Google Announces Market-Changing CO2 Capture Deal

Google just landed a deal to capture global-warming pollutants at a bargain price: $100 per ton of CO2, a price that climate tech startups around the world are trying to hit to make their technologies commercially viable.

The company today announced a deal with Holocene, a startup that has an even shorter history than others in the burgeoning carbon dioxide removal industry but has nonetheless attracted some high-profile investors.

If Holocene actually does that—removing carbon dioxide from the air at a much lower price than competitors charging $600 a ton or more for the same service—it could prove that carbon-removal technologies are poised to help combat climate change. But it’s still early days, and there’s a lot at stake as Google’s carbon footprint continues to grow.

“We think it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. We all need to believe we can do it and work hard to do it,” says Anca Timofte, co-founder and CEO of Holocene. “Google and other partners need to come to the table to support projects like this.”

Timofte was a business student at Stanford University when she stumbled upon Oak Ridge National Laboratory research on new chemistry for filtering CO2 from air. This became the basis for the technology used today in the Holocene.

Since launching in 2022, Holocene has counted among its funders the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Elon Musk’s Xprize Carbon Removal and Bill Gates’ climate investment firm Breakthrough Energy. Timofte and a co-founder previously worked at Climeworks, one of the first carbon removal companies that is still a major player in the field, with clients that include Microsoft and JPMorgan Chase.

Climeworks currently operates the world’s largest carbon dioxide removal plants, called direct air capture (DAC) plants. In June, the company announced that its next-generation DAC plants should reduce the cost of carbon dioxide removal to $250 to $350 per ton of carbon dioxide captured by 2030. That’s still well above the $100 target set by the DOE to make the technology financially feasible. A carbon dioxide removal tax credit expanded under the Biden administration is meant to help achieve that goal, but Holocene also says its own advances in carbon dioxide removal chemistry are driving the price down.

Holocene says its technique is more efficient than others because it can continuously run two chemical loops: one that pulls CO2 from the air and one that produces a clean stream of that captured CO2 so that it can eventually be sequestered underground. The first loop involves passing air through water containing amino acids that attract CO2. Then, a chemical called guanidine is added to the mix, which reacts with the CO2 to form a solid crystal. Once the solids are separated from the liquid, it is heated to between 70 and 100 degrees Celsius (the temperature of boiling water) to release the CO2 into a concentrated stream of the greenhouse gas.

On the other hand, the Climeworks method can be seen as a “load” system, as Timofte describes it. It uses fixed filters that pull CO2 out of the air. Once the filter is saturated, it has to be heated to release the CO2, and then the filter can load more CO2. In other words, there is one material that does the loading and unloading of CO2, and you have to stop loading to start unloading. Holocene, on the other hand, does everything at once.

Climeworks is at this stage more established than Holocene, with the world’s first two commercial-scale facilities operating in Iceland, and further projects underway in the US, Norway, Kenya and Canada.

For now, Holocene has one small pilot plant in Knoxville, Tennessee, that can remove just 10 tons of CO2 from the air per year. The deal it has with Google calls for capturing 100,000 tons of CO2 by 2032. Google paid “a significant portion” of the $10 million upfront to help implement Holocene’s plans, Timofte said. The next step is to build a demonstration plant that can capture about 5,000 tons per year, followed by a commercial plant that can capture 500,000 tons.

The entire DAC industry needs a jump in growth if it hopes to reduce the carbon pollution that is accumulating in the atmosphere. So far, only about 27 DAC plants have been launched worldwide, with a combined capture capacity of just 10,000 metric tons per year.

Google’s 100,000-ton commitment is roughly equivalent to taking 20,000 gas-powered cars off the road for a year. But that’s still a tiny fraction of the 14.3 million metric tons of carbon pollution Google produced last year. Its emissions have risen as it tries to outdo other tech giants with energy-hungry AI tools.

That makes it even more important for companies like Google to prioritize emissions reductions rather than rely on capturing them after the fact. Carbon dioxide removal is not a panacea for climate change. U.S. and global climate goals — aimed at keeping climate change from intensifying to the point where life on Earth has difficulty adapting — call for cutting carbon dioxide emissions by about half by 2030. That deadline comes before the Holocene is due to fulfill its task of absorbing just 100,000 tons of CO2 for Google.