ION Clean Energy Bolsters Leadership Team and Opens New Boulder, Colorado Headquarters as Momentum Continues

BOULDER, Colo--On the heels of its recent $45 million Series A financing from Chevron New Energies and Carbon Direct Capital, ION Clean Energy has announced three key additions to its executive leadership team and opened the doors on its new Boulder, CO headquarters.

Steve Hirsh has joined ION as President and Chief Financial Officer. Prior to joining ION, Mr. Hirsh served as Managing Director of Corporate Development at Proman, a diversified, integrated energy producer. Mr. Hirsh’s industry relationships and extensive experience in project development, finance, and commercial operations will help ION scale its commercial, finance and supply chain efforts.

Also joining ION’s executive team as Chief Operating Officer is Ben Gurtler. Mr. Gurtler joins ION from Koch Engineered Solutions where he was KES’s Commercial Director of Carbon Capture and has long been an advocate of ION’s technology and team. Mr. Gurtler’s knowledge and experience in carbon capture will be indispensable as ION continues to deploy its technology at scale and form strategic partnerships across all aspects of project delivery and execution.

Finally, ION has also hired Jeannie Donovan as VP, Human Resources. Ms. Donovan joins ION after leading the HR practice at Velocity Global where she helped scale that business from a team of 20 employees to over 800 people in 40 different countries. Ms. Donovan’s experience will help ION build out its team as they staff up to meeting growing commercial demand.

“At ION our science is the differentiator and thanks to our Founder and Executive Chairman Dr. Buz Brown’s original vision, we have always had great technology,” said ION CEO Tim Vail. “Now we’re supplementing our world class staff with more expertise that can help us get that technology to more customers and capture more CO₂ emissions. Steve, Ben, Jeannie, and the teams they’ll build are vital additions to our already strong core. These new people and exciting new space in Boulder combined with the tailwinds from our recent financing bring enthusiasm and commercial and investor interest at an all-time high. We are well positioned for continued growth in the years ahead.”

The announcement of these recent hires builds upon significant corporate and commercial momentum for ION over the past year.

In December 2023, it was announced that Calpine’s Sutter Decarbonization Project was selected as a recipient of the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations major demonstration program. ION is the capture technology provider, and the project is now in negotiations to build a commercial-scale carbon capture and storage project that will capture up to 1.75 million metric tons of CO₂ per year.

In February 2024, ION completed its second successful testing campaign at Technology Centre Mongstad (TCM) in Norway, where its ICE-31 technology demonstrated unprecedented deep decarbonization capabilities and emissions results. The 5-month, full-scale pilot program proved ION’s capability to achieve 99%+ capture rates at competitive energy rates with virtually zero emissions. These results clearly set ION apart from the competition in the hard-to-abate CO₂ capture sector.

In addition to the TCM campaign, ION and Calpine commissioned ION’s 10 TPD “Enterprise” Pilot facility at Calpine’s Los Medanos Energy Center in California in September 2023. The pilot began operation without delays and has continued to demonstrate extremely impressive results on a low CO₂, high O₂ NGCC flue gas for over ten months.

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