Startup Clairity raises $6.75 million to scale carbon removal system, bringing active carbon capture closer to cheaper, universally adoptable solutions

California-based climate tech startup Clairity Technology announced that it has raised $6.75 million to scale its energy-efficient and cost-effective direct air capture (DAC) solution for removing dilute CO2. DAC technology is a key carbon removal option in the transition to a net-zero energy system that works by extracting CO2 directly from the atmosphere for use as a raw material or for permanent storage.

Clairity's dilute CO2 streams can be sequestered into concrete, rocks, or products such as sustainable aviation fuels.

The process requires far less infrastructure, using readily available materials and processes and avoiding the need for massive amounts of concrete and steel required for constructing common high-purity systems.

Clairity's carbon removal solution uses a solid sorbent approach, coating honeycomb monolith grid structures with abundantly available carbonate salts, which are durable enough to be reusable for many cycles. The CO2 is bound into the salts' crystalline structure, then collected and concentrated.

DAC – expensive but effective

Clarity Technology

Close-up detail of a section of the honeycomb monolith developed by Clairity.

Since 2009, three companies have tirelessly innovated with DAC technology to remove CO2 from the atmosphere: Carbon Engineering, Climeworks, and Global Thermostat were early on the scene to address the urgency and major barriers facing DAC.

Over time, these companies and any following startups have struggled with issues regarding inefficient performance, prohibitive cost, and working out scalable deployment.

According to last year's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) climate change mitigation study https://www.ipcc.ch/report/sixth-assessment-report-working-group-3/, solutions to limit global warming must include carbon dioxide removal methods at the source, passively and directly for billions of tons of removal needed annually over the coming decades.

Clairity co-created the process with CarbonBuilt, a company using captured atmospheric CO2 for the production of concrete products, feeding CO2 directly into CarbonBuilt's process, where it chemically reacts with a special binder and becomes permanently sequestered in the finished concrete.

"The climate crisis is severe and the worsening impacts of climate change can be seen everywhere. We need solutions that can be implemented and scaled today to mitigate the worst effects of climate change in the coming years," Clairity CEO and Founder Glen Meyerowitz said.

Other DAC companies to watch

Heirloom Carbon utilizes limestone, one of the world's most abundant and inexpensive minerals, to capture and store CO2 underground or in materials like concrete through various partnerships.

"Limestone is made up of calcium oxide and CO2. When CO2 is removed from limestone, the remaining calcium oxide acts like a sponge – absorbing CO2 so it can return to its natural limestone state. Our technology accelerates this natural property of limestone, reducing the time it takes to absorb CO2 from years to just three days," the company penned on its website. "Like repeatedly wringing a sponge, we loop this limestone mineral powder through our system to continuously suck CO2 from the atmosphere – a cyclic process that not only lowers costs but also reduces how much limestone must be mined."

Mission Zero

Turning air into fuel – one promising use for captured carbon is creating sustainable fuels. Mission Zero in the UK has its modular, off-the-shelf components tested by the University of Sheffield's Translational Energy Research Centre to create green jet fuel.

Mission Zero's processing units are off-the-shelf, modular components that electrically produce high-grade CO2 supplied continuously onsite. The company's electrochemical separation consumes three to four times less energy than most thermal regeneration approaches and leverages existing technologies such as cooling towers and electrochemical water purification.

The plant was purchased for the University of Sheffield's Translational Energy Research Centre, where it will recover 50 tons of high-purity CO2 from the atmosphere using water and solar electricity generated onsite. The collected CO2 will be used in the production of sustainable aviation fuel, with the aim of certification and rapid scaling to help decarbonize UK aviation.

CarbonCapture Inc. signed a $20M offtake agreement late last year with Frontier to remove over 45,000 tons of CO2 from the atmosphere, facilitating one of the largest carbon removal purchases to date on behalf of a who's-who of buyers including Meta, JPMorgan Chase, Shopify, and Stripe to name only a few.

"Getting DAC to gigaton scale requires finding innovative ways to quickly drive down costs," said Strategy Lead at Frontier Hannah Bebbington. "CarbonCapture is doing that by cultivating a pipeline of innovative sorbents and building a modular and upgradeable capture system that allows them to swap in best-in-class sorbents as they become available."

Verdox, an electric carbon capture and removal company, has taken a different route; instead of heat extraction, a specific voltage is applied to the captured material to release the CO2. This approach allows for an efficient process without the need for heat or water.

Verdox was recognized on the 2023 Global Cleantech 100 list among top innovators across 15,000 plus nominations and was a winner of the 2022 $1 million XPRIZE Carbon Removal Milestone award funded by the Musk Foundation as part of the Verdox & Carbfix team. Phase two of the competition will see an additional $80M distributed among three winners in 2025.

"We believe carbon removal will be essential to humanity's sustainable development, but it will never be deployed at a significant scale if the required energy and cost cannot be reduced significantly. We launched Verdox two years ago on the promise of our novel electrochemical carbon capture system, which has been shown to reduce the energy penalty for capture by up to 70%," said Verdox CEO Brian Baynes.