As fears of a warming, changing climate have steadily mounted, a new industry has begun to blossom: carbon capture, a sector filled with startups using technology to (sometimes literally) suck carbon dioxide out of the air.
The industry collectively captures about 45 metric tons of carbon annually, according to the International Energy Agency, with some projections showing that it might be able to reach 125 metric tons by the end of the decade. That number, however, remains far below the minimum of 1.2 annual gigatons the sector needs to capture to meet net-zero emissions by 2050 (one gigaton is equivalent to one billion metric tons).
Related: Microsoft signs a $200 million deal to help reduce its carbon emissions
A new startup aims to address some of the scaling issues inherent to carbon capture technology.
Spiritus, the Latin word for “breath,” officially came out of stealth with an $11 million Series A funding round in September. The company started work on its new approach to carbon capture tech in December of 2021.
How it works
The method centers around a porous, lung-like material called a “sorbent” that, when exposed to the air, traps carbon dioxide inside. The material, shaped into small balls, is placed on artificial trees in a carbon capture “orchard,” where it is exposed to the air. Once full, the balls are returned to the firm’s lab, where a low, clean-energy powered heat is applied to squeeze the carbon out before reusing each sorbent.
The carbon that is removed from the balls is then sequestered, ensuring it has been removed from the atmosphere.
The process mirrors that of the microscopic, gas-exchanging alveoli in human lungs.
Each “orchard” is made up of thousands of these porous sorbents, which trap carbon inside.
Spiritus
The method, co-founder Charles Cadieu told TheStreet, is 10 times more efficient and a tenth of the cost of other existing methods. It is additionally a far less energy-intensive process, addressing scalability in a significant way.
“Those just allow us to scale because those temperatures were more accessible in some ways than getting to very high temps, which requires a whole variety of engineering and some specific technologies or unfortunately sometimes using fossil fuels as a main input of heat,” Cadieu said.
Heirloom, for example, another carbon capture startup that has gained a $200 million investment from Microsoft, heats crushed limestone to 1,650 degrees Fahrenheit to separate and sequester carbon.
Where direct-air capture fans require energy to be running 24/7, Spiritus’ sorbent orchards are far less energy-intensive, something that allows the opportunity for greater, faster growth.
“This has been one of the Achilles’ heels of direct-air capture systems and the energy inputs that they’re requiring,” Cadieu said. “So to be able to have this ability, the path to get down to less than half of that, is a huge, huge deal.”
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Carbon capture is a public good, like a ‘sewer system’ for the world
Despite its recent growth, the carbon capture industry has faced plenty of criticism for expensive, risky methods and inherent scalability issues, particularly when some of the companies who support them tend to ignore (and even mitigate) nature’s own methods of carbon capture and sequestration.
Baked into the realities of making these methods work has blossomed an environment of carbon offsets, where one company pays another to remove carbon from the atmosphere, offsetting that company’s carbon footprint. Many big tech companies, Microsoft prominent among them, have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on carbon offsets.
Some experts have claimed that this system essentially grants companies a license to keep emitting — the appearance of reduced emissions can be achieved on paper without actually cutting back the primary sources of emission.
Spiritus co-founders Charles Cadieu and Matt Lee at the site of their first carbon removal orchard.
Spiritus
But Cadieu thinks the carbon removal industry is vastly different from the carbon offset industry — in his industry, the end result remains a trackable reduction in atmospheric carbon.
The atmosphere, he said, is “one shared resource. Therefore, anyone that’s paying to actually have (carbon) removed has a good legitimate argument to say that they are not polluting, but they are ethically using the atmosphere.”
The carbon capture industry, Cadieu said, is best described as a sort of sewer system for the shared resource of the air, and subsequently, the planet. It is, he said, a “collective good.” Over time, humans ought to be able to cut many sources of carbon emissions, but for those that society can’t cut, the carbon capture sector represents a garbage disposal of sorts.
“Carbon removal can be a similar type of cornerstone of civilization where we have some places where we can’t figure out how to stop emitting,” he said. “But if we can do this in the ethical way where those emissions that we’re making are commensurately removed, well then we just physically created the kind of garbage collection of the co2 world.”
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