The Urgent Need for Carbon Capture
Carbon dioxide (CO₂) levels in our atmosphere are at record highs, driving dangerous climate change. In 2024, CO₂ concentrations reached about 426 parts per million – roughly 50% higher than pre-industrial levels news.berkeley.edu. Cutting emissions is crucial, but experts agree it won’t be enough by itself. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says we must also remove billions of tons of CO₂ already in the air to meet global climate targets reuters.com, news.berkeley.edu. This is where carbon capture technologies come in: capturing CO₂ at the source (e.g. power plants or factories) and even directly from ambient air to achieve “negative emissions.” As one climate scientist put it, relying on carbon removal alone is risky – “Only through ambitious emissions reductions in the near term can we effectively reduce the risks… [but] CO₂ removal (CDR) could help slow warming” reuters.comreuters.com. In short, we need carbon capture and removal alongside emissions cuts, and recent breakthroughs are making these technologies more viable.
Why Carbon Capture? Hard-to-abate industries (cement, steel, energy) still emit large CO₂ volumes. Carbon capture can scrub CO₂ from their exhaust, preventing it from reaching the air. For example, cement production alone causes ~7–8% of global CO₂ emissions, and capturing those “process emissions” was long deemed very difficult ccsnorway.com. Meanwhile, direct air capture (DAC) systems can pull the dilute CO₂ in open air (about 0.04% concentration) – an enormous challenge, but essential if we aim to lower the CO₂ already accumulated in the atmosphere news.berkeley.edu. “Direct air capture is being counted on to reverse the rise of CO₂ levels… Without it, we won’t reach the goal of limiting warming to 1.5 °C,” UC Berkeley’s Climate Change Center noted, summarizing IPCC findings news.berkeley.edu.
Until recently, carbon capture was expensive, energy-intensive, and mostly limited to pilot projects. Traditional capture uses liquid amines (chemicals that bind CO₂) in large scrubber towers, which work for concentrated flue gases but consume lots of energy – and they aren’t efficient for low CO₂ levels like air news.berkeley.edu. In 2024–2025, however, scientists and engineers worldwide have unveiled new structures and technologies that promise to make CO₂ capture dramatically more efficient, affordable, and scalable. From cutting-edge sponge-like materials that soak up CO₂ to massive new plants that store CO₂ by the thousands of tons, these innovations are accelerating the race to clean our atmosphere.
Below, we explore the latest breakthroughs in CO₂ capture – including advanced materials (metal-organic frameworks, covalent organic frameworks, sorbents), novel processes (from high-temperature capture to solar-powered DAC), and major projects and initiatives around the globe. We also include insights from leading scientists and climate experts on what these developments mean for the fight against climate change.
Advanced Materials for CO₂ Capture: MOFs, COFs and Sorbents
A major revolution in carbon capture is coming from materials science. Researchers have created new porous solids with astonishing abilities to grab CO₂ molecules. Two star players are metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) and covalent organic frameworks (COFs) – crystalline materials with nanoscopic pores that act like high-surface-area sponges for gases. These frameworks can be tailor-made with chemical groups that latch onto CO₂, offering huge improvements over traditional liquid amine filters energiesmedia.comatoco.com.
- MOFs (Metal-Organic Frameworks): MOFs consist of metal atoms connected by organic linkers, forming an open lattice with an internal surface area so large that “just one gram holds the equivalent surface area of a football field” energiesmedia.com. Scientists can decorate MOF pores with functional groups (like amines or other reactive sites) to selectively capture CO₂. MOFs have been studied for CO₂ capture for over a decade, but new formulations are pushing performance to new heights. For example, in late 2024 a UC Berkeley team led by Prof. Jeffrey Long discovered a MOF that can capture CO₂ from hot flue gas – at 300 °C, far above the limits of conventional materials news.berkeley.edu. This MOF, known as ZnH-MFU-4𝓁, uses zinc hydride (ZnH) sites in its pores instead of amines, and these proved remarkably stable at high temperatures news.berkeley.edu. “Our discovery is poised to change how scientists think about carbon capture. We’ve found that a MOF can capture CO₂ at unprecedentedly high temperatures… previously not considered possible,” said Dr. Kurtis Carsch, co-author of the study news.berkeley.edu. The material achieved over 90% CO₂ capture in simulated exhaust (a level termed “deep capture”), even at ~300 °C, with capacity comparable to the best amine-based sorbents news.berkeley.edu. This is a game-changer for industries like cement and steel, where flue gases often top 200–400 °C news.berkeley.edu. Instead of installing complex cooling systems to use conventional capture, such high-temperature MOFs could one day be integrated right into smokestacks. As Prof. Long noted, “This work shows that with the right functionality – here, zinc hydride sites – rapid, reversible, high-capacity capture of CO₂ can indeed be accomplished at high temperatures such as 300 °C” news.berkeley.edu. Researchers are now exploring variants of this MOF and tuning its metal sites to target other gases or boost capacity even further news.berkeley.edu.
