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.