The Future of Direct Air Capture: From Pilot to Gigaton

Direct air capture (DAC) has moved from theoretical promise to engineering reality. Over the past five years, the cost of removing one tonne of CO₂ from the atmosphere has dropped from over $600 to under $250 — and the trajectory is accelerating. At Captisme, our Capsys™ platform is at the forefront of this transformation.

The Scale Challenge

The IPCC estimates that reaching net-zero by 2050 will require removing between 5 and 16 gigatons of CO₂ per year from the atmosphere. Today, the entire DAC industry captures less than 0.01 megatons. Closing that gap demands a thousandfold increase in deployment within two decades.

This is not a technology problem — it is an engineering, manufacturing, and supply chain challenge. The core chemistry works. The question is how fast we can build, deploy, and finance modular DAC units at industrial scale.

Why Solid Sorbents Win at Scale

Two primary approaches dominate DAC today: liquid solvent systems and solid sorbent systems. While liquid systems — pioneered by companies like Carbon Engineering — work well at large centralized plants, solid sorbent systems like Capsys™ offer decisive advantages for distributed, modular deployment.

• Lower operating temperatures (80–120°C vs. 300–900°C for liquid systems)
• Compatible with low-grade waste heat and solar thermal energy
• Modular architecture enables factory production and rapid deployment
• Lower water consumption — critical for arid deployment sites
• Simpler permitting and site preparation requirements

The Path to $100 per Tonne

Getting DAC costs below $100/tCO₂ is the threshold at which carbon removal becomes broadly competitive with emissions avoidance. We see three drivers that will get us there: sorbent chemistry improvements that increase capacity per cycle, manufacturing scale that reduces unit costs through mass production, and energy integration that pairs DAC arrays with dedicated renewable energy and thermal storage.

At Captisme, we're attacking all three simultaneously. Our next-generation sorbent materials, currently in pilot testing, show a 40% improvement in CO₂ loading capacity. Combined with our array architecture — which shares infrastructure across hundreds of modules — we project costs below $150/tCO₂ by 2028 and below $100 by 2032.

What Comes Next

The next three years will determine whether DAC becomes a major climate solution or remains a niche technology. The decisions being made now — on policy support, carbon market design, and deployment financing — will shape the industry for decades. At Captisme, we believe the technology is ready. The question is whether we will deploy it fast enough.