Google has just struck a deal to capture the air pollution responsible for global warming at a bargain price: $100 per ton of CO2, the price that climate tech start-ups around the world are racing to achieve in order to make their technologies commercially viable.
The company today announced the agreement with Holocene, a startup with an even shorter history than others in the emerging carbon removal industry that has nevertheless attracted some big-name backers.
“We believe it is a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
If Holocene can actually do it – removing carbon dioxide from the air at a price far below that of competitors charging $600 or more per ton for the same service – it could prove that carbon dioxide removal technologies are ready to help in the fight against climate change. But it's still in its infancy, and the stakes are high as Google's carbon dioxide pollution continues to grow.
“We think it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. We all need to believe that we can do it and work hard to achieve it,” says Anca Timofte, co-founder and CEO of Holocene. “Google and other partners need to come to the negotiating table to support projects like this.”
Timofte was studying economics at Stanford when she came across research from Oak Ridge National Laboratory that was developing new chemical processes for filtering CO2 from the air, which formed the basis for the technology Holocene uses today.
Since launching in 2022, Holocene already counts the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Elon Musk's Xprize Carbon Removal and Bill Gates' climate investment firm Breakthrough Energy among its backers. Timofte and another co-founder previously worked at Climeworks, one of the first carbon removal companies that is still a major player in the field with clients like Microsoft and JPMorgan Chase.
Climeworks currently operates the world's largest carbon removal plants, called direct air capture (DAC) plants. In June, the company announced that its next generation of DAC plants should be able to reduce the cost of carbon removal to $250 to $350 per ton by 2030. That's obviously still well above the $100 target the Department of Energy has set to make the technology financially viable. A tax credit for carbon removal expanded under the Biden administration is intended to help meet that goal, but Holocene also says its own advances in carbon removal chemistry are driving down the price.
Holocene says its technique is more efficient than others because it can run two chemical cycles continuously: one that captures CO2 from the air, and another that creates a pure stream of the captured CO2 so it can eventually be sequestered underground. In the first cycle, air is passed through water containing amino acids that attract the CO2. Then the chemical guanidine is added to the mixture, which reacts with the CO2 to form a solid crystal. Once the solids are separated from the liquid, it is heated to 70 to 100 degrees Celsius (the temperature of boiling water) to release the CO2 into a concentrated stream of the greenhouse gas.
Climeworks' method, on the other hand, can be thought of as a “cartridge system,” as Timofte describes it. It uses solid filters that pull CO2 out of the air. Once the filter is saturated, it must be heated to release the CO2, and then the filter can absorb more CO2. In other words, there is a material that does the charging and discharging of CO2, and you have to pause the charging to start discharging. Holocene, on the other hand, does everything at once.
Climeworks now has a better track record than Holocene, with two of the world's first commercial-scale plants in operation in Iceland, and other projects underway in the US, Norway, Kenya and Canada.
Currently, Holocene operates a small pilot plant in Knoxville, Tennessee, which can only filter 10 tons of CO2 from the air per year. The contract with Google is to filter 100,000 tons of CO2 by 2032. Google paid a “a significant portion” of the $10 million paid up front to make Holocene's plans a reality, Timofte said. The next step is to build a demonstration plant capable of producing around 5,000 tons annually, and then a commercial plant capable of producing 500,000 tons.
The entire DAC industry needs a growth spurt if it is to reduce the carbon load in the atmosphere. So far, only 27 DAC plants have been commissioned worldwide, with a total capacity of just 10,000 tons of CO2 captured per year.
Google's commitment to cut 100,000 tons of CO2 is roughly equivalent to what it would take from 20,000 gasoline-powered cars for a year. But that's still a small fraction of the 14.3 million tons of carbon dioxide Google produced last year alone. Its emissions have risen as the company tries to outdo other tech giants with energy-hungry AI tools.
That makes it all the more important for companies like Google to prioritize reducing their emissions rather than relying on sequestering them after the fact. Removing carbon is not a panacea for climate change. The U.S. and global climate goals—which aim to prevent climate change to the point where life on Earth will have difficulty adapting—require cutting carbon emissions in half by 2030. That deadline will be reached before Holocene is even scheduled to fulfill its mission of sequestering just 100,000 tons of carbon for Google.