What began as a student competition entry in 2013 became an Indo-Danish climate-tech company operating commercial plants and fuelling ocean voyages.
MASH Makes (founded 2015; formerly MASH Energy) is a spin-out built on thermochemical technology from the Technical University of Denmark. Its core process — pyrolysis, later coupled with gasification — heats agricultural residue in the absence of oxygen and cracks it into three valuable outputs: a bio-oil that upgrades into marine biofuel, a solid biochar that both stores carbon and improves soil, and a syngas that can power the process itself.
I was co-founder and, across the company’s life, held combined CTO/COO responsibilities in the early years and the Head of R&D / Chief Scientific role thereafter.
The company in brief
| Founded | 2015 (concept from DTU; roots in a 2013 Venture Cup prize) |
| HQ | Copenhagen; operations in Karnataka, India |
| Products | Carbon-negative marine biofuel, biochar (soil amendment + CDR), carbon credits, syngas/electricity |
| Feedstock | Agricultural residues, primarily cashew press cake; trials with invasive species in Kenya; expansion toward Vietnam |
| Backers/partners | D/S NORDEN (investor + offtaker), Nefco (Nordic Green Bank), plus partners including Microsoft, Carbonfuture, Supercritical, XPRIZE, Patch |
The technology: cracking the Lego castle
The company’s CEO likes to describe pyrolysis as cracking apart a big Lego castle to reuse the blocks. Organic matter is heated without oxygen; its molecules break into smaller, recombinable components. The elegance of the MASH approach is that it descends from the “Viking” gasifier at DTU — a pilot system that set a global benchmark for efficiency, needing only about a tenth of the energy it produces to run, and generating very little of the tar that fouls lesser designs.
My R&D contribution was to turn that efficiency into a product. Raw pyrolysis oil is not marine fuel; it is acidic, unstable, viscous, and ignition-reluctant. Converting it into something a ship’s engine will accept — and that meets an international fuel standard — is the hard, unglamorous chemistry where most residue-to-fuel efforts stall. My team solved it, producing a fuel that is chemically distinct from the troublesome cashew-nut-shell-liquid (CNSL) fuels of the past: corrosion-free, non-emulsifying, with a higher cetane number and a calorific value around 41 MJ/kg.
What comes out of the reactor
- Biofuel — a drop-in marine fuel proven at sea; roughly 87% carbon-based, low oxygen content, tested with VLSFO and MGO and in Alfa Laval burners.
- Biochar — a porous carbon solid that boosts soil water and nutrient retention; every tonne of biofuel co-produces around 1.8 tonnes of biochar.
- Syngas / electricity — used to power the process and, potentially, to supply rural communities.
A concrete carbon claim
By MASH’s independently-assessed figures, each tonne of biofuel, together with its co-produced biochar, is associated with sequestering on the order of 5.7 tonnes of CO₂ — the basis on which the overall process is described as carbon-negative.
The market-gap thesis
The intellectual core of the venture is where it chose to compete. The opportunity sat in a deliberate blind spot of conventional investment logic: a residue stream too complex, fragmented and operationally intensive for small companies to industrialise, yet too niche and geographically distributed to attract large incumbents under standard return models.
Occupying that gap required three unusual capabilities held together:
- The chemistry to convert a messy, variable feedstock
- The operational design to do it in modular, containerised units close to where the biomass grows
- The certification savvy to turn the outputs into globally tradable commodities
Miss any one and the gap swallows you. Holding all three is what made the position defensible.
Feedstock as the unlock
More than ten residue types were processed across the programme. The logic was proximity: source biomass within a roughly 30–150 km radius of each plant, run modular 0.5–5 t/day units, and build local value chains rather than long supply lines. In India the primary feedstock is cashew press cake; in Kenya, invasive plant species; the model is designed to travel.
Entrepreneurial finance across the valley of death
Perhaps the least visible and most decisive work was financial architecture. A carbon-negative fuel company earns revenue from an unusual blend — fuel sales, biochar sales, and carbon credits — and its CEO has noted that although biochar is only a small share of revenue, it is the “secret sauce” that makes the carbon-negative economics work.
I wrote, won, and executed funding across a portfolio of 15+ programmes totalling roughly 25–30M DKK in grants, contributing to a combined equity-plus-grant-plus-soft-funding stack on the order of USD 25M.
| Programme / instrument | Partner(s) | Budget | Years |
|---|---|---|---|
| Venture Cup Booster (×2) | DTU student team | 0.4M DKK | 2013–14 |
| GAP Fund | DTU Mech. Eng. | 0.6M DKK | 2014 |
| Innobooster | MASH + Asian mfrs | 0.49M DKK | 2016 |
| EuOpstart | EU consortium dev. | 0.15M DKK | 2016–17 |
| Climate-KIC | Business development | 0.78M DKK | 2016–19 |
| Otto Bruuns Fond | DTU Mech. Eng. | 0.15M DKK | 2016–17 |
| WISE Project | DTU Skylab + Env. | 1.17M DKK | 2017–18 |
| Danida | Kenya agroforestry | 0.54M DKK | 2017 |
| Danish Maritime Fund | DTU Risø + MASH | 1.78M DKK | 2018–20 |
| UNIDO contract | Tanzania demo | 2.8M DKK | 2018–19 |
| UNDP project | Water-body waste | 0.65M DKK | 2018–19 |
| Innovation Fund Denmark | Aalborg Univ. + MASH | 3.6M DKK | 2019–21 |
| ShippingLab | DFDS + Alfa Laval | ~0.38M DKK | 2019–20 |
| MUDP (Danish EPA) | DTU Risø + MASH | 8.25M DKK | 2020–22 |
| Nefco green-bank loans | Nefco (company-level) | €3.75M | 2022–24 |
Portfolio figures are as reported across CVs and public company records; Nefco loans are company-level financing rather than personal grant awards.
Consortium development & industrial deployment
No hard-to-abate technology validates itself. MASH’s progress depended on consortia of five to twelve partners per project, spanning energy companies, shipowners, universities, certification bodies, NGOs and manufacturers. My role was the connective one: aligning engineering design with funding requirements and regulatory frameworks, and coordinating implementation across EU–Africa–India corridors.
The deployment footprint today
- Two commercial pyrolysis plants operating in Karnataka, India (Hebri / Udupi region) — described as India’s first large-scale biofuel-and-biochar carbon-removal facilities.
- Reported cumulative output from the first plant on the order of 2,900 tonnes of biochar and ~1,050 tonnes of biofuel.
- Named to the 2025 APAC Cleantech 25; multi-season biochar field trials showing sustained crop-yield gains.
The commercialization stack: certification & compliance
A fuel is not a product until a standard says so, and a tonne of carbon removal is not an asset until a registry certifies it.
Marine fuel
ISO 8217 (marine fuel spec) · IMO GHG strategy · FuelEU Maritime · EU ETS · ASME/API references
Carbon removal
European Biochar Certificate (EBC) · Puro.earth · CSI · ISCC EU / ISCC CFC
Lifecycle & GHG
ISO 14040/44 LCA · RED II/III · GHG Protocol-aligned reporting
Assurance
Third-party verification (Boundless Impact); links to Bureau Veritas, DNV, TÜV, Saybolt, Eurofins
The payoff of this unglamorous work was tangible: ISCC-audited carbon-footprint reductions of up to 94% for the fuel, EBC-certified biochar value chains, and verified carbon credits that could be sold to buyers such as Microsoft, Carbonfuture and Patch. Certification was not compliance overhead — it was the mechanism that turned chemistry into revenue.