Capture6

Company Information

Capture6 Company Information

Capture6 at a Glance

Name: Capture6 CORP

Established: 2021

Company structure: Public Benefit Corporation

Founders: Dr. Ethan Cohen-Cole and Dr. Luke Shors

Headquarters: Oakland, California & Rotorua, New Zealand

Team members: 25+

Total investment received: $6.4M+

Overview

Capture6 is a direct air capture start-up based in California and New Zealand leveraging its technology to support climate resilience and industrial decarbonization. The company develops and commercializes highly scalable approaches to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Capture6 is pioneering an approach that can be deployed today by repurposing existing industrial-scale technologies. Additionally, when coupled with water treatment and desalination facilities, Capture6 can recover over 50% of freshwater from desalination waste brine for drinking and industrial purposes in the process of removing CO₂. This creates a meaningful synergy between carbon removal and water security.

Our Mission

“To address the harms from historic and current greenhouse gas emissions through developing and implementing negative emission technologies and other industrial decarbonization approaches while building climate resilience through water security.”

Our Story

Our founders Ethan Cohen-Cole and Luke Shors recognized that an overshoot of 1.5℃ was inevitable. They agreed it would take an aggressively scalable framework for direct air capture technology deployment to avoid the worst scenarios of global warming and that this approach needed to be synergistic with mitigation and climate adaptation. With this understanding, they brought Capture6 to life in late 2021.

Our Difference

While most direct air capture companies are investing heavily in developing new technologies, and hoping demand eventually justifies those investments, the Capture6 process was developed to make the economics work today and incorporate further enhancements over time. The economics of direct air capture become feasible through Capture6’s approach, which involves five key differentiators:

 

  1. Proven technological components: The Capture6 process uses existing commercial-grade equipment to enable development of direct air capture facilities. This enables Capture6 to avoid the long deployment timelines or uncertainties typically associated with the development and progressive deployment of new technologies.
  2. Fresh water production: To achieve capture of carbon dioxide, Capture6 processes desalination waste streams and as such yields fresh water.
  3. Brine elimination: Highly saline brine is the waste product of many water treatment facilities. It is both expensive to treat and can cause environmental harm. Capture6’s process eliminates it entirely.
  4. Further value-adding co-products: The Capture6 process can produce green hydrogen, chlorine, hydrochloric acid, and lithium.
  5. Efficient use of renewable energy: Production of fresh water and other green byproducts mean that the energy Capture6 facilities use is not solely dedicated to direct air capture, which is currently projected to use 25% of the world’s energy by 2100.

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