Direct Air Capture

“So when we were solving these problems, if we are solving it in dumb ways, like, I think, you know, a lot of the air capture systems in other ways, the direct air caption carbon systems and others in a lot of other ways that we're trying to solve climate are d…”

“What is the next generation of direct air capture look like? What is the next generation of marine CDR look like? Those are pathways that aren't going to be so big on our 20 30 timescale, but really important in 2035 by 20 40.”

“Direct air capture typically requires a continuous level of power. We've designed our system to work with very intermittent and even curtailed energy for the majority, if not potentially all, of our energy use.”

“As companies look to get to scale, especially in direct air capture, and once you get to like triple digit, or even triple digit millions, or billions of dollars of capex, debt financing, non-recourse financing is, is ultimately going to be needed.”

“A lot of direct air capture is currently in its first of a kind stage, but we do, and Climax has been able to show that now we're past that original folk valley, and now we're up to a fourth of a kind, which is still a folk, but a fourth, and this should reall…”

“The, again, sort of best case from the chemistry is something like 2.75 kilograms of CO₂ per kilogram of methane. So thinking back on a, on an MMBTU basis, you know, if you want to Get the good sort of CO₂ from the air, and we hit all our hopes and targets of …”

“I think we're just starting to enter phase two when it comes to direct air capture. We have the very first few commercial plants coming online now or just having come online, and what the market at least hopes will be a massive wave of others coming behind.”

“Orca has nominal capacity about 4000 tons. What do we mean with that? That means it's that's what the plant was designed to capture at maximum efficiency. So maximum run rate, et cetera. And there's some losses that go away from that.”

“We are of the fundamental opinion that it doesn't really work to you know, deploy in the lab or at very small scale at pilot scale, and then go from that straight to the size that is required for the plant to be profitable, because that's a huge technological …”

“The key milestone was scaling that technology by a factor of about 10 improving on the cost curve deploying more on the offtake side, so really building the market for these project-financeable offtakes and also making an improvement on the technology.”

“If you do direct air capture, that's the other nature is you have to deal with the weather, how it is, because it's quickly becoming completely uneconomical if you have to pre-treat any of your incoming feedstock, so to say, right? The air that comes in.”

“The sensitivity of the sequestration on the purity of the CO two and your ability to deliver that purity, 24, seven with all the things that happen in this type of production environment, you have to deliver really, really pure CO two doesn't really matter on …”

“We've worked really hard over the last, I would say, four years to move the market to something that will actually work for project finance. In terms of offtake. So that means long duration contracts, right, over five years plus ideally 10 years or 15 years, l…”

“Because this is another thing that I don't see a lot of companies thinking about is they're trying to sign 10 or 20 year contracts, but they're making them fixed price. I think they end up underwater at some point if they do that.”

“I think at the moment there might be a little bit too many unrealistic promises in the market, and that might also mean that some of the companies will not make it to that next stage.”

“If people are trying to secure the volumes for 2030, 30 or 20, 35, when they potentially want to actually fulfill their net zero ambitions, then I clearly see this will become more and more supply constraint.”

“There are now, I think we found a list somewhere, and it's a pretty credible list of over a 150 direct air capture startups, so there are countless mousetraps.”

“There's an extent to which I still want more mousetraps in DAC, despite I think what's going to be a pretty painful reckoning in the startup landscape, just because I think we need to find something that is truly cheap enough. If we're going to do DAC at scale…”

“However, the capabilities and the requirements to move to the next levels of scaling and to do it as quickly as possible, they move very quickly from technical insight and technical capability, particularly scientific insight and scientific capability, into th…”

“The first procurements, besides some really small individual ones for some of the early, early days of DAC, but the first procurements of this kind of new emergent market that is focused on durable carbon removal really only showed up in call it 20, 2019, 20, …”

“So the traditional way folks have gone about it was basically to build a novel material artificially. But the problem was not whether you could capture the CO two. The problem was the cost of making that material. And because the supply chains don't exist, you…”

“Yeah, so this is the first director capture facility in North America that captures and stores CO₂ from the air.”

