A young company from Germany can hardly get more prominent support from business.

Jürgen Hambrecht, former Chairman of the Board of Management and Supervisory Board of BASF, the former CEO of Linde and today Chairman of the Continental Supervisory Board Wolfgang Reitzle, plus Jim Hagemann Snabe, once CEO of SAP and acting chief supervisor of Siemens - all three have invested in Carbon One.

Bernd Freytag

Business correspondent Rhein-Neckar-Saar based in Mainz.

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C1, as the Berlin start-up calls itself, has set out to make the chemical industry less dependent on oil and gas.

As a pilot project, the founders are promoting what they say is a completely new process for producing methanol, one of the most important chemical raw materials.

It should no longer be produced from a mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide using a catalyst under high pressure and high temperatures.

A newly developed, highly effective catalyst not only requires less pressure and heat, it can also process "excess biomass or old plastic".

This is what makes the production of "green" methanol, such as is used in large quantities in shipping, economical in the first place.

Snabe, who as head of the board of directors also oversaw the world's largest shipping company, the Danish Maersk, can be quoted as saying: The demand for the climate-friendly alternative drive system will exceed supply for years to come.

C1's technology "will reduce the overhead of green methanol and accelerate production ramp-up."

The new production method was no longer developed with lengthy experiments, but on the basis of "quantum chemical simulations" on high-performance computers.

In this way, chemical processes could be developed that were unthinkable just a few years ago, writes Jürgen Hambrecht, who is also a member of the C1 supervisory board.

It remains to be seen whether the promise will be fulfilled.

The co-initiator and series founder Christian Vollmann speaks for the success.

In his mid-forties, he made the dating portal E-Darling, the online video store My Video and the neighborhood network Nebenan.de big.

However, chemistry is new territory for him.

According to the company, the necessary expertise comes from a team led by the scientist and inventor of the technology, Marek Checinski.

In a first round of financing, the sponsors have invested a total of 5 million euros.