The Carbon Removal Power List

INTRODUCTION

Go to the website of sustainable travel initiative Tomorrow’s Air , and you will see a ‘traveller’ option, where you can pay $20 to remove carbon from the atmosphere and have it stored permanently, via Direct Air Capture (DAC) company Climeworks

That $20 accounts for 14kg of CO2. Unfortunately, a round-trip from London Heathrow to New York JFK in economy burns up 630.5kg of carbon (Source - ICAO carbon calculator).

In other words, you need to buy $900 of carbon removal to fully offset that flight, something few people would do..

Yet, carbon removal as a technology has some very high profile advocates, including in aviation.

For example, when talking to SimpliFlying CEO Shashank Nigam as part of the

Sustainability in the Air podcast, United CEO Scott Kirby said that he sees carbon removal and storage as a very promising solution.

Why, if prices are so high?

Like other advocates of the technology, Scott Kirby is banking on the technology becoming much cheaper and more scalable in the future with the right governmental policies and support:

“If we put a price on carbon today, if governments put a price on carbon around the world, carbon sequestration would grow on its own. It’s not economical today, but neither were wind and solar 20 years ago.

“But today, it’s cheaper to produce a megawatt of electricity with wind or solar, because there was government support [and] government credits to build and grow the industry.”

Let’s look at solar energy. Several decades ago it was almost prohibitively expensive. Yet, In 2020, the International Energy Agency (IEA) called Solar “the cheapest electricity in history.”

In fact, the cost of solar dropped even faster than experts had predicted.

According to the US Department of Energy, utility sector solar kilowatt costs were $0.28 in 2010. The 2020 target of $0.06 was achieved three years early, and the target is now $0.03 by 2030.

The lesson is that advances in technology combined with regulatory support can turbocharge a promising technology, especially one that’s needed to solve a mission critical problem, that of climate change.

This report looks at carbon removal, in particular the Direct Air Capture industry as well as companies making products from CO2, talks about what it is, outlines the benefits and showcases a number of players within this sector, who might be of interest to anyone working in aviation.

We’ll also give some recommendations as to how airlines can get involved, as this is a sector that’s only now starting to be explored by the industry.

Dirk Singer HeadofSustainability,SimpliFlying dirk@simpliflying.com

WHY CARBON CAPTURE?

When writing this report, I wished we could quickly scale up what some of the companies featured in it are doing x 1,000. So like Scott Kirby, at SimpliFlying we believe in carbon capture, removal and transformation solutions.

Here is why:

1 - Carbon capture costs are high right now, but this is a technology in its infancy and costs will go down with the right amount of innovation and help.

In fact, the sector recently received a boost in the (US) Inflation Reduction Act, with Time calling it “a bonanza for the carbon capture industry.”

We’ll return to the act and what it means.

2 - It’s much more efficient than reforestation (a common tool in carbon offset programmes).

In a June episode of ‘How I built this’ with Guy Raz, Climeworks co-founder Jan Wurzbacher pointed out that in the same area where you take one tonne of CO2 from the atmosphere via trees, you could have one machine taking 1000 tonnes via direct air capture (DAC).

You also don’t know how long a forest will be there for, while underground storage of CO2 is permanent

Wurzbacher estimated that to remove 1% of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere you would need the equivalent of 750,000 shipping containers. While that sounds like a lot, that’s two weeks of container traffic going through Shanghai.

3 - You can store that captured CO2 underground. Or you can turn it into a product.

One company, CarbonCure, is trying to store it in concrete that’s then used in construction. You can use it for plastics, for example Made of Air and Twelve (featured in this report) have each made sunglasses from CO2.

You can even turn it into e-fuels that will power aircraft, a number of companies featured in this report are trying to do exactly that.

WHY US LEGISLATION MATTERS

As the world’s largest economy, laws and regulations passed in the US, have a worldwide impact.

As a result, the boost carbon removal technology got from the recent US Inflation Reduction Act is significant and will be felt beyond the USA.

The US Govt tax credit for carbon storage projects now increases from $50 to $85 a metric ton, which could make the difference between many projects going ahead and not, while credits for capturing CO2 directly from the air go up to $180 a ton.

Meanwhile, last year’s Infrastructure bill already provided $10 billion for carbon capture, direct air capture and industrial emission reduction - more than the $8 billion allocated for clean hydrogen, an area which interests much of the aviation industry.

In summarising the impact, The Clean Air Taskforce says -

“Enhancements to an obscure tax credit (45Q) have created a new market that

will likely jumpstart a carbon emissions reduction and removal industry. Businesses that are savvy will take advantage of the opportunity and create thousands of wellpaying jobs in the process. Carbon capture, which was once elusive or unthinkable for so many companies, has now become tantalisingly realistic.”