“Direct air capture, which is there. I think it is just too energy intensive. I think it is like the current numbers are, it's three megawatt hours. Again, not taking the numbers, just too energy intensive. Right now, I really don't see a pathway to energy inte…”

“It's undoubtedly cheaper, and it could be super scalable, just given the amount of photosynthesis that takes place already in the world.”

“I think eventually investors are going to look at, do you have a credible path to getting to like a hundred bucks a ton? Of removal. And I think there's a large number of players who don't have a credible pathway to getting there, even if you make big assumpti…”

“On the acquisition side, I think the one that Climatech investors and founders couldn't stop talking about this year was Oxy's acquisition of carbon engineering at a billion dollars, so the first unicorn we've ever seen in DAC and probably carbon removal.”

“DAC is actually currently Hovering around 7000 metric tons annually globally.”

“But if we're talking about the square footage it requires to, you know, plant trees and have that carbon dioxide removed over time versus the square footage it requires, or a DAC unit might require to remove carbon dioxide in a given time, the DAC unit is goin…”

“The Inflation Reduction Act expanded tax credits for the technology, and this month the Biden administration unveiled 1.2 billion dollars in funding for hubs to support direct air capture projects, plus thirteen million dollars for 23 different R&D projects in…”

“The notice of intent last Thursday covers that sixty million of the funds will actually go towards direct your capture, but I think what's even more exciting is the Track Two CDR purchase pilot, because this is allocating thirty-five million, roughly over seve…”

“The idea of maximizing now because you're going to need the infrastructure anyway fails, I think, in one major way, which is that it's not conscious of where that infrastructure needs to go. And in a situation where you're designing linear infrastructure like …”

“Direct air capture, say, is on the order of 600 dollars a ton. A good biochar project might be on the order of 150 dollars a ton. A good biomass with carbon capture project might be between 153 hundred dollars a ton.”

“Way easier to establish additionality for something like direct air capture than for soils or improved forest management.”

“I think carbon markets and carbon trading are not going to be the thing that we thought it was going to be. I think stuff like direct air capture, again, are going to be toy projects off to the side. I don't think that those are... Toads are not, those are not…”

“If you build machines like we are doing, you can do it on much, much less area. So you are about a thousand times more area efficient. So at the same area where you can take one ton out of the air with trees, you could take a thousand tons out of the air with …”

“Like, in terms of climate effects, that market is totally irrelevant. Like, is that a market? Could you grow a sustainable business on that? Yes, sure. So you, we could have decided just to become a small, medium-sized company developing direct air capture pla…”

“And that's the same, what has had to happen in our industry, and I'm sure that will happen over the next two decades to come.”

“If you have 10 cent per kilowatt hour power, no direct air capture system is going to be anywhere near in the money, no matter what you define in the money as. If you have one cent per kilowatt hour power, then it looks really, really promising.”

“Some of the more expensive methods, like direct air capture, are gonna probably be easier to verify. And some of the potentially cheaper methods, especially those using biomass, are probably gonna be harder to verify.”

“First of all, I think geothermal could be really huge for DAC just as a side note, but that's not, like, to say that that's obviously not a alternate energy use that would go somewhere else, right?”

“Absurd, absurd, totally absurd technology that will cost, that is the, that is a staggering waste of human brain cells and capital and resources. And it's, and we should be spending at, we should always be working on the most effective, the best marginal use o…”

“The key CDR technologies, in my mind, will be direct air capture with CCS, because what CCS does is it takes the CO₂ taken by the direct air capture unit and pushes it back underground, and probably some forms of geological weathering, and it's going to be a b…”

“So, you know, those five industries are what we've identified as, you know, the areas where we think there is inevitable growth in the sort of hundreds of billions of dollars. These are industries that could easily be some of the largest industries that our pl…”

“There are plenty of them out there at industrial scales that will definitely get down into the, you know, 102 hundred dollar, you know, a ton kind of level, at which point capture becomes your backstop technology, if you will, and it will set the price point a…”

“The challenge is that it is definitionally a cost. Like, it is definitionally a cost to remove carbon. And therefore, like, creating a market around that is a challenge, which is what, you know, the EU ETS did away with that by regulating it.”