- COFs (Covalent Organic Frameworks): COFs are like MOFs but without metal – they are made entirely of light elements (C, H, N, O) linked by strong covalent bonds. This can make them more robust against certain conditions. In October 2024, a team led by Prof. Omar Yaghi (the inventor of MOFs/COFs) and Prof. Laura Gagliardi unveiled COF-999, a new CO₂-capturing COF that has stunned researchers with its performance pme.uchicago.edu. COF-999 is a porous lattice whose hexagonal channels are “decorated with polyamines” – essentially, long chains of amine groups grown inside the pores pme.uchicago.edu. These amines act like molecular hooks for CO₂. In tests at UC Berkeley, just a small sample of COF-999 was able to scrub CO₂ out of ambient air completely. “We passed Berkeley air – just outdoor air – into the material to see how it would perform, and it was beautiful. It cleaned the air entirely of CO₂. Everything,” Prof. Yaghi reported news.berkeley.edu. According to the researchers, 200 grams of COF-999 (about half a pound) can capture 20 kg of CO₂ per year, roughly the amount a mature tree absorbs news.berkeley.edu. Importantly, COF-999 is extraordinarily stable: it showed no degradation over 100 cycles of capturing and releasing CO₂ pme.uchicago.edu. “It is very stable both chemically and thermally, and can be used for at least 100 cycles,” said Prof. Gagliardi pme.uchicago.edu. This durability solves a big problem – many earlier materials would break down after repeated use, especially due to water or contaminants in air. COF-999’s backbone is built from olefin (carbon-carbon) bonds which are among the strongest in chemistry news.berkeley.edu Unlike some MOFs that fell apart in humid air or basic conditions, this COF shrugs off water, oxygen, and other gases news.berkeley.edu. “Trapping CO₂ from air is very challenging – you need high capacity, high selectivity, water stability, low regeneration temperature, scalability… It’s a tall order,” Yaghi explained, “This COF has a strong backbone, requires less energy, and we’ve shown it can withstand 100 cycles with no loss of capacity. No other material has been shown to perform like that” news.berkeley.edu. In fact, Yaghi called COF-999 “basically the best material out there for direct air capture” to date news.berkeley.edu. The CO₂ uptake is up to 2 millimoles per gram of sorbent, putting it among the top performers in solid sorbents news.berkeley.edu. And because it releases CO₂ when heated to only ~60 °C (140 °F), it could potentially use low-grade heat sources for regeneration news.berkeley.edu. The team is already using AI techniques to design even better frameworks, aiming for materials that might capture “twice as much CO₂” before needing regeneration pme.uchicago.edu. Such AI-driven discovery is a growing trend: for instance, researchers at University of Illinois Chicago and Argonne National Lab recently used a computational framework to screen 120,000 hypothetical MOF structures and identify promising ones for CO₂ capture energiesmedia.com. Yaghi’s lab has also spun off a startup, Atoco, to commercialize these reticular materials for carbon capture.
- Solid Sorbents & Other Materials: Beyond MOFs and COFs, a variety of new solid sorbents are being tested. These include modified zeolites, porous polymers, ion-exchange resins, and even bio-inspired materials. Many are functionalized with amine groups to chemically bind CO₂. The goal is to achieve high capacity and selectivity for CO₂ while requiring less energy to regenerate than liquid amine solutions. Some startups are exploring enzyme-based sorbents or electrochemical CO₂ capture (using electricity to trigger CO₂ release instead of heat). Others, like Heirloom Carbon in the U.S., take a different approach: using naturally occurring minerals. Heirloom spreads out calcium oxide (derived from limestone) which passively absorbs CO₂ from air by reverting to calcium carbonate, then heats it to release pure CO₂ and regenerate the oxide. This mineral looping approach leverages cheap, abundant materials (basically accelerated limestone weathering). In 2023–2024 Heirloom attracted major investment to scale up – raising over $150 million – and is building its first commercial facilities businesswire.com, heirloomcarbon.com. While slower than fan-driven systems, mineral DAC can be low-cost and runs on heat; Heirloom claims it can reach <$100/ton removal costs at scale. Meanwhile, membranes for CO₂ capture have seen incremental improvements, though they mainly work for concentrated gases. Researchers are also developing hybrid sorbents (for example, binding enzymes or liquid-like materials onto solid supports) to combine the best traits of each. The landscape of materials is rapidly expanding, aided by AI design and high-throughput testing. As one energy media outlet noted, “sophisticated metal-organic frameworks… function like molecular sponges”, and when combined with smart process engineering (like vacuum swing cycles), new systems have demonstrated up to 99% CO₂ removal in lab tests – far above the 50–90% typical of older technology energiesmedia.com. In short, advanced materials are enabling carbon capture to be more efficient (grabbing a higher fraction of CO₂, >95–99% in some cases) while using less energy. For example, one novel MOF filter achieved the same CO₂ capture rate with about 17% less energy and 19% lower costs compared to conventional amine systems energiesmedia.com. All these gains are critical, because lower energy use means cheaper operation and a smaller climate footprint for the capture process itself.
