tl;dr

We’re working to design and scale carbon capture technology for capturing CO₂ directly from air, with the goal of making it feasible to scale to gigatons of carbon dioxide captured each year. We believe projects like these are the only possible path for our world to be livable past 2031, so we’ve decided to devote our lives to this.

what’s specific about our approach

The key to our current system is biocatalysts — like photosynthesis, but engineered to go faster. We design and test biocatalysts in silica, then synthesize and deploy in vitro: one process that does carbon fixation (the carbon capture part), coupled to another process that captures solar energy (to power the carbon cycle).

So far we think using biocatalysts gives us the best chance to safely scale to gigatons using readily-available material — in contrast to current sorbent technology, which uses rare reagents that limit scale and is highly corrosive and thus hard to build out in arbitrary locations.

who’s “we”

We’re a tiny team of biophysicists/computational biologists/machine learners/mechanical engineers/software engineers based out of Oakland, CA.

how to help

The team is currently self-funding our prototype, but if you want to help out, please reach out at hello@collectivecarbon.cc!