When they returned, their church was gone. One year a hurricane forced his family to evacuate their town. Growing up in the southeastern U.S., Santos says he first recognized climate change as an issue by experiencing the increasing intensity of hurricanes in his neighborhood. “I don’t think any of this would be possible without the way in which MIT opened up my horizons by showing me what’s possible when you work really hard.” “I need to thank all of my MIT professors,” Santos says. Santos says the ambitious approach, which is driven by the urgent need to scale carbon removal solutions, was influenced by his time at MIT. Noya has already secured millions of dollars in presales to help build its first facilities from organizations including Shopify, Watershed, and a university endowment. The three-year old company is currently building its first commercial pilot facility, and says its first full-scale commercial facility will have the capacity to pull millions of tons of carbon from the air each year. “We can stack these boxes in a LEGO-like fashion to achieve scale in the field.” “Think of our systems for direct air capture like solar panels for carbon negativity,” says Santos, who formerly played a role in Tesla’s much-publicized manufacturing scale-up for its Model 3 electric sedan. Using third-party auditors to verify the amount of carbon dioxide captured, Noya is selling carbon credits to help organizations reach net-zero emissions targets. The company plans to power its system with renewable energy and build its facilities near injection wells to store carbon underground. The startup Noya, founded by Josh Santos ’14, is working to accelerate direct-air carbon removal with a low-power, modular system that can be mass manufactured and deployed around the world. Such technologies are still in their infancy, but many efforts are underway to scale them up quickly in hopes of heading off the most catastrophic effects of climate change. One method for achieving carbon removal is direct air capture and storage. Here we go (in no particular order).In order to avoid the worst effects of climate change, the United Nations has said we’ll need to not only reduce emissions but also remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. While not a whole lot is known about each given their early stage of development, I want to share a quick run down of 8 companies worth keeping an eye on and what makes them unique. Fortunately, the last few years have seen a wave of new companies enter the arena. The scale of the challenge (billions of tons of CO2 every year) and the urgency on which we must address the major barriers facing DAC (performance, cost, and responsible deployment) calls for new innovators to expand on the successes of these incumbents. And finally, project developer 1PointFive is deploying a million ton DAC facility in the Permian Basin based on Carbon Engineering's technology, starting construction this year. Engineering firm Black & Veatch recently received funding to develop a 100,000 ton per year DAC plant based on Global Thermostat's technology. Climeworks launched Orca at the end of last year, a 4,000 ton per year capacity DAC installation in Iceland, making it the largest commercial DAC facility in the world. Make no mistake, each of them have made significant advances in recent years, and are poised to continue their stride in the years ahead. It's hard to imagine, but these companies have been around since as early as 2009. Permanently removing billions of tons of CO2 by mid-century demands that we solve these problems ASAP.įor the last decade, three main companies have shouldered this burden and tirelessly worked through the hairy problem of using DAC to remove CO2 from the atmosphere: Carbon Engineering, Climeworks, and Global Thermostat. Not because this is the decade that DAC will actually play an outsized role in mitigating the effects of climate change - in fact, we should primarily be focused on reducing emissions, which can often be done more quickly and cheaply than DAC - but because this decade is a critical juncture for companies, researchers, and policymakers working on DAC to figure out how to do three things: I believe that this is the defining decade for direct air capture (DAC).
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