Innovative CO₂ Capture Processes and Synergies
In tandem with new materials, engineers are reinventing how CO₂ is captured and released, making the process more practical. Traditional carbon capture often uses temperature or pressure swing adsorption – you expose a sorbent to gas to let it adsorb CO₂, then change conditions (heat it up or lower the pressure) to make it release the CO₂ for storage. New techniques are improving this cycle:
- Moisture-Swing & Water Harvesting Synergy: A breakthrough idea in 2024 was to use water vapor to assist CO₂ desorption. In a paper published in Nature Communications (Nov 2024), researchers showed that adding a burst of humidity can dramatically reduce the energy needed to regenerate DAC sorbents nature.com. Their method captures both water and CO₂ from air using a solid amine sorbent; then, at around 100 °C, they introduce concentrated water vapor which effectively pushes the CO₂ off the sorbent. The process yielded 97.7% pure CO₂ (ready for storage or utilization) and simultaneously produced fresh water, all without needing vacuum pumps or high-pressure steam boilers nature.com. In fact, a simple in-situ vapor purge was enough to recover 98% of the captured CO₂ with about 20% less energy input nature.com. Even more impressively, they demonstrated a prototype powered entirely by solar heat, showing the potential for DAC units that run on renewable energy in remote areas nature.com. This “distributed DAC” concept – using sunlight and ambient moisture – could enable affordable carbon removal in water-scarce regions while co-producing water. It’s a clever twist on the problem: water is usually seen as a contaminant in CO₂ capture (humid air makes many sorbents less effective), but here water becomes a feature to aid release of CO₂.
- Energy-Efficient Regeneration: Another focus is squeezing more efficiency out of the CO₂ release step. One example is heat integration. At the world’s first cement-plant carbon capture project in Norway (discussed later), engineers implemented a Carbon Capture Heat Recovery system: waste heat from the CO₂ compressor is recycled to generate steam that helps drive the amine scrubber, supplying about one-third of the heat needed for regeneration man-es.com. By re-using heat that would otherwise be wasted, the system significantly cuts the energy penalty of capture man-es.com. Digital optimization of the process also shortened startup times and eliminated some unnecessary components, making the system more flexible in operation man-es.comman-es.com. Similarly, many new capture systems use vacuum or pressure swing adsorption with advanced sorbents to avoid heating altogether: they pull a vacuum to release CO₂ from the sorbent at ambient temperature, saving energy. Some designs alternate between two or more sorbent beds, so one is capturing while the other is regenerating, ensuring continuous operation (this is how Climeworks’ DAC modules work, using low-pressure steam or vacuum to regenerate their filters).
- Electrochemical and Catalytic Approaches: Outside of heat/pressure swings, companies are innovating with electricity-driven CO₂ capture. For instance, an MIT spinoff called Verdox is developing electro-swing adsorption, where applying a voltage changes a material’s affinity for CO₂ – in effect, you “charge” the sorbent to pick up CO₂ and then discharge it to drop the CO₂ off, without significant heating. This could be powered by renewable electricity and scaled modularly. Other researchers are adding catalysts to solvent-based systems to lower the energy required for CO₂ release (e.g. carbonic anhydrase enzymes or metal catalysts that help break the CO₂-amine bond at lower temperatures). While these approaches are mostly in R&D, they represent a promising frontier to cut the energy cost of capture by using smarter chemistry instead of brute-force heat.
- Hybrid Systems (CCUS): Some new setups combine CO₂ capture with immediate utilization to improve economics. For example, designs exist for direct air capture to fuels, where CO₂ pulled from air is fed into a reactor (with green hydrogen) to make synthetic fuels. There are pilot projects coupling DAC units to fuel synthesis or to concrete production (mineralizing CO₂ into building materials). In one notable project, Carbon Engineering’s DAC technology will be paired with Air Company’s fuel synthesis in a proposed plant to make jet fuel from atmospheric CO₂. Another hybrid concept is BECCS (bioenergy with CCS), where biomass power plants capture their CO₂ emissions – achieving net-negative emissions since the CO₂ came from atmospheric carbon fixed by the plants. Such innovations are still nascent but could create revenue streams (fuels, products) that offset the costs of capture, helping scale the technology.
Overall, the theme is efficiency and integration: making CO₂ capture units more like smart machines that harvest CO₂ using minimal energy, often taking advantage of natural processes (like water cycling, waste heat, or renewable power). These process breakthroughs, combined with the advanced materials, are yielding record-breaking performances in labs and early demos. For instance, using a custom MOF filter and a vacuum-swing cycle, one team recently hit 99% CO₂ removal in lab tests while using ~17% less energy than older methods energiesmedia.com, energiesmedia.com. All these improvements inch us closer to the dream of cost-effective carbon capture at scale.
