80/20 rule. Decrease in revenue. The “good enough” principle. Sometimes it just doesn't make sense to strive for perfection. At least, that's what Glenn Meyerowitz thinks.
Meyerowitz, an engineer by training, is leaning heavily into that concept with Clarity Technology, the direct air capture startup he founded in 2022. Most other carbon capture companies try to squeeze almost all the juice out of the lemon to saturate the adsorbent with enough CO2.2 The end result is an almost completely pure gas flow. Meyerowitz feels that's going too far.
“Most people in the world, and almost everyone we know, are trying to produce this kind of high-purity CO.2 Streams with greater than 99% purity. “This is historically consistent with what we've produced as a species, but there doesn't seem to be any greater reason than that,” he told TechCrunch.
Clairity recently raised $6.75 million in a seed round led by Initialized Capital and Lowercarbon Capital, TechCrunch has learned exclusively. The company is currently working on its next expansion, which will allow it to capture one tonne per year. Meyerowitz expects the company to have a pilot plant with more than 100 times the capacity by the end of the year.
Because the end result is considered less pure, Clarity says it can be designed with lower precision in mind, saving costs.
Clairity is one of the latest entrants into the direct air capture (DAC) market, where companies compete to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere at the lowest cost. It may sound easy, but remember CO.2 It only makes up 0.042% of the air we breathe. It's like pulling a needle out of a haystack.
But it is widely recognized that some form of direct air capture is needed to curb carbon dioxide levels and avoid the worst consequences of climate change.
Currently, DACs are unreasonably expensive, ranging from $600 to $1,000 per ton of CO.2, up to an order of magnitude more than experts expect the market to hold. That's partly because the technology is in its infancy and economies of scale haven't yet kicked in, but Meyerowitz believes the pursuit of purity may also be at play.
He and his team, now eight strong, said they had designed a box “sufficient” to capture carbon dioxide that is more than 80% pure. What it can't do is achieve 99.9% purity, but that's by design.
Clarity's reactor is operating at the company's facility. Image credits: clarity technology
“For example, if we can build and scale a direct air recovery system similar to how apartment buildings are built, we think we can dramatically reduce the cost of the overall system,” he said.
The impurities in Clarity's gas stream are not ones that are not already present in the atmosphere. The result is a product that is suitable for many, but not all, applications.
“There is a huge opportunity to utilize CO.”2 We are offering a value-added product to something that can still have a very positive impact on the climate,” Maelowitz said.
Concrete is one thing. Using carbon dioxide as a raw material “improves the quality of concrete. It provides better material properties and greater strength, reducing the amount of material needed for a given application.” he said. The company recently collaborated with another startup, his CarbonBuilt, to create concrete blocks using 28 grams of CO.2 It was collected using Clairity boxes, which are about the size of a dormitory refrigerator and can handle about 100 kilograms a year.
Additionally, cheaper adsorbents can be used. The ceramic honeycombs currently in the box are coated with alkali carbonates such as sodium carbonate and potassium carbonate, both of which are widely available components of baking soda. “You could go in today and buy, say, a million tons and have it delivered,” Maelowitz said.
The company will eventually need to build some large facilities if it wants to make any impact. The plan is to replicate components in a modular fashion.Capturing large amounts of CO2, Clarity would either let companies sell the gas flow and claim carbon credits, or sell only the gas and keep the credits themselves. “I think it varies from project to project,” Meyerowitz said.
Like most DAC startups, the biggest challenges Clarity faces are costs and finding customers willing to take on some of the burden. A small number of companies are currently active, paying a premium for the carbon credits that DAC generates. It is hoped that they will help promising startups cross the valley of death. The Inflation Control Act would also pay $130 per ton for carbon used in products and $180 per ton if that carbon is permanently sequestered somewhere, usually underground. .
DACs are energy-intensive operations, and Meyerowitz said his technology likely uses the same amount of energy as its competitors. If that part of the playing field were level, Clarity's capital investment advantage could be, well, favorable.