Spiritus Wants To Make Carbon Capture Affordable

New easy-to-make sorbent could slash the cost of pulling carbon from the air.

Spiritus is making towers that will hold tennis ball–size sorbent spheres that capture carbon dioxide from air. The towers will be installed in a field in Wyoming. Credit: Spiritus

At a Glance

Publicly launched: 2023*Headquarters:* Los Alamos, New Mexico*Focus:* Direct air capture of carbon dioxide*Technology:* Low-cost nanostructured polymer sorbent*Founders:* Charles Cadieu and Matt Lee*Funding or notable partners:* $41 million from Aramco Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, TDK Ventures, and other investors.

>> In Other News: Shell, Mitsubishi Invest $17M In Hybrid Direct Air Capture Startup

Spiritus is making towers that will hold tennis ball–size sorbent spheres that capture carbon dioxide from air. The towers will be installed in a field in Wyoming.

Matt Lee had been creating nanostructured materials for all sorts of applications at Los Alamos National Laboratory for 10 years when his friend Charles Cadieu came to him with the idea of removing carbon dioxide from air. Direct Air Capture (DAC) technology was gathering steam, and Climeworks was about to launch the first large-scale DAC facility in Iceland.

Lee and Cadieu, who already had two successful startups under his belt, founded Spiritus in stealth mode in 2022. The company, named after the Latin term for “breath,” is on pace to capture 1,000 metric tons of CO₂ at its pilot facility on Nambé Pueblo tribal land in New Mexico by early 2026.

“In many ways, we are letting nature do the heavy lifting here by assembling an intricate structure for us.”Matt Lee, chief technology officer, Spiritus

Current commercial DAC facilities use giant fans to blow air over sorbents that soak up CO₂ and then need high temperatures to release the trapped gas for permanent storage or for use. The process ends up costing $600–$1,000 per metric ton of CO₂, according to the World Economic Forum. Using a sorbent that passively pulls CO₂ from air, Spiritus aims to shrink that number to $100 per metric ton, a benchmark for viability set by the U.S. Department of Energy.

At Los Alamos, Lee used the technique to make porous materials for catalysts and for fusion energy fuel pellets. The pivot to DAC brought the challenge of scaling up production cost-effectively. “You need a lot of sorbent for DAC,” Lee says. “If the process to create it is too expensive or cumbersome or esoteric, the economic picture starts to get hazy very quickly.”

Spiritus cofounders Charles Cadieu (left) and Matt Lee

Luckily, he had already been working with a manufacturing plant outside Kansas City, Missouri, during his time at Los Alamos. Some of the personnel from that facility have now joined Spiritus, bringing their expertise in taking a laboratory innovation to full-scale production. Spiritus plans ultimately to scale up to thousands of kilograms per week.

Lee says Spiritus’ DAC sorbent is made from easily available raw materials. Active sites on the polymer adsorb CO₂. Releasing the captured gas requires heating the sorbent to 70–100 °C, less than what other DAC sorbents need. The material also has many times the carbon capture capacity of anything commercially available at a similar cost.

Cadieu and Lee plan to put money from their recent $41 million fundraise toward growing Spiritus’ first full-scale DAC facility, Orchard One, in central Wyoming. The “orchard” will be planted with treelike structures bearing tennis ball–size sorbent spheres that can be removed once they have soaked up carbon. Time Magazine recognized the concept as one of the best inventions of 2024.

Slated to be the world’s largest DAC plant, Orchard One will capture 2 million tons of CO₂ annually, equivalent to the emissions of about 340,000 pickup trucks. Spiritus is partnering with Casper Carbon Capture to inject the captured CO₂ into a deep underground rock formation. In the future, it might work with companies making sustainable fuels from captured CO₂.