Carbon Capture at the Source: Cleaning Up Industries
Capturing CO₂ from point sources – such as power plants, factories, and refineries – is a critical piece of climate mitigation. These sources produce CO₂ at high concentration and volume, so capturing here can prevent large emissions from ever reaching the air. Several major developments in 2024–2025 have boosted point-source carbon capture:
- Cement & Steel – First Full-Scale Projects: In early 2025, Norway’s Longship carbon capture and storage project marked a historic milestone: the Brevik CCS facility became the world’s first full-scale CO₂ capture plant on a cement factory ccsnorway.com. After completing construction in late 2024, Brevik CCS began capturing CO₂ from Heidelberg Materials’ cement plant in Brevik, Norway. By May 2025 it had already safely captured its first 1,000+ tons of CO₂ during start-up tests ccsnorway.com. Once fully operational, it will capture 400,000 tons of CO₂ per year, eliminating about 50% of the plant’s emissions man-es.com. This CO₂ is liquefied on site and shipped to a permanent storage reservoir under the North Sea as part of the Northern Lights project ccsnorway.com. This is a breakthrough for heavy industry – as Gassnova (Norway’s CCS agency) stated, “The cement sector accounts for 7–8% of global CO₂ emissions… Capturing process emissions from this industry has long been considered highly challenging. The fact that Brevik CCS is now capturing CO₂ in practice is a breakthrough… technologically and industrially” ccsnorway.com. It proves that even “hard-to-abate” industrial CO₂ can be captured at scale. Next in line, a Norwegian waste-to-energy plant in Oslo is set to come online with CO₂ capture (~400k tons/year) in 2026, further demonstrating CCS in diverse sectors.
- High-Temperature Capture for Industry: One big barrier for industries like steel and cement was that their exhaust is too hot for conventional CO₂ scrubbers (which need gases cooled to ~40–60 °C). Cooling those gases costs energy and water, hampering adoption news.berkeley.edu. The new zinc hydride MOF from UC Berkeley (mentioned earlier) directly tackles this: it captures CO₂ at 300 °C, typical of cement/steel flue streams news.berkeley.edu. Under tests simulating real exhaust (20–30% CO₂, with other gases present), this MOF snared over 90% of CO₂ even at furnace-like temperatures news.berkeley.edu. Such materials could enable retrofit of capture systems on industrial furnaces without adding large coolers. As Dr. Carsch noted, it opens “new directions in separation science” – designing sorbents that operate in extreme conditions news.berkeley.edu. For now, most point-source capture projects still use improved amine solvents or ammonia-based capture, but these too are being advanced. China, for instance, announced in 2024 that it will pilot carbon capture at several coal power plants by 2027, alongside trials of co-firing biomass and ammonia to cut emissions spglobal.com. Chinese engineers have developed their own solvent-based capture systems and even membrane contactors for power plant flue gas. As policy support grows (China’s 2024 guidelines added CCUS into its official decarbonization roadmap climateinsider.com), we expect to see large-scale capture demonstration units on coal and gas plants in Asia soon.
- Natural Gas Power with CCS: In the U.S. and UK, plans are advancing to build the first gas-fired power plants with full carbon capture. In Britain’s Teesside region, the Net Zero Teesside project aims to equip a new gas power plant with CCS by late this decade, sending CO₂ into offshore storage in the North Sea. In the U.S., NET Power (an American startup) has developed an Allam-cycle power plant that inherently produces a pure CO₂ stream by combusting natural gas with pure oxygen in a CO₂ medium – essentially a power cycle that outputs liquid CO₂ ready for sequestration. A 300 MW NET Power plant is expected to go online in Texas by 2026, potentially becoming the first zero-emission gas power facility of its kind. These integrated designs could make clean power while capturing nearly 100% of produced CO₂.
- Cheaper Solvents and Modular Systems: A number of companies are working on incrementally better point-source capture tech – for example, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and Aker Carbon Capture have both deployed improved amine solvent systems that cut energy use by ~30% compared to older amines, thanks to proprietary chemistry that binds CO₂ just as tightly but releases it more easily. Modular capture units (skid-mounted) are being marketed that can capture, say, 30–100 tons of CO₂ per day from small industrial emitters (like ethanol plants or cement kilns) without massive infrastructure. These smaller units can be replicated to scale up capacity. In Japan, the government set a 2030 goal to capture 6–12 million tons of CO₂ per year (including from industry) and is funding R&D into next-gen solvents and adsorption methods iea.org. The drive is to make carbon capture plug-and-play for many facilities, rather than bespoke mega-projects each time.
Overall, point-source carbon capture in 2024–2025 is transitioning from pilot stage to real projects that intercept CO₂ from industrial operations. With first-of-a-kind plants like Brevik proving it can be done, the focus is now on lowering cost and energy use – where the new materials and processes will play a big role. The ultimate vision is that in the near future, a coal plant or a cement factory could bolt on a modular capture system filled with advanced sorbents (maybe MOF pellets or similar), which can strip out >90% of CO₂ even from hot, dirty exhaust, and then either recycle that CO₂ into products or send it safely underground. As these solutions take hold, they can substantially shrink the carbon footprint of essential industries during the transition to cleaner alternatives.
