Google inks deal to hit carbon cost milestone
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Google's got a counterintuitive plan for tackling the urgency of climate change with carbon removal: patience.
Why it matters: A deal with the startup Holocene targets much lower costs — $100 per ton of CO2 — than current direct air capture systems that are well into the hundreds of dollars per ton.
- The patient part? They have until the early 2030s for delivery — a pretty long runway.
- But Google is paying for some of the deal to capture and store 100,000 tons up front, helping stake work that's needed to cut costs.
The big picture: That's big-time volume in the young DAC space.
- But it's still a speck compared to the billion-plus tons worldwide per year that would make CO2 removal a real weapon against global warming.
- "We all need to be paying attention to price. That is a critical element to getting these technologies to scale," Michael Terrell, Google's senior director for energy and climate, tells me.
- Providing up-front money for services well into the future is part of this longer-term thinking, he said.
Reality check: $100 per ton is a benchmark that DOE and others use for removal methods to get on the path to mass deployment.
- Getting down that far — and beyond — will be immensely hard for DAC companies. There's no guarantee DAC ever becomes a prominent tool.
But Google is hopeful about the cost curve for Holocene's chemistry that uses amino acids and other organic compounds to capture CO2 from ambient air.
- It's then concentrated and subjected to a low amount of heating for transport and storage, Google said.
- The tech holds energy and capital costs in check, Google's removal lead Randy Spock writes in a blog post. The limited heating needed can come from carbon-free sources or waste heat, he adds.
- The companies also envision Holocene snagging federal tax credits for CO2 storage.
State of play: Knoxville, Tennessee-based Holocene launched in 2022.
- It's operating a 10 ton-per-year pilot and plans to have a demo plant in 2026 that sucks up thousands of tons annually, president Keeton Ross said via email.
- Holocene has raised $8 million to date via grants, awards, and customer contracts, per Ross and their business deck.
- Supporters include Breakthrough Energy's fellows program, DOE, Frontier, TVA and more.
Catch up quick: The new deal is part of Google's wider removal strategy that's been taking shape for years.
- For instance, parent Alphabet is a founding member of Frontier, the corporate consortium contracting with startups to jump-start removal.
The bottom line: "We're taking a lot of shots on goal," Terrell tells me.
- "We're trying to be smart and how we're doing it and ... we're trying to further this ecosystem so that hopefully it'll scale like we've seen with wind and solar."
