Dublin, July 2025
As scrutiny around Direct Air Capture (DAC) intensifies in 2025, the challenges of cost, scale, and energy efficiency have become undeniable. But rather than signaling the failure of DAC, this moment marks a crucial turning point for the industry. It’s time to move from aspirational projections to practical, engineering-led solutions – where materials, system design, and operational flexibility take center stage in achieving real-world performance. At Carbon Collect, we’re focused on delivering scalable, efficient DAC systems grounded in reality – not hype – paving the way for commercial success.
2025 has seen renewed scrutiny of Direct Air Capture, and not without reason. The challenges of cost, scale, and energy use are real. Performance to date has not always lived up to early expectations. This doesn’t signal the end of DAC. It signals that the industry is growing up.
Growing up means shifting from aspirational projections to practical engineering. It means hard choices around materials, siting, infrastructure, and operations. And a willingness to revisit assumptions that no longer hold.
Some DAC companies tried to scale too quickly, building large and costly corporate structures on the assumption the technology would soon catch up. But DAC doesn’t respond to top-down growth strategies. It demands technology first. Engineering-led development, validated performance, and real-world readiness before commercial expansion.
Materials matter. For example, wind turbine blades are made from composite materials, not metal, for well-documented reasons of weight, corrosion, cost, and structural stress. The same logic applies in DAC. Every material choice impacts cost and how a system performs at scale and over time. Composite materials can last 50 years, or more. Infrastructure is equally important.
Temperature and humidity affect capture rates, so siting decisions must be tightly coupled to system design. DAC plants also need to be flexible and be designed to run multiple equipment groups at slower rates when conditions are sub-optimal, using less energy. That flexibility must be matched by piping and layout that allow for efficient turn-up/turn-down operation.
At Carbon Collect, we have focused on getting the fundamentals right. Our Gen-II system uses non-metallic structural materials, improved sorbents, and a redesigned sorbent form factor to increase capture per cycle. A doubling of capture efficiency translates into half the hardware and supporting infrastructure needed to capture the same volume of CO₂. The system is modular, infrastructure-aware, and built for real-world performance, not based on lab assumptions or ideal conditions. And we are optimising with AI and Deep Reinforcement Learning.
Gen-III is on the way, and it will enable us to begin deploying systems for commercial projects. This configuration will deliver a steady-state flow of CO₂, like turning on a tap and having continuous output, and with it, greater overall system efficiency.
No skipping steps. Every decision, from organisation size, site layout to sorbent regeneration, affects cost per ton. If DAC is to scale, every unnecessary steps must go.
We are starting the beginning of a more grounded, more scalable phase. One that puts engineering first and lets the technology, not the press releases, set the pace. And yes, it might look like we’re shooting for the stars. We’re not. We’re firmly grounded in the reality of atmospheric carbon management, and focused on making a measurable impact here on Earth.