Direct Air Capture: Pulling CO₂ Out of Thin Air
While point-source capture prevents new emissions, Direct Air Capture (DAC) aims to actually reduce the CO₂ already in the atmosphere. DAC is often compared to an “atmospheric vacuum cleaner” – a daunting task given CO₂ is only ~0.04% of air. But 2024–2025 saw DAC make tangible progress, with new plants coming online and better sorbents making the process more feasible.
Scaling Up DAC Facilities: In May 2024, the Swiss company Climeworks switched on the world’s largest DAC plant to date, named Mammoth, in Iceland climeworks.com. Mammoth is about 10 times larger than Climeworks’ previous Orca plant. Once fully operational, its 72 modular CO₂ collectors will capture up to 36,000 tons of CO₂ per year from the air climeworks.com. The plant runs on Iceland’s renewable geothermal energy; after capture, the CO₂ is handed off to Carbfix, an Icelandic partner, which injects it deep underground where it mineralizes into stone climeworks.com. Mammoth started by installing 12 of its collector units in 2024 and has begun “capturing its first CO₂”, with completion expected by end of 2024 climeworks.com. Climeworks’ co-CEO Jan Wurzbacher called it “another proof point in our scale-up journey to megaton capacity by 2030 and gigaton by 2050”, highlighting that the company is gaining invaluable real-world experience on how to optimize DAC at larger scales climeworks.com. Indeed, Climeworks has already logged seven years of field operation and processes 200 million data points daily from its plants to refine performance climeworks.com. The lessons from Mammoth will feed into even bigger projects: Climeworks is part of three proposed “megaton” DAC hubs in the United States, all of which were selected in 2023 by the U.S. Department of Energy for initial funding climeworks.com. The largest of those, Project Cypress in Louisiana, was granted $50 million in early 2023 to kickstart engineering; it’s envisioned to capture 1 million tons of CO₂ per year once built climeworks.com. These U.S. DAC hubs aim to leverage abundant renewable energy and geologic storage to scale DAC dramatically.
The U.S. in particular is betting big on DAC. In 2022, the government earmarked $3.5 billion for regional DAC hubs. By late 2024, the Department of Energy launched a fresh $1.8 billion funding round to support up to 9 new DAC facilities, ranging from mid-sized (capture 2,000–25,000 tons/year) to large (≥25,000 tons/year), plus “hub” infrastructure to connect them to storage or usage sites energy.gov. This program explicitly seeks “transformational” DAC technologies and will help promising designs bridge the gap from pilot to commercial scale energy.gov. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm noted that widespread deployment of DAC will be key for U.S. climate goals and a new clean industry. Several high-profile projects are already moving: Occidental Petroleum’s 1PointFive subsidiary (in partnership with Carbon Engineering) received an award of up to $500 million from DOE in 2024 to build a DAC plant in South Texas 1pointfive.com. The initial $50M will fund engineering and equipment for a plant designed to capture 500,000 tons of CO₂ per year from air, with plans to scale to 1 million tons/year and eventually up to 30 million/year on that site 1pointfive.com. “Large-scale DAC is one of the most important technologies to help organizations and society achieve net zero,” said Occidental’s CEO Vicki Hollub, lauding the DOE’s support and expressing confidence in delivering “CO₂ removal at climate-relevant scale” 1pointfive.com. The South Texas DAC hub will use Carbon Engineering’s high-temperature DAC process (which uses potassium hydroxide solutions and giant contactors to absorb CO₂, then regenerates a pure CO₂ stream via calcination). Notably, the site at King Ranch, TX, has underground saline formations that can store up to 3 billion tons of CO₂, allowing decades of operation 1pointfive.com. By coupling capture and storage in one locale, it will simplify logistics and could become a blueprint for future DAC farms.
Global Participation: DAC is not just a U.S./Europe endeavor. In July 2024, China announced that “CarbonBox”, its first homegrown DAC module, passed reliability trials news.cgtn.com. Developed by Shanghai Jiao Tong University and the state-owned CEEC, CarbonBox is a shipping-container-sized unit that can capture over 100 tons of CO₂ per year from air, with a stated capture efficiency of 99% news.cgtn.com. It’s reportedly Asia’s largest DAC module so far, and multiple units could be deployed in a modular fashion to reach million-ton scales annually news.cgtn.com. Each CarbonBox unit, about the size of a standard container, can be built and tested in a factory and then shipped to site – a very similar approach to how Climeworks or Carbon Engineering envision modular DAC deployment. China’s interest in DAC dovetails with its huge renewable energy capacity, which could power these systems. Elsewhere, startups in Canada, Australia, and the Middle East are entering the fray. For instance, CarbonCapture Inc. in the U.S. is developing modular DAC units using MOF sorbents and has a project in Wyoming to use renewable energy and mineral storage. In Kenya, a company called Octavia Carbon aims to build Africa’s first DAC plant (and was selected as an XPRIZE finalist) leveraging geothermal energy from the Rift Valley. The field is becoming truly global, with knowledge-sharing through efforts like the Mission Innovation “Carbon Dioxide Removal” initiative and the XPRIZE competition.
