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(Bloomberg) — Startup Spiritus has lined up $30 million from the likes of Khosla Ventures to deploy technology that sucks carbon pollution from the air using machines.
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The Series A round also includes Aramco Ventures, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries America and TDK Ventures. The funding will allow Spiritus to speed the build out of its so-called direct air capture (DAC) pilot plant in New Mexico, according to co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Charles Cadieu.
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The facility is expected to come online in the second half of 2025 with the capability of removing 1,000 tons of carbon dioxide per year. The funding announced Thursday will also help Spiritus develop a larger-scale carbon removal plant in Wyoming, though construction has yet to begin.
Its pilot plant would capture just a small sliver of the billions of tons of CO2 the world will need to remove by mid-century to avert the worst impacts of climate change. DAC startups are aiming to be part of that solution, though the technology remains costly to operate and has yet to show it can operate at meaningful scale. The Trump administration has introduced uncertainty for the climate tech industry as it attempts to freeze funding and considers other rollbacks that would undercut deployment of next-generation technologies.
“From a federal perspective, there won’t be these massive tranches of funding realistically for direct air capture,” said Brenna Casey, an associate at BloombergNEF who covers carbon capture.
Unlike some other DAC systems that rely on energy-intensive fans to pull air in and pass it over a sorbent that captures CO2, Spiritus’s technology uses a passive approach.
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“Theoretically this should help to bring costs down pretty significantly contingent on the rest of the system,” Casey said.
The captured CO2 will be desorbed using a novel material and injected underground. Spiritus says its desorption process is also lower-energy compared to other DAC approaches, a move that could further cut costs.
Customers that have already signed up for removals from the New Mexico facility include Frontier, which made a purchase on behalf of Stripe, Shopify, and H&M Group. That deal is for 713 tons of carbon removal services.
Oil companies such as Oxy have envisioned using DAC and other forms of carbon capture to help extract more fossil fuels using a process known as enhanced oil recovery (EOR). While Aramco has explored EOR, Spiritus said it has no plans to sell its captured CO2 to help with fossil fuel extraction, though it does plan to sell it for projects that turn CO2 into fuel.
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