Direct Air Capture
Engineered removal that pulls CO₂ directly from ambient air for permanent storage. Today's most expensive removal method, and the only one with a manufacturing cost curve.
Direct air capture is the family of technologies that pull CO₂ directly from ambient atmospheric air, where it sits at a dilute concentration of around 425 parts per million, and concentrates it for permanent geological storage or industrial use. Unlike point-source capture, which scrubs CO₂ from a smokestack at high concentration, DAC works on the open atmosphere — which makes it physically harder, energetically expensive, and unbounded in where it can be located. DAC costs $400 to $1,000 per ton today and runs on roughly two megawatt-hours of electricity per ton. The economics close around $100 per ton, which is reachable at two-cent electricity. Crucially, DAC is the only removal method that falls along a manufacturing cost curve as production scales — the others (biology, enhanced rock weathering, ocean alkalinity) are cheaper per ton today but cap out at smaller scale. DAC is therefore the load-bearing technology of the carbon removal pillar: expensive now, scalable without limit, energy-gated.