Carbon Capture raises $80m from investors

Los Angeles-based Carbon Capture, which aims to build machines that suck carbon dioxide out of the air to fight climate change, said it had raised $80m from investors, including Saudi oil giant Saudi Aramco.

The money raised in Carbon Capture’s latest funding round represents one of the largest injections of private capital into direct air capture (DAC) — a technology that has yet to be proven at scale — over the last five years, according industry tracker Pitch Book.

“This is exactly what has to happen, this alignment with large industrial partners who have the capacity, the access to capital, the skills to actually scale DAC to a meaningful level,” Carbon Capture CEO Adrian Corless said.

The Series A fundraising was led by Prime Movers Lab and included Amazon’s Climate Pledge Fund, Siemens Financial Services, Idealab X and Marc Benioff’s TIME Ventures, the company said.

Carbon Capture builds modular machines that contain material that absorbs carbon dioxide when cooled and releases it when heated. That allows it to capture the climate-warming gas for storage underground or used in products such as concrete.

Its Wyoming-based Project Bison plans to capture 5-million tonnes of carbon dioxide annually by 2030, a tiny fraction of US overall carbon emissions of more than 6-billion tonnes a year. The company hopes to improve its technology and scale it up.

Worsening climate change and inadequate efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions have led some governments and investors to bet on carbon removal as a last-ditch hope to avert the most dire impacts of global warming. Carbon removal is also seen as a way for the most difficult-to-abate sectors of the economy to reach carbon neutrality, including aviation and cement production.

Saudi Aramco is among several fossil fuel companies backing carbon removal efforts, including US-based Occidental Petroleum and UAE rival ADNOC.