eChemicles and the EIC Accelerator: Industrial CO From Waste CO2

Carbon monoxide is one of the chemical industry's basic building blocks, and according to eChemicles co-founder Csaba Janáky it is mostly made from natural gas today. His company, based in Szeged in southern Hungary, makes the same molecule from captured carbon dioxide, water and electricity in a low-temperature electrolyser that fits in a shipping container. Its pitch to smaller users, as the Hungarian National Research, Development and Innovation Office described it in May 2026, is to produce the gas on site instead of trucking it in high-pressure cylinders.

The EIC Accelerator selected the project, Scale_eChemicles, at its 1 October 2025 cut-off for blended finance. CORDIS records an EU contribution of €2,499,568.75 under an agreement signed on 28 May 2026, for a project running from 1 June 2026 to 31 May 2028. The aim, in the project's own words, is to turn the company's containerised prototype into a commercial product "introduced to the market by 2028". Five months in, the record shows industrial tests and partners, and no announced sale.

An electrolyser instead of a gas plant

CO2 electrolysis splits carbon dioxide at an electrode, using electricity as the only energy input. eChemicles' version runs at low temperature and grew out of work by Janáky's group at the University of Szeged. In April 2021 the group published a paper in Nature Energy on water-fed "zero-gap" cells, in which the cathode is periodically flushed with alkali-containing solutions to stop salt deposits from choking it. The paper reports a carbon monoxide partial current density of 420 ± 50 mA per square centimetre for more than 200 hours, and a multicell stack with an active area of 100 cm² per cell.

The product is ordinary carbon monoxide, so a buyer can feed it into existing chemical processes. The NRDI Office article names semiconductor, agrochemical, fragrance and pharmaceutical companies, which buy CO in smaller quantities, as the first target users; the CORDIS objective lists chemicals and petrochemicals, aviation, shipping, cement and steel as the larger markets. Turning CO into ethylene, which the company also advertises on its website, is still in development with a different reactor, according to Janáky.

The CORDIS objective calls scalability the key bottleneck of the field, and the company's claim is that it has solved it by stacking cells: it says its stack design is "the first scalable low temperature electrolyzer stack" (March 2023 release) and, in the CORDIS objective, the largest low-temperature CO2 electrolyser stack in operation "to our best knowledge". Neither claim states a stack size, and no independent comparison could be found.

What the earlier EIC money produced

Scale_eChemicles is the company's second EIC project. The first, SolarCO2Value, was an EIC Transition grant of €2,373,125, covering the full project cost, from 1 December 2022 to 31 May 2025. Its goal was a containerised CO2-to-CO demonstrator able to process 100 tonnes of CO2 a year, validated on solar power, plus a business plan to make the company ready for a Series A round "and/or EIC Accelerator blended finance". The second of those has now happened.

According to the new project's CORDIS summary, SolarCO2Value reached technology readiness level 6 with what the company calls the world's first low-temperature CO2 electrolyser container prototype, producing CO while connected to a photovoltaic park. The CORDIS results page lists a demonstration report and a techno-economic and life-cycle assessment as deliverables, three peer-reviewed papers, two EU trademarks and two patent applications. It does not publish the demonstrator's measured throughput, so whether the 100-tonne target was reached cannot be checked from the record.

Partners, tests and the missing order

In December 2024 eChemicles announced a joint development agreement with Bosch Thin Metal Technologies, the Tilburg unit of Bosch Transmission Technology, which brings thin-metal stamping to the production of its stacks; Renewable Carbon News carried the same announcement. No financial terms were published. A year later, CO2 Value Europe reported on 17 December 2025 that its member had teamed up with MATECH, part of the Hungarian KÉSZ Group, to develop a new containerised unit that would allow on-site tests at customer facilities.

Those tests have begun, by the company's account. In the May 2026 NRDI Office article Janáky said that several container units, each holding one stack, were being tested in industrial settings, and that one had just been shipped to a major European steel plant in Austria for a three-month trial. The plant is not named and no result has been published. He also said the first containers could be sold "as early as next year", meaning 2027, with a first industrial-sized small plant expected in the first half of 2028.

The CORDIS summary of the Accelerator project says nothing about orders. A search of the company website, the CORDIS pages and trade press on 4 November 2026 found no announced purchase and no named customer.

What Scale_eChemicles has to deliver

The Accelerator project is two years long and runs to May 2028, the same year the product is due on the market. CORDIS gives no total cost for it, and the equity part of the blended finance award is not public: the EIC Fund beneficiaries page checked on 4 November 2026 does not name eChemicles, and the size and timing of any equity investment are not disclosed. It is too early to judge delivery.

1. Containerised prototype at TRL 6ReportedStated in the CORDIS objective as the outcome of SolarCO2Value; deliverables listed on the results page.
2. Industrial testing at customer sitesStartedSteel plant trial in Austria, per Janáky in May 2026; no result published.
3. Commercial product on the market by 2028Too earlyThe project runs to 31 May 2028; no sale announced so far.
4. Scale to medium and large productionToo earlyA plan in the CORDIS objective, with no date or capacity attached.

The money and the register

Besides the two EIC grants, CORDIS lists eChemicles as a partner in REACT, a SINTEF-led consortium on converting lower-purity industrial CO2 that started on 1 May 2026, with €697,900 for the company. North Data lists the same amounts and several smaller EU and Hungarian grants. The NRDI Office says the company received nearly HUF 270 million from its Fast Track programme and named it winner of its 2025 DeepTech Award.

The only disclosed private round is the $1.3 million investment by Blue Planet Venture Capital Fund announced on 7 March 2023, for hiring engineers, marketing and scale-up; PitchBook gives the same seed amount. The GLEIF legal entity record lists the company as active under number 06-10-000524. The free extract of the Hungarian company register sits behind a captcha and was not read for this article, so filed accounts, revenue and staff numbers are not verified here.

Why it matters for Europe

The Commission's Industrial Carbon Management Strategy of 6 February 2024 names carbon capture and utilisation as one of three pathways, with captured CO2 replacing fossil carbon in chemicals, fuels and construction products. The binding figure in the related Net-Zero Industry Act, 50 million tonnes of CO2 injection capacity by 2030, concerns storage, not use. eChemicles' case, in Janáky's words, is that CO made from captured CO2 can stand in for CO made from natural gas. The company has published no production cost or price, so whether buyers will accept it is the question the 2028 product has to answer.

eChemicles has not been asked for comment for this article. The reporting is based on publicly available sources, listed below.