Breakthrough Sorbents for DAC: We’ve already discussed COF-999, the new champion sorbent for DAC, which “cleaned the air entirely of CO₂” in tests news.berkeley.edu. Materials like that will be central to improving DAC. When Climeworks started a decade ago, it used commercial sorbent filters (solid supported amines) that captured a few tens of milligrams of CO₂ per gram of filter. New MOFs and COFs can capture hundreds of milligrams per gram, potentially an order-of-magnitude jump in capacity. This means smaller, more efficient DAC units. The stability of COF-999 in humid air also addresses a big pain point – previous DAC sorbents often degraded due to moisture or required pre-drying the air (which wastes energy) nature.com. With water-tolerant sorbents like COF-999, DAC units can operate in real-world outdoor air without extensive pretreatment. Another promising angle is aiming for lower-temperature regeneration. Some new sorbents can be regenerated at 80–100 °C, which means waste heat or solar thermal could drive the DAC cycle (as the Nature study with water-vapor purge demonstrated at ~100 °C nature.com). This avoids burning extra fuel to provide heat, making the net carbon balance more favorable. Several research groups are also exploring direct air capture with metal oxides that release CO₂ when electrochemically reduced, offering an alternative to thermal cycling.
Cost and Energy Trajectory: Historically, DAC was very energy intensive – early Climeworks units needed ~2,000 kWh of heat plus 500 kWh of electricity per ton of CO₂, and costs were on the order of $600–$1000 per ton. The new technologies aim to cut this dramatically. Climeworks hasn’t disclosed Mammoth’s exact numbers, but they claim each generation of plant is improving. Carbon Engineering’s approach (high-temp chemical) estimates an energy use around 8 GJ (2,200 kWh) of natural gas per ton and cost ~$250/ton in their first large plant, with potential to drop below $150 with scale. With materials like COF-999 and improved processes, some researchers project that DAC could get below $100 per ton within a decade – a key benchmark for mass deployment, since that’s roughly the cost at which pulling carbon from air becomes a viable climate solution alongside other measures. Government support is helping push costs down the learning curve: the U.S. 45Q tax credit now offers $180 per ton for CO₂ removed from air and stored, providing an incentive for early projects. In the voluntary carbon market, corporations like Microsoft, Stripe, and Shopify have poured funding into DAC via advance purchase agreements (through initiatives like Frontier Climate), paying premium prices now to help companies scale up and drive down future costs.
Notably, Microsoft in 2023 agreed to purchase 315,000 tons of CO₂ removal over 10 years from Heirloom and CarbonCapture Inc., a strong vote of confidence in DAC tech. And in 2024, the global aviation sector, through the Jet Zero initiative, started investing in DAC as a source of carbon credits to offset air travel emissions (United Airlines’ sustainability fund, for example, put money into a future DAC plant). All of this signals that direct air capture, once a sci-fi concept, is fast becoming an industry. “DAC in particular is not just a concept, but a tangible industry,” a report on Climeworks’ 2023 DAC Summit noted climeworks.com. Still, the scale needed is enormous – some studies suggest billions of tons per year of removal by mid-century to meaningfully limit climate change reuters.com. We are at the kiloton per year stage now, so a 1,000x or 1,000,000x scale-up is the grand challenge ahead. The 2025 XPRIZE for Carbon Removal is set to award $50 million to teams that can demonstrate viable paths to scale 1,000+ tons/day removal, emphasizing how urgent and large the need is.
Government and Private Initiatives Driving Progress
Recognizing the importance of CO₂ capture, governments and industries worldwide launched major initiatives in the past two years:
- United States – “Carbon Capture Moonshot”: The U.S. has emerged as a leader in funding carbon capture and removal. Beyond the DAC hub program ($3.5B) mentioned, the Department of Energy’s Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management is investing in point-source carbon capture too – for example, R&D into next-gen capture for gas power plants and industrial facilities, and pilots like Project Cypress will also capture from an ethanol plant in addition to DAC. In 2024 the DOE also announced $2.6B for expanding CO₂ transport and storage infrastructure (e.g. pipelines and storage wells) efifoundation.org, since capturing CO₂ is only useful if you can safely sequester or utilize it. The Biden Administration’s broader climate law (Inflation Reduction Act) significantly boosted the 45Q tax credit (now up to $85/ton for point-source CO₂ stored, and $180/ton for DAC CO₂ stored), which has spurred a wave of planned carbon capture projects in power, ethanol, and industrial sectors as companies seek to earn credits. For instance, multiple gas power stations in Louisiana and California are now considering adding capture units to claim 45Q. The government also continues to support enhanced oil recovery (EOR) with CO₂ – while controversial, CO₂-EOR (injecting captured CO₂ into oil fields to boost oil production) does store some CO₂ and can provide revenue to offset capture costs. Some of the Texas DAC hub’s CO₂ may initially go to EOR. Additionally, the U.S. is funding storage hubs (like saline formations in the Gulf Coast and Midwest) that can take CO₂ from many capture sites. All these moves are creating an ecosystem for carbon management.