Other countries are also on-board when it comes to putting funding behind carbon removal.

Last year it was announced that Saudi Arabia will be launching a $10+ billion carbon capture fund.

The Danish Government has approved $41 million in funding for two carbon capture and storage projects around North Sea oil and gas installations.

Carbon capture and storage is also a large part of the UK Government’s $12 billion plan for a “Green Industrial Revolution” announced by former Prime Minister Boris Johnson. As part of that, the Government announced the funding of 20 carbon removals projects.

CARBON REMOVAL HAS HEAVYWEIGHT CORPORATE BACKING

In addition to Governmental support, the carbon removal industry received a vote of confidence from a group of high profile corporates, which includes the world’s biggest technology companies.

In April, Alphabet, Shopify, Meta and Stripe and McKinsey made a $925 million commitment to carbon removal (20222030)l, with the creation of Frontier

So far Frontier is supporting six carbon removal projects, three in the United States, one in Australia, one in Israel and one split between the UK and US.

The mechanism to distribute the $925 million is an advanced market commitment, which industry publication GreenBiz de-

scribes as funding a horse race, where you pay for the total prize pot, but the amounts depend on where the horses place.

The article points out that one of the partners, Stripe, has been funding carbon removal projects for several years, including putting money into ClimeWorks, who operate Orca, which is (at time of writing) the world’s largest carbon removal / direct air capture facility.

This is obviously a serious, heavyweight commitment and vote of confidence by big business names, and should be another indication that carbon removal technologies are here to stay, and may go down the same path as solar in eventually being cheap and scalable.

AVIATION’S INVOLVEMENT IN CARBON CAPTURE

So far, carbon capture is only starting to be considered by aviation as a net zero solution. But already, there have been some significant announcements.

In July, during the Farnborough Air Show, Airbus signed a carbon removal MOU alongside a number of airlines, including Air Canada, Air France-KLM, easyJet, International Airlines Group, LATAM Airlines Group, Lufthansa Group and Virgin Atlantic.

As part of the agreements, the airlines have committed to engage in negotiations on the possible pre-purchase of verified and durable carbon removal credits starting in 2025 through to 2028.

Those credits will be issued by Airbus’ partner 1PointFive – a subsidiary of Occidental Petroleum and the global deployment partner of direct air capture company Carbon Engineering (who we will come back to in the report).

Airbus’ partnership with 1PointFive will include the pre-purchase of 400,000 tonnes of carbon removal credits to be delivered over four years.

Of course, for now this is only an MOU, and there are lots of MOUs and Letters of Intent when it comes to airlines and the envirotech space. However, it’s an important start.

As we mentioned in the introduction, United boss CEO Scott Kirby is very much a believer in carbon removal technology, so the US carrier is a step ahead of Airbus and its partners.

In June, United announced an agreement with Dimensional Energy, to turn carbon dioxide into SAF.

Dimensional Energy is using the FischerTropsch process – a nearly 100-year-old proven technology. And it’s worth noting that synthetic fuels are not new, and you can go back as far as WW2 to find them being made in significant quantities using Fischer-Tropsch.

Similarly, Alaska Airlines has partnered with tech giant Microsoft to collaborate on working toward the first commercial demonstration flight in the United States powered by Twelve’s E-Jet fuel.

(Image via Airbus)

Twelve’s E-Jet uses renewable energy, water, and CO2 as inputs to transform CO2 into a variety of critical chemicals and materials conventionally made from fossil fuels.

The aim is to work towards a demonstration flight using E-Jet, and to supply the fuel to address some of Microsoft’s business travel on Alaska Airlines.

Use it or bury it?

Last year, think tank Transport & Environment, which has at times taken a sceptical view on aviation, commissioned a report by the Öko-Institut (Germany) on the benefits of carbon storage vs E-Fuels -or as they put it, when it comes to CO2, should the industry “use it or bury it?”

The conclusion of the report was that carbon removal will be cheaper than the production of e-fuels, but that e-fuels might

have a better environmental impact due to it helping the industry move away from a fossil-fuels based model.

“It is not unlikely that the DACCS option is more cost-effective than the e-fuels option

“It might result in carbon lock-in and may make the transition to a post-fossil approach at a later stage even more expensive due to the persisting fossil-based capital stock and infrastructure.

