Direct Air Capture: Sucking CO2 from the Atmosphere
Gigaton Potential
Consistent and scaling investment in careful direct air capture deployment over the 21st century can result in annual CO2 reductions of 5 GT by 2050 and 40 GT by 2100.
For reference: in 2019, the world emitted 51 gigatons of CO2-equivalent greenhouse gases. Project Drawdown estimates we need to cumulatively eliminate 1,000 GT from 2020-2050 to keep global warming below 2 degrees Celsius.
You Might Be Interested If...
You believe that we can engineer our way out of the worst impacts of climate change
You are excited to face the challenges of scaling a high-potential, nascent technology
You want to find the treasure in the waste streams of the economy
What You Should Know
What is direct air capture?
Carbon dioxide (CO2) is a gas in our atmosphere that takes on two forms: one is relatively concentrated CO2 that comes out of facilities like power plants (point source CO2) and the other is a very diluted form in the air we breathe (direct air CO2). Direct air capture (DAC) is a process to concentrate the atmosphere’s dilute CO2. After capture, the CO2 is stored either in a container (e.g., pipeline) before using it in another application or in the earth for permanent sequestration.
DAC starts by using fans to collect ambient air from any location on the planet. This is possible because CO2 is pretty evenly distributed around the globe today. DAC plants then have to complete a 3-step cycle:
Separate that CO2 from the rest of the ambient air through some binding technology
Release that now captured CO2
Reset the binding mechanism to start the cycle again
The choice of the binding mechanism and how efficiently you can run through the cycle are the areas where the most innovation and diversity of approaches are today. Figure 1 shows the landscape of engineered capture technologies. Other natural sinks for carbon include plant life and dissolving in the ocean.
Figure 1. Engineered carbon capture technologies landscape. Songolzadeh et. al 2014
After concentration, DAC plants then have to either store or transport the CO2 to another use case. The most active form of storage today is geological storage where you pump the CO2 into oil or salt water reservoirs underground. Oil and gas companies already use this today for enhanced oil recovery projects (31.5 MT/year) and the IPCC reported a global technical potential of 2,000 GT CO2 of available storage volume this century (National Academies).
Figure 2. Map of renewable energy source potential and CO2 geological storage. IEA 2022 Direct Air Capture report.
Many companies are also trying to find use cases for the captured CO2. I’ve already mentioned the traditional use in enhanced oil recovery, but there are also projects underway to reuse CO2 in enclosed greenhouses and algae farms, synthetic fuels, plastics, minerals, and foods and carbonated drinks (link).
Scaling DAC
The International Energy Agency, as of April 2022, reports 18 active DAC projects capturing 0.01 MtCO2/year today. For DAC to get to the 5 GT/year stage by 2050 and the 15 GT/year by 2100 projected in surveys of researchers, it requires significant investment and new market creation. Those are key for DAC companies to scale their manufacturing processes to realize cost reductions and increases in deployment similar to what we’ve seen with solar and wind.
Figure 3. Constant CAGR projections to 5 GT/year 2050 and 15 GT/year 2100 from Strefler et al. 2018 .
Making DAC net climate positive
To run the thermodynamic processes associated with most DAC technologies, facilities need heat and electricity. As companies deploy new technologies and financing arrangements, it will be important to verify that the volume of emissions removed from the atmosphere are not offset by emissions to run the DAC processes. The gold standard will be finding opportunities to co-locate DAC “behind the meter” with distributed renewable energy near geological storage sites to maximize the amount of net CO2 removed.
Key Players
The majority of the market today ($2.8B in 2020 with a 9.9% CAGR to reach $4.9B in 2026) is primarily determined by technological maturity.
Major Players
The longest-running, pure-play DAC companies have small teams today, but they are farthest along in their go-to-market plan for their technology. Most are currently building pilots of increasing scale (soon to be >1 MT CO2 captured & stored).
New Technologies
Most new tech focuses on novel chemical or physical processes to improve resource use efficiency (water, heat, electricity) or pathways to low-cost service. Carbon Collect is aiming to reduce the electricity and cost needed for DAC by removing fans and instead letting the wind passively bring the CO2 to the devices.
New Applications
As the industry matures, companies are emerging to help connect DAC to new demand sources or build out a new supply chain. Infinitree is an example of using a different technology configuration (lower purity CO2) to reduce the cost of DAC for niche use cases like greenhouses while companies like Heirloom and BluePlanet are working to store CO2 in rocks via chemical reactions for permanent storage instead of injecting liquid CO2 underground.
Opportunities for Innovation
🐈 Herding cats to find revenue
Companies that have successfully piloted their technology have used government incentives (e.g., grants, 45Q in the US) and voluntary market revenue to build initial projects, commanding high price points of $600/ton to $1000/ton. For those prices to fall to the $75/ton to $150/ton range shown in DAC price forecasts, companies need to sign contracts to continue building out larger pilots and initial waves of their technology. DAC companies need to optimize siting to reduce cost, ensure sustainability benefits, and meet the needs of customers.
🌎 Ecosystem development
Even if DAC companies get costs below $100/ton on a timeline that helps address climate change, long-term storage presents serious infrastructure challenges. A single gigaton of CO2 stored per year is roughly 35 million barrels of liquid a day. For comparison, globally, we move around 100 million barrels of oil and 300 million barrels of water per day. For us to reach something like 15 GT/year, we’ll need a distribution five times the size of the oil industry – or something significantly leaner.
⚙️ Technological feasibility
As novel technologies come out to compete with the more traditional chemistries, researchers and early-stage companies will need to find ways to efficiently accelerate lab testing, piloting, and initial deployment with an eye towards scale in the future.
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