therefore, to put the Carbon Bared activities into perspective, the amount of CO2 recovered from the refinery in one year, which amounts to 27,375 tonnes of CO2, is equivalent to the amount of carbon captured by 1,244,318 mature trees in one year that on a rough estimate is equivalent to planting trees in a land with an estimated area of 34 million square meters. This demonstrates the amount of CO2 that has been offset in a year, which significantly contributes to our commitment to positive climate actions in support of green technology investments.