“Taking into account that the difference between the e-fuels and the DACCS option ranges in 2050 between 1.0% and 2.5% of the ticket price, which can certainly be borne by passengers, it should be considered whether embarking on the e-fuels option would be more consistent with the precautionary principle as the basic rule of environmental policy.”

(Image via United Airlines)

CONTROVERSIES AROUND CARBON REMOVAL

Inevitably, when there’s a new technology or solution to reduce carbon emissions you are faced with two objections: It won’t work or it’s too impractical.

We’ve already covered the cost issue, and given the parallel of what happened to solar power becoming the cheapest source of electricity.

And / or - It’s a trick by polluters to carry on business as normal, while looking like they are doing something. This criticism usually comes from climate change activists.

In August and September there were a number of pieces taking aim at carbon removal programmes, in particular CCSCarbon Storage Sequestration.

For example, an opinion piece in The New York Times on 16 August was headlined, “Every Dollar Spent on This Climate Technology Is a Waste”

The piece was by Dr Charles Harvey of MIT and Dr Kurt House of KoBold Metals, who make the charge of greenwashing:

“Instead of spreading doubt about climate science, the industry now spreads false confidence about how we can continue to burn fossil fuels while efficiently cutting emissions. For example, Exxon Mobil advertises that it has “cumulatively captured more carbon dioxide than any other company — 120 million metric tons.”

Then the Economist in July wondered, “what if carbon removal becomes the new

(Image via Climeworks)

big oil.” This was an imaginary piece looking ahead to 2050, talking about “money from thin air.”

Finally, the New Scientist quoted a report from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA), an Australian think tank, which said that carbon capture projects were underperforming.

For example, ExxonMobil’s LaBarge facility at Shute Creek in Wyoming had underperformed by 36% in terms of capacity, while the Boundary Dam in Saskatchewan, Canada, has captured about 50 per cent less than planned.

We’ll make a few points in response:

1 - These pieces are largely about Carbon Storage Sequestration, not about Direct Air Capture (DAC). They are related, but not the same thing.

Christina Beckmann from Tomorrow’s Air summarises it succinctly as follows:

“Basically - CCS takes CO2 from the source of emission (think oil and gas production as discussed in the article) while DAC takes CO2 from the ambient air.”

Climeworks has a useful page on their website, where they explain the difference between the two:

“CCS is a technology that helps to reduce emissions at the point source because it prevents new fossil CO₂ from entering the atmosphere. DAC+S, on the other hand, is a technology that goes beyond reducing: it removes carbon dioxide from the air, which produces so-called negative emissions. DAC+S allows us to remove unavoidable or historic emissions that are already in the atmosphere.”

2 - Of course, there is understandable scepticism about anything promoted by the fossil fuel industry.

However, it’s still early days for carbon removal. It stands to reason that some projects will fail at this stage.

You could also turn some of the findings around. To take the New Scientist article as an example:

Instead of saying that ExxonMobil’s facility had underperformed by 36%, you could just as easily say that it was operating at 64% on target, and was on the road to being successful.

3 - Related to that, Edinburgh University’s Stuart Haszeldine, a Professor of Carbon Capture and Storage says a lot of these findings are too simplistic, and that carbon removal and storage programmes can work with the right mix of regulations and market incentives.

INCLUDING CARBON REMOVAL IN CUSTOMER FACING SUSTAINABILITY INITIATIVES

Other than the examples we mentioned in the previous section, most airlines currently don’t work with carbon removal firms.

But the opportunity is there, not only in carbon capture, but in rolling out customer facing initiatives. Here are two ways this could be done:

1 - Offer a carbon removal subscription.

Right now as a traveller you can buy carbon capture plans via Tomorrow’s Air. Or directly through Climeworks.

Climeworks plans start at €1, which is obviously a minimal amount of carbon removal - 1kg a month.

However this is a starter commitment, and there’s an argument to say that this €1 could be added to ticket prices, either voluntary or automatic, which together would add up to a significant commitment to removing carbon.

Obviously the messaging is important here, this is not carbon offsetting.

Carbon offsetting has the advantage of simplicity - I’ve flown X miles, now I need to plant Y trees. However, this model has of course also been an area of criticism, as it’s been likened to a church offering absolutions.

Instead, any carbon removal subscription would need to be positioned as a forward thinking investment to support a sector that is crucial if we want to meet climate targets.

Note, there is no reason why voluntary carbon offsetting couldn’t be offered side by side with this.

2 - Use products made from carbon taken from the air.

The most relevant solution is fuels made from carbon capture, something Twelve, Prometheus, Dimensional Energy, Synhelion and Carbon Engineering, among others, are doing.

