Corporate Information Toolkit

Once captured, the CO2 is separated from the solvent or sorbent using heat. The greenhouse gas is concentrated and collected, and the chemical solvent or sorbent is reused in another cycle of capture. New DAC approaches, including passive, membrane, and electrochemical systems, are in active stages of research and development.

DAC carbon removal can be used to create sustainable carbon credits, and these can be purchased to offset emissions. Industries and corporations across the globe, from Google and Amazon to Swiss Re and Alibaba are pledging to work toward net-zero operations, and DAC can help provide some of the carbon removal necessary to achieve those goals.

Additionally, there are many different innovative companies that are creating, optimizing, and tuning unique approaches to DAC. Many of the more than 30 different DAC companies in existence today are members of the DAC Coalition and are listed on this page.

The carbon credit market is booming as new carbon-negative technologies emerge, and as more groups look for ways to mitigate their environmental impacts. DAC technologies are already emerging as a crucial solution in this market, serving as efficient and quantifiable ways to store carbon permanently, generating valuable and effective credits. Investing in these technologies by purchasing DAC carbon credits early will not only remove carbon from the atmosphere now, but will speed optimization of the technology itself, supporting innovation, driving down costs, and speeding the growth and adoption of a new and crucial corner of the carbon market.

Non-point source pollution, on the other hand, originates from smaller, diffuse, everyday sources, such as passenger vehicles, agricultural practices, or melting permafrost. So little carbon is emitted at each location that capturing it would be prohibitively expensive or technologically impossible, yet nonpoint sources in total make up billions of tons of emissions per year. DAC helps make up for this gap by removing carbon from ambient air. DAC is able to remove the carbon that has already made it to the atmosphere, reducing the carbon that is already present and so restoring the atmosphere back toward a lower carbon time.

As the technology and industry advance, and as larger-scale projects are implemented, we expect the marginal cost of carbon capture and storage to decrease significantly, and early investment in DAC technology can help accelerate this transition.

DAC projects can also be placed anywhere on the globe – they do not need to be near point sources of pollution, as industrial scrubbers do, nor do they require specific climate conditions or ecosystems to function, as reforestation projects do.
Despite these advantages, DAC is not a replacement or alternative to other types of carbon removal, but rather one more valuable tool in a varied toolbox. The carbon debt is a problem without a silver bullet, and it must be approached from multiple angles. DAC is but one of these angles, one that complements and works well alongside other existing and emerging removal technologies.

While this would be an undesirable outcome, we do not believe it is a realistic objection against DAC technologies. There is value in allowing some polluters to buy the offsets DAC creates, if only while they develop more efficient technologies, infrastructure, and methods of operation (as they are incentivized to do when more efficient operations are cheaper than a future of constant carbon purchases). Offsets ensure that pollution levels during the time of transition are lower than they may be otherwise. Moreover, carbon removal will be necessary even after this transition – it would be necessary even if we ceased burning carbon immediately, globally, and permanently. The carbon that already exists in the atmosphere is having increasingly disastrous effects on the planet, and even without additional emissions, the planet would continue to warm, the oceans rise, and the climate shift. If we want to reduce these effects, we need to start turning back the carbon clock. The IPCC’s latest reports project that all routes forward which limit global warming to an acceptable degree require the use of significant carbon removal technologies – both “to compensate for residual emissions and, in most cases, achieve net negative emissions…following a peak.” We do not wish to de-incentivize significant changes for carbon polluters, but the fact remains that these changes, even under ideal circumstances, will not be enough without some form of carbon removal. It is a larger moral hazard not to develop these technologies now. DAC is one way forward; ignoring the scale of the problem is not.