Google just struck a deal to capture planet-warming pollution at a whopping bargain: $100 per ton of CO2, the price climate tech startups around the world are racing to achieve in order to commercialize their technologies.
The company announced today’s deal with Holocene, a startup with a shorter history than others in the burgeoning carbon removal industry that nevertheless has attracted some big-name backers.
“We think it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
If Holocene can really pull it off – remove carbon dioxide from the air at a price lower than competitors charging $600 per ton or more for the same service – it could prove that carbon removal technologies are ready to help climate change. But it’s still in its early days, and there’s a lot on the line as Google’s carbon pollution continues to grow.
“We think this is a self-fulfilling prophecy. We all need to believe that we can do it and work hard to do it,” said Anca Timofte, cofounder and CEO of Holocene. “Google and other partners need to come to the table to support projects like this.”
Timofte was in business school at Stanford when he came across research from Oak Ridge National Laboratory about new chemistry for filtering CO2 from the air. That formed the basis of the Holocene technology used today.
Since breaking ground in 2022, Holocene already counts the US Department of Energy (DOE), Elon Musk’s Xprize Carbon Removal, and Bill Gates’ climate investment firm Breakthrough Energy among its funders. Timofte and a fellow cofounder previously worked at Climeworks, one of the first carbon removal companies and still a major player in the field with clients including Microsoft and JPMorgan Chase.
Climeworks currently operates the largest carbon removal facilities in the world, called direct air capture (DAC) plants. In June, it announced that the next generation of DAC plants should be able to bring the cost of carbon removal down to $250–350 per ton captured by 2030. That’s clearly more than the $100 target set by DOE for financial technology production. can do A tax credit for carbon removal expanded under the Biden administration should help get there, but Holocene also says its own advances in carbon removal chemistry are lowering the price.
Holocene says its method is better than others because it is able to continuously run two chemical loops: one that captures CO2 from the air and another that produces a pure stream of that captured CO2 so it can be sequestered forever underground. The first loop involves passing air through water containing amino acids that attract CO2. The chemical guanidine is then added to the mixture, which reacts with CO2 to form a solid crystal. Once the solids are separated from the liquid, it is heated to between 70 and 100 degrees Celsius (the temperature of boiling water) to release the CO2 in a concentrated stream of greenhouse gas.
The Climeworks method, on the other hand, can be considered a “cartridge” system, as Timofte describes it. It uses solid filters that take CO2 out of the air. Once the filter is saturated, it needs to be heated to release the CO2, and then the filter can load more CO2. In other words, there is a material that does CO2 loading and unloading, and you have to stop loading to start unloading. Meanwhile, the Holocene does everything at once.
Climeworks has a more proven track record than Holocene at this point, with two of the world’s first commercial facilities operating in Iceland and more projects underway in the US, Norway, Kenya, and Canada.
Right now, Holocene has a small pilot plant in Knoxville, Tennessee, capable of extracting only 10 tons of CO2 from the air each year. The deal Google reached was to capture 100,000 tons of CO2 by 2032. Google paid a “significant part” of the total $10 million up front to help implement the Holocene plans, Timofte said. The next step is to build a demonstration plant that can take about 5,000 tons annually and then a commercial plant that can produce 500,000 tons.
The entire DAC industry needs a growth spurt if it hopes to reduce the carbon pollution generated in the environment. Only about 27 DAC plants have been commissioned worldwide to date, with a collective capacity to extract only 10,000 metric tons per year.
Google’s 100,000-ton pledge is roughly equivalent to taking 20,000 gas-powered vehicles off the road in one year. But that’s still a tiny fraction of the 14.3 million metric tons of carbon dioxide pollution Google produced last year alone. Its emissions have grown as it tries to overtake other tech giants with energy-hungry AI tools.
This makes it even more important for companies like Google to prioritize reducing their emissions rather than relying on capturing them after the fact. Carbon removal is not a cure-all for climate change. U.S. and global climate goals — which aim to keep climate change from intensifying to a point where life on Earth will struggle to adapt — call for cutting carbon emissions by nearly half by 2030. The deadline looms that’s before the Holocene is set to fulfill its task of drawing down just 100,000 tons of CO2 for Google.