The industry could also look to use sustainable concrete from companies like Carbon Cure in construction projects.

There’s even the potential to offer in-flight products made from carbon capture. New York company Air Company, for example, offers perfume, hand sanitizer and vodka made from Co2 sucked from the air

Again the messaging matters here. If using CO2 based in-flight products then it will need to form part of a larger carbon removal programme.

(Image via Air Company)

OUR POWER-LIST

We’ve picked ten companies that for various reasons have caught our eye, and that we recommend aviation sustainability heads and C-Suite executives take a look at.

Our criteria for picking them wasn’t as simple as market value or level of funding.

Rather we looked at the technology each company is using, where they are in the development cycle, the strength of the management team, the market potential and the vision.

Crucially, as we are ourselves part of the aviation industry, we also looked at it through an industry lens.

As a result, there are many carbon capture

companies we didn’t include even though they are doing great things. The reason was that there were others that we could see as being a better specific industry fit.

Finally, we’ve looked beyond just DAC, and instead at carbon removal in its broadest sense.

Air Company CarbonCure

CarbonEngineering

ClimeWorks

Heirloom

LanzaTech

Noya

Prometheus

Synhelion

Twelve

Consumer products out of air AIR COMPANY

Based in - NYC, New York Website - https://aircompany.com/

CEO - Gregory Constantine, formerly at drinks giant Diageo, and a Forbes ‘30 under 30.’ Constantine founded Air Company with Dr Stafford Sheehan, who is the company’s CTO.

In 2020, Air Company featured in Time Magazine’s best inventions of the year for “vodka, out of thin air.”

That vodka is made by taking carbon out of the air and turning it into ethanol.

Talking to Fast Company, CTO and Co-Founder Stafford Sheehan said, “We ended up targeting premium spirits because the ethanol that we were making was really, really high purity, and the place where you can recognize the benefits of that really high purity is in a really premium vodka.”

As well as vodka, Air Company has also developed CO2 based perfume and hand sanitizer. However, the next phase of Air Company’s development has more relevance for aviation. That’s because the company, which has NASA as a partner, is looking at turning air into sustainable fuel.

Though the company’s stated target market is space travel, you’d imagine that SAF for aviation would be possible if there was a buyer.

Investors have been impressed and gave the company a vote of confidence earlier this year, when Air Company raised $30 million from climate fund Carbon Direct Capital Management.

CARBONCURE

Sustainable concrete

Based in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, Canada Website - https://www.carboncure.com/

CEO - Robert Niven. Robert Niven has been in the carbon and construction industries since 2007, when he founded carbon sense solutions, a carbon management consulting firm focused on construction. He founded CarbonCure in 2011.

Buildings and construction are one of the biggest sources of carbon emissions, responsible for 39% emitted worldwide.

Robert Niven set out to do something about that when he started CarbonCure, which produces sustainable concrete, which has recycled CO2 injected into it.

As a result, the next time an airport or airline looks at an infrastructure project, they may want to look at CarbonCure.

One household name that is doing so is Amazon. According to Axios, by January 2022, CarbonCure’s contractors had used

162,000 yards of the company’s CO2 injected concrete at 13 Amazon construction sites across North America.

Breakthrough Energy Ventures, which has funding from both Amazon and Bill Gates is in fact one of the investors in CarbonCure.

Last year, CarbonCure was one of two winners of the $20 million NRG COSIA Carbon XPRIZE.

This was a global competition that took place in three rounds over 54 months. It challenged participants to develop breakthrough technologies to convert carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions into usable products — with the ultimate goal of tackling climate change.

At the start of this year, CarbonCure was also named a 2022 Global Cleantech 100 Company out of a candidate pool of more than 10,000 entrepreneurs (Carbon Engineering and Climeworks, also in this report, were likewise on the list).

70 large carbon capture plants by 2035 CARBON ENGINEERING

Based in Squamish, BC, Canada Website - https://carbonengineering.com/

CEO - Daniel Friedmann. Daniel Friedmann has been chairman of the board of Carbon Engineering since 2018 and in January of this year additionally assumed the role of CEO. Previously, he spent 37 years at satellite and robotics company MDA, including serving as the company’s chief executive for over twenty years.

Canadian company Carbon Engineering is one of the more high profile players in this market, and one with big ambitions.

Investors include Microsoft founder and cleantech supporter Bill Gates, Chevron, and Low Carbon Ventures. According to Daniel Friedmann, it was Gates who originally told him to go away and redo his plans, so that it allowed for scale.

