San Francisco-based Heirloom Carbon has become a hot name in the nascent capture technology sector, even sealing a deal with Microsoft to help the Windows-maker meet its zero-carbon ambitions.
"If you actually want to reverse climate change and go back to where things were, carbon removal is the closest thing we have actually removing legacy emissions from the air," he said. That will help put a dent in the between the 10 and 20 billion tonnes of carbon that the US National Academy of Sciences says has to be eliminated every year between now and the end of the century.
Going through the 2018 IPCC report, Samala narrowed in on carbon capture, a field then in dire need of innovation and investment.Direct Air Capture techniques, such as those developed by Heirloom and Swiss pioneer Climeworks, differ from systems where carbon is captured at source , such as factory chimneys.
Will Knapp, cofounder of the CCS startup Cocoon, believes it is much easier to capture CO2 directly from places it is emitted, such as factories or steel plants, than from the general atmosphere.