The future of DAC requires rethinking capture and regeneration

Direct air capture is hard, expensive and difficult to scale. That said, we are going to need a scalable source of carbon if we are ever going to operate in a decarbonized world. Demand for plastics, liquid fuels and chemicals will all continue to rise. All require carbon. With today’s pathways, DAC is simply too expensive for meaningful industrial use. 

Industry analysts argue that for wide adoption of DAC, its cost needs to fall from today’s range of $600 to $1,000 per ton of CO₂ to $100 per ton or below. Even assuming substantial technological improvements, aggressive deployment rates and industrial scale, no incumbent path exists for DAC to reach $100 per ton.^,

We are clearly going to need a different approach. At Sora, we have validated a technology that can deliver DAC CO₂ at costs below $50 a ton by simply avoiding its most energetic and capital intensive steps. 

1. Pulling CO₂ from the air is surprisingly easy (and cheap) 

Years of academic and industrial research have gone towards developing a wide range of chemical tools, known as sorbents, for capturing CO₂ from the air. These include aqueous salt solutions, organic small molecules and highly engineered porous materials. These materials all have one feature in common, they form quick, strong bonds with carbon dioxide.

2. But it is quite hard to release that captured carbon 

Liberating CO₂ (thereby regenerating the sorbent) from a solution that is designed to effectively capture it under dilute conditions is an uphill energetic battle. This step requires significant additional energy, generally in the form of either heat or vacuum. It is this step that drives the cost of the entire process. 

3. Avoiding regeneration altogether allows for DAC CO₂ at industrially viable costs 

At Sora, we skip the hard and energy intensive step altogether and have developed an electrolyzer that can operate directly on our CO₂-rich sorbent. This is game changing and cuts the cost of our most expensive feedstock by more than 90%. While Sora has focused on liquid fuels, the technical approach we are pioneering can also be applied to plastics and chemicals. 

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_{1. BCG, ​“Shifting the Direct Air Capture Paradigm.” 5 Jun 2023}

_{2. BNEF, ​“Occidental’s Big Buy May Change Course of $150 Billion Market.” 28 Aug 2023.}