Carbon Engineering is working closely with Occidental Petroleum via its subsidiary 1pointFive. Getting back to the point of scale, the aim is to build 70 carbon capture plants by 2035, with the first likely to be in Texas, where the aim is for it to take one million tonnes out of the atmosphere a year.

As mentioned earlier in the report, Airbus and a group of partner airlines have signed an MOU with Carbon Engineering and 1PointFive for carbon removal, while Air Canada is examining the possibility of both carbon storage and e-fuels with Carbon Engineering.

Virgin Atlantic has also signed up to be a customer of a DAC facility being built in the North East of Scotland with partner Storegga

It’s the emphasis on e-fuels, or as Carbon Engineering calls it “Air to Fuels” that should be of particular interest to aviation executives.

Carbon Engineering first had an “Air to Fuels” pilot plant that produced clean fuel in 2017, and has since been working on the solution.

Physical construction of an ‘Air to Fuels’ facility should start in 2023, with the goal being to produce 100 million litres of ultra low carbon fuel a year.

Last year, Carbon Engineering announced that it would collaborate with biotech company LanzaTech (which has an SAF subsidiary, LanzaJet) in creating Project AtmosFUEL which will investigate the feasibility of a large-scale, commercial air-to-jet facility in the UK that will likewise produce more than 100 million litres of SAF each year.

CLIMEWORKS

Has the world’s largest DAC facility

Based in Zurich, Switzerland Website - https://climeworks.com/

Founders - CEO Dr Christoph Gebald has a mechanical engineering background, having met co-founder Dr Jan Wurzbacher at Swiss academic institution ETH Zurich

To the extent that anyone outside of sustainability has heard of carbon capture, the chances are that they will have heard of Climeworks.

This is because Climeworks operates the (at the moment) largest Direct Air Capture Facility, the Orca plant in Iceland, where it works with partner Carbfix on storing the carbon into the Icelandic rock (it’s effectively turned into mineral water and pumped underground).

Right now, Orca’s capabilities are quite modest, with the potential to remove 4000 tonnes of legacy CO2 from the atmosphere every year - this equates to the emissions from around 870 cars.

However, the company’s ambitions are of course much bigger than removing the CO2 of the car fleet of a very small town. Work will soon start on a second plant in Iceland that will remove 36,000 tons of CO2 a year - by 2050, the Swiss company wants to be taking a billion tons a year out of the atmosphere.

The company is well funded with high profile backers and partners. In the Spring, Climeworks announced an equity round of $650 million. In July, Climeworks also signed a ten year agreement with Microsoft. This follows Climeworks having been included in Microsoft’s carbon removal portfolio a year earlier.

Climeworks is one of the only carbon removal companies to have a consumer product, and this is something that airline executives may want to look at (in addition to any interest in carbon storage).

Starting at €1 a month, you can become a supporter of Climeworks, though the amount of carbon stored for now with that price will be minimal. That amount can be increased to €80 a month

Sustainable travel initiative Tomorrow’s Air also offers subscriptions and one time purchases via Climeworks.

In May, Boom Supersonic, which aims to offer commercial supersonic flights powered by 100% SAF, signed an agreement with Climeworks to remove a part of Boom’s residual CO₂ emissions from the atmosphere and permanently store it underground, helping Boom achieve netzero carbon by 2025.

Wants to drastically reduce carbon capture costs HEIRLOOM

Based in - San Francisco, California Website - https://www.heirloomcarbon.com/

CEO - Shashank Samala. Formerly an entrepreneur in residence at Carbon 180, and co-founder of electronics company Tempo Automation

Heirloom has an ambitious goal of taking one billion tons of CO2 from the atmosphere by 2035.

Crucially, it intends to do that at a competitive market price. With DAC right now costing $200-$600 per carbon ton, Heirloom’s goal is to reduce that to $100 and then $50.

Right now, Heirloom has no large scale carbon removal facility, on September 2nd, the company put up a blog post asking “Where will Heirloom’s Direct Air Capture facilities be deployed.”

However, the signs are, these won’t be on the drawing board for long.

That’s because in March, Heirloom received one of the largest investments in a DAC company, with $53 million being put in by Carbon Direct Capital Management, Ahren Innovation Capital, and Breakthrough Energy Ventures, with The Microsoft Climate Innovation Fund as an additional participant.

Heirloom’s process works by exposing rocks to the atmosphere and letting them naturally react with CO2 in a process known as “carbon mineralization”.

The rocks are then heated to release the CO2, which is then captured and safely pumped underground into rock formations where it is stored permanently.