- Europe – Policy and Projects: The EU and UK are also heavily investing in carbon capture, with a focus on industrial decarbonization. The UK Government in 2023 selected two industrial clusters (Humber and Liverpool Bay) as Track-1 CCUS clusters to receive funding and support. These clusters plan to equip multiple factories and power plants with CO₂ capture by around 2030, linked to shared CO₂ pipelines leading to offshore storage in the North Sea. Projects include the Drax bioenergy with CCS (BECCS) plant – aiming to capture 8 million tons/year from a biomass power station – and Net Zero Teesside power station with CCS. The EU’s Innovation Fund has granted money to several CCS projects, like a carbon capture unit at a Dyneema factory in the Netherlands and DAC projects involving Climeworks and Carbfix in Iceland (which helped Orca and Mammoth get built) climate.ec.europa.eu. In 2024, the EU also proposed a binding target to remove 5–10% of emissions via CDR by 2040, essentially mandating that member states deploy things like DAC or reforestation to take CO₂ out of the atmosphere climeworks.com. Norway, aside from Longship, is planning “Longship 2” to expand CO₂ infrastructure and possibly add more capture sites (like hydrogen production with CCS). And across Europe, numerous pilot plants are underway – from a Swiss plant capturing CO₂ from a waste incinerator’s flue gas, to a Spanish project testing new membranes to capture cement plant CO₂. Importantly, Europe is developing a regulatory framework for carbon removal certification, so that companies can invest in high-quality removals (like DAC) and count them toward climate goals in a verified way.
- Asia and Middle East: We saw China’s entry into DAC with CarbonBox. China is also operating some of the world’s largest point-source capture pilots – for instance, a facility in Jiangsu capturing 500,000 tons/year from a coal-to-chemicals plant for use in making baking soda. State-owned giants like Sinopec are building CO₂ capture units on refineries and petrochemical plants (using the CO₂ for EOR or chemicals). In the Middle East, Saudi Arabia and the UAE have announced plans for massive carbon capture deployments as part of their net-zero pledges (e.g. Saudi’s NEOM project includes DAC ambitions, and the UAE’s ADNOC is expanding its CO₂ capture from gas processing). Notably, direct air capture was highlighted at COP28 in late 2023/early 2024, hosted by the UAE – there was even a live demo DAC unit on site. Both wealthy Gulf states have ideal conditions for DAC: cheap land, lots of solar energy, and geology for CO₂ storage. We may see some of the first gigaton-scale DAC “farms” built in those regions if costs come down.
- Private Sector and Startups: Dozens of startups are racing to innovate in carbon capture. Besides those already named (Climeworks, Carbon Engineering/1PointFive, Heirloom, CarbonCapture Inc., Octavia, Verdox), others include Global Thermostat (which developed a DAC process using amine-coated porous sorbents on fluted panels), Svante (using solid sorbent filters in a rotating bed for point-source capture; they claim their MOF-based filters can capture CO₂ for <$50/ton in industrial settings), and Mission Zero (UK-based, working on electrochemical DAC). Oil & gas companies are investing in many of these – Occidental in Carbon Engineering, Chevron in Svante, United Airlines in carbon removal firms, etc. Meanwhile, Atoco, the startup founded by MOF pioneer Omar Yaghi, is developing “novel reticular materials” to supply both carbon capture and atmospheric water harvesting solutions atoco.com. “Our technology uses 50% less energy to capture and separate CO₂ from direct air or flue gas,” says Atoco’s CEO Samer Taha atoco.com. The company has engineered materials with extremely high CO₂ affinity, which “dramatically reduce energy requirements and costs” for capture atoco.com. This kind of improvement could make smaller, modular capture units economically viable in many applications.
On the finance side, private capital is flowing into carbon capture and removal. Venture investment in carbon removal startups has surged (into the hundreds of millions of dollars across the sector). And corporations are creating buyers’ clubs to ensure future demand: the Frontier consortium (funded by Stripe, Alphabet, Meta, etc.) has committed $1B to purchase permanent carbon removal this decade, effectively guaranteeing a market for companies that can deliver verifiable CO₂ removal. This has given startups confidence to scale R&D. Even marketplaces for carbon removal credits are emerging, though volumes are still small and prices high ($500+ per ton for DAC credits currently).
All these initiatives – public and private – indicate a strong momentum building behind carbon capture. As the Global CCS Institute noted, the deployment of carbon capture still lags what’s needed for climate goals, but the gap is starting to close with these new policies and projects catf.us. There is a sense that carbon capture’s moment has arrived, not as an alternative to cutting emissions, but as an essential parallel strategy.
