Merle Symes has spent fifty years building companies. His co-founder, Tanvi Govil, has spent seven years coaxing enzymes out of microbes pulled from more than a mile underground. Together they run Carb Enzero, a South Dakota startup that enters 2026 with a single, narrow goal: prove its carbon-capture enzyme works outside a laboratory.
The system is called Carbon Lock. The name points to what it actually does: turn flue-gas CO₂ into stone, on-site, without a pipeline or a storage well.
From a Black Hills mine to a bioreactor
The idea started where you would least expect a carbon story. Govil, an assistant professor in the Chemical and Biological Engineering department at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology, studies extremophiles, organisms that survive in punishing conditions. Her team collected microbes at the Sanford Underground Research Facility, deep beneath the Black Hills, and at sites across the country, then engineered the enzymes those organisms produce into high-performance biocatalysts that tolerate heat, pressure, acidity, and toxic metals.
What we learned from these organisms helped us engineer enzymes that can efficiently remove CO₂ directly from the industrial emissions.— Dr. Tanvi Govil, Founder and CTO, Carb Enzero
The original research focused on the microbes themselves. The commercialization strategy shifted to the enzymes they secrete. Symes, Carb Enzero's CEO and a Mines Entrepreneur-in-Residence with an MBA from Wharton, is blunt about where the value sits: the enzyme is the workhorse, and the enzyme is what the company will sell.
How Carbon Lock turns gas into stone
The process runs as a four-step loop at the emission source. Flue gas enters the Carbon Lock unit directly at the stack. Proprietary enzymes catalyze the conversion of CO₂ into carbonate ions. Those ions react with calcium from coal ash, a power-plant waste stream, to form solid calcium carbonate. Clean air leaves; a cement-ready solid stays behind.
Two claims separate this from the usual capture story. The first is speed: the team says its enzymes cut a reaction that would otherwise take years down to a few minutes. The second is the input. Coal ash, normally a disposal problem, becomes the calcium feedstock that locks the carbon. No purification, no compression, no transport, no Class VI storage well.
These enzymes take 100 percent of the CO₂ out of the flue gases. Industrial flue gases make up 50 percent of carbon emissions, and 90 percent of those come from fossil fuel power plants.— Merle Symes, Co-Founder and CEO, Carb Enzero
No pipeline. No well.
The technology sits in a different lane from both legacy Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) and Direct Air Capture (DAC). CCS compresses and buries concentrated CO₂; DAC pulls it from the open air at a steep energy cost. Carbon Lock targets point-source flue gas and mineralizes it where it forms. That is a narrower addressable stream than atmospheric capture, but it is also the stream where the gas is cheapest to grab.
The razor-blade model and the 2026 pilot
The company does not plan to build capture plants. It plans to supply enzymes to engineering firms that already work with power plants and that would design and install the industrial-scale systems. Symes frames it with a line he clearly enjoys repeating.
We like to say we will sell the razor blade while engineering firms sell the razor.— Merle Symes, Co-Founder and CEO, Carb Enzero
That model keeps its own capital concentrated on enzyme production rather than construction. The 2026 milestones are deliberately modest: design and fabricate mobile pilot demo units, run field demonstrations with potential partners, and raise the capital to deploy those pilots. Govil's first-place finish and $20,000 at the South Dakota Governor's Giant Vision competition this spring bought the team room to start raising larger money and continue design work. A South Dakota Board of Regents competitive research grant funds the underlying extremophile research.
The roadmap then points to a 2027 commercial launch and, in 2028 and beyond, a full-scale enzyme production facility in Rapid City. Those later dates are aspirations, not commitments. The pilot is the gate.
What the pilot has to prove
For an investor, the interesting question is not whether the chemistry works in a beaker. It is whether a mobile unit can hold up against real flue gas, day after day, at a cost that beats piping CO₂ to a well. The coal-ash angle helps on both fronts: it turns a waste stream into feedstock and sidesteps the largest line item in conventional mineralization.
The risks are equally specific. Enzyme supply is the bottleneck the company itself names; a 2028 production facility implies today's output is small. Field demonstrations have to survive the variance of actual plants, not curated lab conditions. And the company is entering a category where incumbents already ship CCS at scale and DAC players chase the residual removal market with far larger balance sheets.
What it has that the others do not is a near-term, low-capital proof point. One working pilot, attached to a real stack, converts a thesis into a track record. Symes and Govil are betting that 2026 is enough time to get there.