While carbon mineralization occurs over long timescales in nature, Heirloom says it can speed up the process substantially, resulting in fewer minerals, less capital expenditure, and less time needed to capture the same amount of CO2

LANZATECH

Carbon transformation - shorts to SAF

Based in - Skokie, Illinois Website - https://lanzatech.com/

CEO - Dr Jennifer Holmgren is the author or co-author of 50 US patents and more than 30 scientific publications. Dr Holmgren joined LanzaTech as CEO in 2011, having previously been VP Renewable Energy and Chemicals at Honeywell subsidiary UOP,. where she drove the development of aviation biofuels.

LanzaTech was founded by Sean Simpson in 2005 in New Zealand, he now serves as the company’s chief scientific officer.

LanzaTech captures CO2 at source, and uses it to create products. For example, in May, the company partnered with Danone totransform carbon into plastic.

LanzaTech’s press release talks about sustainable PET (polyethylene terephthalatepolyester) bottles made from captured carbon, but the uses for PET are much wider. QuotedintheChemicalEngineer, CEO Dr Jennifer Holgrem says the use cases include packaging as well as textiles, so for fashion.

In fact, at the end of last year, LanzaTechworkedwithfashionretailerZara to produce a collection of dresses made from carbon-recycled materials.

This was followed up by a second collection in the Summer, According to Dr Holmgren, “LanzaTech has the technology that can help fashion brands and retailers limit their carbon impact by recycling #carbonemissions to make fabric.”

Among other things, that makes us wonder when we’ll see the first cabin crew uniforms made out of carbon - or seat covers.

As well as Danone and Zara, LanzaTech has worked with L’Oreal on turning captured carbon from a Chinese steel mill into bottles made from recycled polyethylene, with Coty on sustainable perfume and with Unilever in producing the world’s first laundry capsule made from carbon emissions.

LanzaTech is the highest valued company in this report, in March it announced that it would be going in a SPAC deal valued at $2.2 billion, which is expected to complete in the Autumn.

Investors include ArcelorMittal, BASF, the New Zealand Super Fund, Khosla Ventures and the US Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E).

LanzaJet is also collaborating with Twelve (featured later in this report) in creating ethanol, a common alcohol used as fuel, and an ingredient in hand sanitizers, personal care, and household cleaning products.

LanzaJet

LanzaTech’s Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF) spin-off is called LanzaJet. Investors include British Airways, Mitsui Shell, ANA and Suncor Energy.

The aim of LanzaJet is to produce ten million gallons of ethanol based drop in fuels by next year. As with the core LanzaTech business, the process involves capturing emissions from industrial plants like steel mills, or from landfill sites.

The resulting fuel has an 80% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, compared to regular fuel.

(Image via Air Company)

Turns cooling towers on buildings into carbon capture units

Based in San Francisco, California Website - https://www.noya.co/

CEO - Josh Santos is ex Harley-Davidson, Tesla, Labdoor and MIT, and was one of Forbes’ “30 under 30.” Co-founder and CTO Daniel Cavero has a background in AI, robotics and mechanical engineering.

At the end of July, Forbes ran a piece making a very bold claim - “The Success Of One Company Could Just Lead The U.S. To Become Carbon Negative Relatively Quickly.”

In the piece, writer Hersh Shefrin said that it’s possible that, “within a decade a single company will be able to remove more carbon dioxide per year from the atmosphere than the U.S. emits during an entire year.”

That company is San Francisco based Noya.

Rather than building huge facilities in the desert, Noya has a different solution. It wants to retrofit cooling towers that sit on top of buildings, to take CO2 out of the atmosphere. If that works, that’s obviously a scalable and cost effective solution.

According to Noya - “The U.S. has an entire fleet of machines already combining fans, heat, and lots of water. We call them cooling towers.

“We piggyback off existing, distributed cooling tower infrastructure to keep our upfront capital costs low — as much as an order of magnitude lower than today’s most advanced, large scale carbon removal plants. Not only is it more economical, it also takes a fraction of the time!

And fortunately, it does seem to work. Last August, Noya was up and running at its first commercial site, successfully capturing CO2 from the air and regenerating it at a +95% purity, with work underway to make this number higher.

On the face of it, it looks like an ingenious solution that answers a lot of the questions around carbon capture, and it’s started to get the attention of high profile names.

In March, Shopify committed to buying 1445 tons of carbon from Noya. An investor in the company is climate change tech VC firm Aera, which also funds Twelve, who we will profile later in this report.

Other investors have included Y Combinator and Lower Carbon Capital (which again is also an investor in Twelve).

In summary, the relevance for aviation here is clear. Noya has a way to turn the cooling towers that sit on top of terminals and aviation office buildings into carbon capture units.

