Carbon-to-Value's Triumphant Return

How Aircapture’s modular direct air capture units tap into the $30B merchant CO₂ market while paving the way for large-scale removal.

Aug 11, 2025

Not actually Aircapture, but pretty cool.

🔹 Quick Takeaways from this Reversing Climate Change podcast episode

$50M Series A raised in a tough market by targeting merchant CO₂ markets instead of relying solely on policy or carbon credits.
Modular direct air capture (DAC): smaller, containerized units serve beverage, food, and industrial customers locally—reducing transport costs and supply disruptions.
Sequestration is still on the table: engineering large-scale projects in the US, UAE, and Asia, but it’s a parallel track to the near-term commercial work.
Capital efficiency in DAC can be counterintuitive: bigger isn’t always better. For some tech pathways, modular units can beat large-scale plants on cost.
Policy agnostic… for now: merchant market revenues make the business viable even if carbon credit markets stumble or policy is changed.
Learning curve focus: Deploy early, sell CO₂ in existing markets, drive costs down rapidly, and de-risk technology for future large-scale removal.
Advice to peers: Demonstrate commercial traction early and design for bankability; equity fundraising alone is a risky road.

📝 Matt Atwood on Building a Bankable, Modular Future for Direct Air Capture

When most carbon removal companies talk about their business models, policy incentives and carbon credit buyers dominate the conversation. But Matt Atwood, CEO of Aircapture, has designed his company to survive and thrive without depending on either.

By focusing on existing, high-value CO₂ markets like beverage carbonation, food processing, and specialty industrial uses, Aircapture can generate revenue right now, while still laying the groundwork for large-scale sequestration projects.

🍾 The Merchant Market Advantage

Transporting liquid CO₂ is costly, especially to remote or island markets. Aircapture sidesteps that by installing modular, shipping-container-sized DAC units directly at the customer site.

These units pull CO₂ from the air, purify it to beverage or food-grade standards, and feed it straight into production, whether that’s bottling soda in the Canary Islands or supplying concrete applications in Asia.

This approach means customers aren’t hostage to price spikes or shortages caused by disruptions in fossil-based CO₂ supply, like the seasonal fertilizer shutdowns that plague Europe.

🛠️ Modular vs. Mega-Scale DAC

Atwood stresses that in DAC, “bigger” isn’t always “more efficient.” For his technology pathway—low-pressure drop, amine-based contactors—modular production lowers capital costs, speeds deployment, and simplifies logistics.

A large sequestration plant might share infrastructure (compressors, boilers, pipelines), but it doesn’t get more energy-efficient in the capture step itself, and it risks tying up huge sums in slow-to-build projects.

That modularity also makes it possible to serve many different market segments with the same hardware — just pairing the DAC unit with liquefaction or gas delivery modules as needed.

📈 Playing the Long Game: Learning Curves and Bankability

Aircapture’s strategy is rooted in Wright’s Law: the principle that costs drop predictably with each doubling of production. Deploying into commercial CO₂ markets now accelerates that doubling rate, which in turn accelerates cost declines.

This not only strengthens the company’s merchant market position, it de-risks the technology for large-scale carbon removal financing. Banks are far more likely to back sequestration projects if they can see proven, reliable, real-world deployments.

🏦 Policy Independence — and Optionality

Because the merchant market for CO₂ is already worth $25–30 billion annually, Aircapture doesn’t need 45Q tax credits, ETS integration, or voluntary carbon market demand to survive.

That robustness means that if policy winds shift or major buyers like Microsoft or Frontier slow their purchases, the business still works. Atwood is clear: even in that scenario, “it would be a great business for us.”

At the same time, the company is positioning itself to take advantage of future sequestration policy support: engineering large projects in the US, UAE, and Asia, and keeping an eye on developments in Japan, Europe, and under UN Article 6.4.

💡 Advice to Carbon Removal Founders

Atwood’s closing advice reflects his two decades in carbon tech:

“Demonstrate commercial traction, customer reliability, and a clear path to scale. It’s not enough to say you’ll hit a target cost in 2030 — map out every step to get there.”

For Aircapture, that means delivering CO₂ today, learning fast, and building a foundation that investors, customers, and (eventually) banks can trust.