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Heirloom Carbon Technologies Inc. has launched a new Direct Air Capture (DAC) facility in Tracy, California, that can capture up to 1,000 tons of carbon dioxide per year.
Touted as the first commercial DAC facility in the USA, the Tracy facility is fully powered by renewable energy and has been operational for nearly 1,000 hours, Heirloom said in a statement Thursday. The facility captures atmospheric carbon dioxide that will be permanently sequestered in concrete through a partnership with CarbonCure Technologies, according to the statement.
The facility will deliver net removals to early, catalytic buyers of Heirloom’s carbon dioxide removal credits, including Microsoft, Stripe, Shopify, and Klarna, the release said. It will also help advance President Biden’s 2050 net-zero goal and California Governor Gavin Newsom’s 2045 state net-zero targets, Heirloom noted.
Heirloom said the facility follows its “principles for the responsible deployment of carbon removal”, which include “commitments that no carbon dioxide removed will be used for enhanced oil recovery and that no equity will be granted to companies whose core business is the production of oil and gas”.
“This first commercial direct air capture facility is the closest thing on Earth that we have to a time machine, because it can turn back the clock on climate change by removing carbon dioxide that has already been emitted into our atmosphere”, Heirloom CEO and Co-Founder Shashank Samala said. “The capacity of Heirloom’s limestone-based technology to capture CO2 from the air has gone from 1 kilogram of CO2 to up to one million, or 1000 metric tons, in just over two years. We owe it to every climate vulnerable citizen to continue to deploy our technology at the urgent pace required to reach [the] billion-ton scale and beyond in time to stop the worst of climate change”.
“Heirloom Carbon Technologies, right here in Tracy, California, is the blueprint for how America can beat climate change”, Secretary of Energy Jennifer M Granholm said during the facility’s official unveiling ceremony.
“We’ve set ambitious, nation-leading climate goals to cut pollution and accelerate our transition to clean energy”, California Governor Gavin Newsom said. “Projects like this Heirloom facility are exactly the sort of big and innovative ideas that we’re embracing – using renewable energy to directly remove pollution from our air, all while creating good-paying jobs in the Central Valley. California is creating the model for expanding the economy and fighting climate change”.
According to the statement, Heirloom raised a $53 million Series A in 2022, with backing from some of the world’s leading climate investors, including Breakthrough Energy Ventures. Earlier in 2023, Heirloom and CarbonCure pioneered the world’s first-ever demonstration of DAC-to-concrete storage, and in August, Heirloom and other partners were selected for one of the largest projects under the Biden Administration’s DAC Hub program, with eligibility for up to $600 million in federal funding for a DAC facility in Louisiana. Further, in September, Microsoft agreed to purchase up to 315,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide removal from Heirloom over a 10-year period.
Heirloom’s technology works by using limestone to pull carbon dioxide from the air. Using a renewable-energy-powered kiln, the limestone is heated to extract the gas, leaving a mineral powder that is spread onto vertically stacked trays where it once again pulls carbon dioxide, according to the release. The captured gas is then permanently stored safely underground or embedded in concrete.
With the company’s goal of removing 1 billion tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by 2035, Heirloom said that its technology “represents one of the lowest cost pathways to permanent CO2 removal”, by using easy-to-source materials like limestone, harnessing the power of algorithms to increase the capture capacity of that material, and scaling the process with modularity.
“California continues to lead the world toward a clean energy future. With the opening of Heirloom’s facility, California is the first state in the nation where CO2 will be permanently and durably removed from the atmosphere through Direct Air Capture and the first among nations to store atmospheric CO2 in concrete, supporting construction projects across the state”, California Lieutenant Governor Eleni Kounalakis said. “As a California-born company, Heirloom has helped us achieve an incredible milestone that further cements our state as a global climate leader and brings us closer to achieving our goal of carbon neutrality by 2045”.
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