NOYA

(Image from Noya)

PROMETHEUS FUELS

Wants to deploy half a million modular units to turn CO2 into fuel

Based in Santa Cruz, California Website - https://www.prometheusfuels.com/

CEO and founder Rob McGinnis was one of 50 innovators at the World Economic Forum in Davos earlier this year. Before starting Prometheus in 2018, McGinnis founded nanotechnology company Mattershift as well as renewable energy company Oasys Water.

The goal of Prometheus is to make fuel from air. But it wants to do so using only renewable electricity in its processes, and for that fuel to be cheaper than the kerosene based fuels used in aviation today.

Prometheus certainly does a much better job of explaining its vision than most other companies in this space. via a visually striking and accessible brand language.

It has its own storyteller with chief creative officer Amanda R Martinez having a background as an author, journalist and playwright.

And that vision includes big ambitions. Rather than giant refineries, Prometheus’ model is to create and deploy modular “Titan Forge” units, each of which will capture 4450 tons of CO2 a year, and to deploy half a million of these around the world by 2030.

Prometheus says that the result will be the cheapest DAC cost in the world - $36 per carbon ton, as opposed to the $200+, which is the case right now.

Last year, following a funding round it said that it was valued at $1.5 billion, with investors including shipping giant Maersk and BMW.

Prometheus was also name checked by the White House last year in a SAF fact-sheet, along with a few other SAF providers, thanks to an agreement signed with American Airlines for the supply of ten million gallons of e-fuels

The other significant partnership Prometheus has in aviation is with Boom Supersonic, which wants its Overture aircraft to be 100% powered by SAF when it takes flight at the end of this decade.

As a visible company that operates in an unconventional way and with a large valuation, Prometheus has its detractors.

Earlier this year a piece in MIT Technology Review cast doubts on the company’s ambitions, claiming it was behind schedule with some experts questioning whether the technology will work.

Prometheus responded by directing us to two pieces on their website. One is an essay by CEO Rob McGinnis titled “Dude, where’s my fuel?”

McGinnis points out that solar also used to be hugely expensive and now is very cheap, and says that unlike standard DAC methods, the company doesn’t need pure CO2 as it captures CO2 from water.

Another piece on the website from this Summer talks about the report, “Making NetZero Aviation Possible,” co-authored by the Mission Possible Partnership, the World Economic Forum, the Energy Transitions Commission, and McKinsey & Company.

In it, McGinnis again differentiates between the Fischer-Tropsch method to make most synthetic fuels (which is almost 100 years old), and the Prometheus pathway.

(Image via Prometheus Fuels)

Makes fuel out of sunlight SYNHELION

Based in Lugano, Switzerland Website - https://synhelion.com/

CEO - Like the founders of Swiss DAC Climeworks, which we profiled earlier in this report, Philipp Furler came out of ETH Zurich. Meanwhile his fellow CEO and founder Gianluca Ambrosetti has a background in solar energy and nanotechnology.

Synhelion’s stated mission is to contribute to a net zero transportation sector.

Synhelion extracts CO2 from the atmosphere and, together with water and with the help of concentrated sunlight, converts it into a synthesis gas that can be used to produce jet fuel, or as the company puts it, “we turn sunlight into fuel.”

And Synhelion appears to be making progress on that journey.

The proof of concept was to make ‘solar fuel’ in the lab at ETH Zurich in 2014. A medium scale demonstration took place at the IMDEA Energy solar concentrating plant in Madrid in 2019.

Meanwhile in August, Synhelion became the first company in the world to succeed in producing syngas on an industrial scale using only solar heat as an energy source. The company successfully demonstrated this on the multifocus solar tower of the German Aerospace Centre (DLR) in Jülich, North Rhine-Westphalia.

Jülich will also be the site of DAWN. With construction having started in September, DAWN will produce synthetic liquid fuel on an industrial scale. SWISS will be the first airline to fly using the CO2-neutral solar kerosene produced there.

The German Federal Government put up almost €4 million in funding towards the plant. At the end of last year, the Swiss company also raised CHF 16 million (US 16.3 million) from investors that include Swiss KMU Partners, with major backing from Orchilla, and SMS Concast, part of the SMS group, with additional support from CEMEX Ventures, AMAG, and private investors.

The company’s goal is to reach a production capacity of 875 million litres of fuel per year in future commercial plants by 2030.

As well as producing fuel for the transportation sector, Synhelion is working with CEMEX on carbon neutral cement.