Outlook and Expert Perspectives
As we stand in 2025, carbon capture and removal technologies are moving from science fiction to fact, but significant challenges remain. Leading scientists emphasize both the potential and the limits of these technologies:
On one hand, there is optimism. “It’s basically the best material out there for direct air capture,” Omar Yaghi said of COF-999, expressing excitement at how such breakthroughs “break new ground in our efforts to address the climate problem” news.berkeley.edu. Many in the field share a genuine hope that with continued innovation, carbon capture can be made efficient and cheap enough to deploy globally. The vision is that in a couple of decades, we’ll have a new industry on the scale of modern oil & gas – but in reverse, operating worldwide to pull carbon out of the system. This could include “giant air purifiers” in strategic locations, as Prof. Gagliardi imagines, with DAC plants “significantly contributing to global efforts to achieve carbon neutrality” pme.uchicago.edu. Climate modelers confirm that negative emissions from such technologies will likely be required to offset the hardest-to-eliminate sources (like aviation, agriculture, and historical emissions) if we are to stay near 1.5 °C warming.
On the other hand, experts caution against viewing carbon capture as a silver bullet or an excuse to delay cutting fossil fuel use. Dr. Fatih Birol, head of the International Energy Agency, warned that “continuing business-as-usual for oil & gas while hoping a vast deployment of carbon capture will cut emissions is fantasy”. In other words, carbon capture can complement but not replace the rapid transition to clean energy x.com. Scientists also note that carbon removal addresses carbon dioxide but not other greenhouse gases or climate impacts. “Even if you’ve brought temperatures back down [with CDR], the world we will be looking at will not be the same,” said Dr. Carl-Friedrich Schleussner, highlighting that issues like sea level rise won’t simply reverse reuters.com. And we must remember scale: currently, all DAC plants combined remove only a few thousand tons of CO₂ per year; nature (forests, soils) removes on the order of 2 billion tons; yet to genuinely help climate goals, 7–10 billion tons per year of removal may be needed by mid-century reuters.com. That is a colossal challenge – roughly a tenfold increase in nature’s current removal, or thousands of Mammoth-sized DAC plants. Delivering that will require continued innovation, investment, and supportive policy over many decades.
The takeaway from 2024–2025’s developments is that the carbon capture learning curve has truly begun. Costs are gradually coming down, and first-of-a-kind projects are proving key concepts. We’re seeing the first cement plant with CCS, the first megaton-scale DAC projects funded, new materials that shatter prior limits (capturing CO₂ at 300 °C; surviving 100+ cycles; working in humid air; capturing 99% of CO₂, etc.), and governments putting real money on the table. Each success builds knowledge that makes the next project easier and cheaper. As one report put it, the marathon to build a carbon removal industry has only just begun, but the runners are finally off the starting blocks youtube.com.
In the coming years, keep an eye on those “mega-projects” – if the likes of Project Cypress (USA) or the UK’s Humber cluster succeed, they will capture CO₂ at unprecedented scales and show whether costs can drop as expected. Also watch the XPRIZE Carbon Removal competition, which in 2024 narrowed to 20 finalist teams spanning DAC, ocean-based capture, mineralization, and more xprize.org. The winner (to be announced in 2025) must demonstrate the removal of 1,000 tons of CO₂ and a viable path to scale to 1 million tons/year. This competition has galvanized creativity and led to teams like Heirloom, Carbfix, and others being spotlighted and funded cen.acs.org.
In summary, new structures and technologies for CO₂ capture are emerging rapidly – from cutting-edge COF crystals that act like super-sponges for CO₂ news.berkeley.edu, to massive engineering projects aiming to suck carbon out of the sky by the megaton climeworks.com. Each contributes a piece to the puzzle of stabilizing the climate. The tone among experts is one of “cautious optimism.” Yes, carbon capture is technically complex and currently costly, but the advances of 2024–2025 show that human ingenuity is chipping away at those challenges. As Prof. Yaghi remarked about blending AI with chemistry to design better sorbents, “We’re very, very excited” news.berkeley.edu – and that excitement is increasingly shared by climate scientists, engineers, investors, and policymakers who see carbon capture as an essential tool to hand off a livable planet to future generations.
Carbon capture alone will not save the world, but it can buy us time and draw down legacy pollution as we do the hard work of decarbonizing. With breakthrough technologies now in hand and more on the horizon, the once-theoretical idea of cleaning our atmosphere is becoming a reality. The next few years will be crucial to deploy these solutions at scale – and if we succeed, future generations might look back and recognize this period as the dawn of a new carbon removal age, when humanity began literally scrubbing the skies to help restore a safe climate balance.
Sources: Carbon capture research and news (2024–2025) news.berkeley.edu, pme.uchicago.edu, ccsnorway.com, climeworks.com, 1pointfive.com, atoco.com, reuters.com, government announcements and expert commentary energy.gov, news.berkeley.edu, energiesmedia.com, man-es.com, and IPCC climate assessments news.berkeley.edu, reuters.com.
