Spiritus And Aramco Sign Joint Development Agreement To Advance Next-Scale DAC Pilot

Spiritus, the Los Alamos based direct air capture company, has signed a Joint Development Agreement with Aramco's Research and Development Center to move its next generation DAC technology toward commercial scale. The deal centers on the engineering and buildout of a 100 ton per year DAC pilot deployment.

The collaboration pairs Spiritus' proprietary high capacity sorbent technology with Aramco R&DC's process engineering and heat integration expertise. The goal is a pilot system that proves out a path to $100 per ton carbon dioxide removal, a price point that has eluded most DAC developers so far.

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This agreement is not a first date. Aramco Ventures made an equity investment in Spiritus back in 2023, and the two companies followed that up with a 2024 memorandum of understanding covering technical collaboration on Spiritus' sorbent system and potential pilot and scale deployment in Saudi Arabia. The new Joint Development Agreement formalizes the next phase of that relationship with a concrete engineering target attached to it.

Why the 100 ton pilot matters

Most DAC systems today run well above $600 per ton, and getting costs down has been the industry's biggest bottleneck. Spiritus built its approach around a passive air contacting system, called the Carbon Orchard, that skips the energy intensive fans used by many competitors. Pairing that design with Aramco's heat integration know how gives the pilot a real shot at testing whether the cost curve can bend the way Spiritus has projected.

A Spiritus representative framed the stakes this way: "the companies that figure out how to make DAC cheap and modular will end up supplying decarbonization infrastructure to the hardest to abate sectors on the planet, not just carbon credits to sustainability teams."

Aramco struck a similar note on the partnership's direction, saying the company is "proud to support Spiritus on this milestone as they work to advance practical and scalable carbon capture technologies globally."

Where this fits with Spiritus' broader buildout

Spiritus currently has two flagship projects underway in North America: the Orchard One facility in Casper, Wyoming, designed to eventually capture 2 million tons of CO2 a year, and a pilot on the Pueblo of Nambé tribal land in New Mexico. The Aramco pilot adds an international proving ground to that lineup, with lessons from the 100 ton deployment expected to feed back into the company's larger scale projects at home.

About Spiritus

Spiritus is a climate technology company developing modular, low cost direct air capture and sequestration systems. The company's Carbon Orchard design combines a proprietary sorbent with passive air collection to reduce the energy intensity of traditional DAC. Spiritus is backed by Aramco Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries America, and TDK Ventures.