Turns CO2 into everything from sunglasses to SAF TWELVE

Based in Berkeley, California Website - https://www.twelve.co/

CEO - The company’s founders are Nicholas Flanders (CEO) who worked at McKinsey’s Cleantech practice and was CFO/COO at Levo. Etosha Cave is Chief Science officer, and also a member of the board of advisors at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. CTO Kendra Kuhl developed the core of Twelve’s technology, a reactor to turn carbon dioxide into chemicals.

Twelve was named by Fast Company as one of the most innovative companies of 2022.

Like a few of the other companies we have profiled in this report, Twelve takes CO2 from the atmosphere and turns it into products.

Twelve has even made sunglasses out of CO2 (for Pangaia), as well as the first CO2 made car part for Mercedes Benz, and the world’s first detergent made from CO2 for Tide.

The relevance to aviation is that one of those products is ‘E-Jet’ fuel.

E-Jet is made with Twelve’s carbon transformation technology, a new electrochemical reactor and proprietary catalyst that electrifies CO2 and water, which creates synthesis gas, CO + H2, which is then refined into carbon neutral jet fuel.

E-Jet is a drop-in fuel, so it can be used now, but has over 90% lower lifecycle emissions.

In 2020, the US Air Force launched a pilot program to test the viability of E-Jet. That hit a major milestone in August of last year, when Twelve successfully produced jet fuel from CO2, proving the process worked and setting up the conditions to create the synthetic carbon-neutral fuel in larger quantities.

That in turn has led to interest from Alaska Airlines, which wants to use E-Jet to reduce the climate impact of corporate travel of one of its biggest customers - Microsoft.

As part of the collaboration, Alaska and Twelve will first of all be working towards a demonstration flight using an aircraft from the Alaska fleet.

Twelve successfully raised $130 million in Series B funding over the Summer.

The round was led by VC Fund DCVC, Twelve’s Series A lead investors Capricorn Technology Impact Fund and Carbon Direct Capital Management also took part. Other investors include Breakout Ventures, Elementum Ventures, Munich Re Ventures, and Microsoft Climate Innovation Fund.

(Image from Alaska Airlines)

OTHER CARBON REMOVAL FIRMS TO LOOK OUT FOR

There are dozens of companies in this space, here are a few others to keep an eye on.

AspiraDAC is in Frontier’s portfolio, the Australian company is building a modular, solar-powered direct air capture system with the energy supply integrated into the modules.

Carbon Capture - U.S. climate tech company that has just announced Project Bison, a 5-megaton direct air capture project in Wyoming.

Carbon Infinity is working on producing modular DAC units that can be deployed at scale

Carbon Removal is building a DAC facility in Norway to capture 0.5 million tons of CO2 per year for permanent storage in offshore saline aquifers.

Dimensional Energy - Ithaca, NY based company. Seeks to make SAF out of CO2 and sunlight. Has an order from United Airlines.

Made of Air, a Berlin based company, which makes products from CO2. This has included sunglasses for H&M and carbon neutral walls for Audi showrooms.

Living Carbon is another company supported by Frontier. It’s a public benefit corporation (PBC) with a mission to

responsibly balance the planet’s carbon cycle using the power of plants.

Remora would have been on our powerlist had it been more directly related to aviation. The company makes mobile carbon capture units to be put on trucks. One device on one truck is the equivalent of planting 6200 trees a year (above video from Remora).

Mission Zero is developing direct air capture (DAC) technology that will recover highpurity CO₂ from the air. It says its process means it will incur only a fraction of the costs and energy it takes to do so today.

Puro Earth is the world’s first B2B marketplace, standard and registry focused solely on carbon removals.

Sustaera has developed a Direct Air Capture technology which it says uses renewable energy that will allow it to remove, replace, and reuse carbon at a massive scale to enable a cleaner future.

Verdox uses electroswing adsorption (ESA) platform technology, originally developed at MIT, to remove carbon dioxide from industrial emissions and the air, which it says gives 70% energy savings versus conventional approaches.

THE SUSTAINABILITY IN THE AIR PODCAST

Over the Spring and Summer, Sustainability in the Air, established itself as the must-listen podcast in sustainable aviation.

Hosted by SimpliFlying CEO and Founder Shashank Nigam, the first season featured interviews with four airline CEOs including United’s Scott Kirby and Tony Douglas of Etihad.

Season two is about to kick offonSeptember22ndwith Boom CEO Blake Scholl. Boom has partnered with a number of companies in this guide, and one of its goals is to fly with 100% Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF).

Click here to listen to season one’s interviews and for the relevant links so you can subscribe on your favourite podcast app