Google just struck a deal to absorb pollution that heats the planet for an incredible $100 per tonne of CO2, which is the amount that climate tech entrepreneurs are vying for to turn their ideas into profitable ventures.
The partnership was announced today by the firm with Holocene, a startup in the emerging carbon removal industry that has drawn some well-known investors despite having very little history with others.
“We think it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
If Holocene can remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere at a cost significantly less than rivals that charge $600 or more per tonne for the same service, it may demonstrate that carbon removal technologies are prepared to aid in the fight against climate change. But as Google’s carbon pollution increases, it’s still early and there are a lot of stakes involved.
According to Holocene’s CEO and Co-founder, Anca Timofte: “We think it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. We need to all believe we can do it and work hard to do it.”
Timofte added: “Google has to and other partners have to come to the table to support projects like this.”
Timofte discovered research on novel chemistry for air CO2 filtering from Oak Ridge National Laboratory while she was a Stanford business school student. That served as the foundation for the technologies that Holocene utilises now.
Among its backers since its founding in 2022 are the US Department of Energy (DOE), Bill Gates’ climate investment company Breakthrough Energy, and Elon Musk’s Xprize Carbon Removal. Before joining Climeworks, which was among the first carbon removal firms and is currently a significant player in the industry with clients including Microsoft and JPMorgan Chase, Timofte and a colleague cofounder worked there.
The largest carbon removal plants in the world, known as direct air capture (DAC) plants, are being run by Climeworks. It declared in June that by 2030, the cost of removing carbon dioxide should only be $250–350 per tonne caught because of its next generation of DAC plants. Of course, that still puts it well beyond the $100 threshold the DOE established to make the technology commercially viable.
Holocene claims that its own advancements in carbon removal chemistry bring down the price, but the Biden administration’s extended tax credit for carbon removal is meant to assist get there.
Continuing, according to Holocene, their method is more effective than others since it can continually operate two chemical loops: one that absorbs CO2 from the atmosphere and another that creates a pure stream of the CO2 that has been absorbed for it to finally be stored underground. In the first loop, air is circulated through water that has amino acids in it, which draw CO2.
Subsequently, the mixture is supplemented with guanidine, which combines with the CO2 to generate a solid crystal. After the liquid and solids are separated, the mixture is heated to a temperature of 70–100 degrees Celsius, or boiling water, to release the CO2 and create a concentrated stream of greenhouse gases.
However, as Timofte puts it, Climeworks’ approach might be viewed as a “cartridge” system. It extracts CO2 from the air using solid filters. The filter can absorb more CO2 after it has been saturated, but first, it must be heated to release the CO2. Stated otherwise, loading and unloading CO2 is done by a single substance, and loading must stop before unloading can begin. In contrast, the Holocene completes everything at once.
BrandSpur digital news platform reports that with further projects in the works in the US, Norway, Kenya, and Canada, as well as two of the first commercial-scale facilities in the world functioning in Iceland, Climeworks now has a stronger track record than Holocene.
Holocene currently operates a single, modest pilot plant in Knoxville, Tennessee, with an annual capacity of only 10 tonnes of CO2 removal. The arrangement it landed with Google is to capture 100,000 tons of CO2 by 2032.
According to Timofte, Google contributed an upfront “significant part” of the $10 million to support Holocene’s initiatives. Building a demonstration facility with an annual capacity of about 5,000 tonnes and a commercial plant with a capacity of 500,000 tonnes are the next steps.
If the DAC sector as a whole is to reduce the amount of carbon pollution that has accumulated in the atmosphere, it requires a growth boom. To present, only about 27 DAC units with a combined capacity of just 10,000 metric tonnes annually have been put into operation worldwide. Google’s promise of 100,000 tonnes is roughly the same as 20,000 gas-powered cars being removed from the road for a year. However, it still pales in comparison to the 14.3 million metric tonnes of carbon dioxide pollution that Google generated in just the previous year. As it attempts to outcompete other tech companies with energy-hungry AI capabilities, its emissions have increased.
However, because of this, it’s even more crucial for companies like Google to focus on cutting their emissions rather than waiting to measure them after the fact. Eliminating carbon emissions won’t stop climate change. Reducing carbon emissions by almost half by 2030 is necessary to meet US and global climate objectives, which are designed to prevent climate change from getting worse to the point that life on Earth would find it difficult to adapt. Before Holocene is even scheduled to complete its mission of extracting just 100,000 tonnes of CO2 for Google, there is a deadline.
