Independent techno-economic and life-cycle assessment for founders of GreenTech and carbon removal companies with a raise or an offtake agreement in the next 6 months.
You have a cost model, a carbon footprint and pilot data. Your team built them, so anyone deciding whether to fund you or buy from you will treat them as your claims until someone independent has tested them. That test usually happens in diligence, on their timetable.
After working with me you know which assumptions hold, which do not, what each one does to your headline cost and carbon numbers, and what to fix first, while there is still time to fix it.
What I look at
The Technology Scrutiny Framework tests 3 things together, because each can be correct on its own and the case can still fall apart where they meet.
Engineering. What your pilot proves about a plant at commercial scale, and what is still extrapolation.
Economics. Capex, opex and revenue assumptions under realistic changes in energy price, yield, utilisation and scale, including the downside case.
Environmental integrity. Whether your TEA, LCA and MRV use the same boundaries, and what the lifecycle numbers say about net removal rather than gross capture.
I also record which site, permit and offtake assumptions are secured and which are still assumed. I do not handle permitting or offtake negotiation.
Three ways to work together
Independent TEA/LCA Review
You already have a model and I test it. This fits best when a raise or offtake diligence is live. You receive an assumption register, a challenge log with a verdict on each priority assumption, a sensitivity summary with the downside case, a report you can hand to an investor as it stands, and a findings session with your leadership.
Scale-up & TEA Assessment
You need the economics built independently. You receive capex and opex, cost per tonne today and the trajectory to an Nth-of-a-kind plant, sensitivity analysis, a benchmark against competing pathways, a report and the live model.
LCA & Carbon Integrity Assessment
You need carbon numbers a buyer or registry will accept. You receive an ISO 14040/44 life-cycle assessment, carbon intensity per tonne removed or per unit of product, and documentation aligned with registry requirements.
Each has a fixed scope and a fixed fee, agreed after a fit call. There is no hourly billing. Most founders start with the review. Where it leaves a question unresolved, the report says so plainly, and you decide whether it needs answering and by whom.
How an engagement runs
Every engagement follows the same 5 steps of the Technology Scrutiny Framework. The Independent TEA/LCA Review works from the models you already have. The Scale-up & TEA Assessment and the LCA & Carbon Integrity Assessment also build new analysis at step 4.
1. Scope: frame the decision
We agree what the evidence has to support, whether that is a raise, an offtake agreement, a grant or the next engineering commitment, and who will scrutinise it. Then we fix the technology, system boundary, feedstock, site and maturity assumptions that the rest of the work depends on. We sign an NDA before any data changes hands.
- You provide: a 90-minute kick-off workshop, and the documents, models, pilot data and earlier studies you already have.
- You receive: a decision-framing note, a defined system boundary and commercialisation stage, a map of your existing evidence, and a design basis or process model where one is missing.
- Where you end up: your engineers, CTO and CEO work from one agreed description of the system and the decision.
2. Surface: find the assumptions that decide the outcome
I pull every assumption that carries weight out of your TEA, LCA and financial model into one register, and tag each by source: measured, supplier data, literature or engineering judgement. I then rank them by how far they move your headline cost and carbon numbers, so the effort goes on the few that matter.
- You provide: the current status of site, utilities, permits, suppliers, partners and offtake, where they apply.
- You receive: a critical-assumption register, an evidence-gap and confidence assessment, a dependency check that sorts each external input into secured, under negotiation or assumed, and a prioritised sensitivity plan.
- Where you end up: you know which handful of numbers decide the case, and which external dependencies are still assumptions.
3. Scrutinise: test the evidence independently
The priority assumptions are tested against published evidence, comparable technologies, benchmarks and my own modelling. That covers your performance and scale-up claims, what your pilot data can and cannot support at commercial scale, and the inputs to your TEA, LCA and MRV.
- You provide: answers to focused technical questions by email. There is no new software to learn and no parallel internal study to run.
- You receive: a technical and scale-up review, an assessment of your pilot or demonstration evidence, a challenge log recording your value, the independent view and the evidence behind any difference, and recommended priorities for further testing.
- Where you end up: someone with no stake in the answer has asked the hard questions before an investor or buyer does.
4. Synthesise: put the case together and stress it
Engineering, economic and environmental evidence are reconciled onto the same boundaries, throughput, energy use, plant lifetime and scale. Scenarios then test what happens when several assumptions move at once, because that is how diligence treats them.
- You receive: scenario and sensitivity analysis with the downside case and break-even conditions, and a reconciliation showing where your TEA, LCA and engineering evidence agree and where they contradict each other. In a Scale-up & TEA or LCA & Carbon Integrity Assessment, this step also delivers the full TEA or LCA, a first-of-a-kind against Nth-of-a-kind comparison and, for carbon removal, the net removal and MRV or certification-readiness assessment.
- Where you end up: economics you know will survive an imperfect year, and carbon claims built on boundaries anyone can inspect.
5. Support: make the stage-gate call
The findings are written for the decision you named in step 1: what is defensible now, what remains uncertain, and what engineering, evidence or contracting work has to happen before the next commitment. Sometimes the answer is that the case is not ready yet. Better to hear that from me than from an investor.
- You provide: time with your leadership to review the findings and choose the next action.
- You receive: the Technology Scrutiny Report, an executive brief for investors and boards, a summary of the gaps that would stop an investor or buyer committing, a staged roadmap to your next commercial milestone, and a leadership workshop.
- Where you end up: one independently challenged evidence base you can use with investors, grant assessors, customers and your board without rebuilding it each time.
Your time: roughly 4 hours of leadership time across a review, and no new documents to produce.
What if I find nothing wrong? Then you go into diligence with an independent record that the assumptions were examined and hold up.
Why independent matters
I do not design, build or sell the plant, and there is no follow-on delivery contract for me to win. The only thing I have riding on the work is that the answer holds up when someone else checks it.
Your data stays under NDA. On request, I will not work with a direct competitor for the length of the engagement plus 6 months.
Track record
Dawid has successfully undertaken 3 projects for us with 2 more in preparation now. We also will retain Dawid as an independent reviewer for third party tests being carried out.
Kenneth Flockhart, Technical Director, Changeover Technologies
- Independent techno-economic and environmental assessments since 2013 across direct air capture, CCUS, hydrogen, industrial decarbonisation and greenhouse gas removal.
- Work delivered for IEAGHG, Innovate UK, PolyCapture and The Catalyst Group.
- Research and commercial projects attracting more than £4.5m in external funding.
- Professor at the Net Zero Industry Innovation Centre, with 4,860 citations and an h-index of 39 (Google Scholar, September 2026).
Questions founders ask
“We already have a TEA and LCA.” Good. The review starts from them. The question is not whether the work is competent. It is whether anyone without a stake in the answer has challenged the assumptions underneath it.
“We don’t have enough data yet.” That is when a review helps most. It separates what has to be measured now, what can be bounded, and what does not matter for the next decision.
“Our investors haven’t asked for this.” Investors form a view of your numbers from the first deck. Finding a weak assumption before diligence means you fix it on your timetable rather than theirs.
Book a fit call
A 30-minute call to work out whether a review is the right step and what it would cover. If it is not, I will say so.