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With its Orchard One project in Wyoming, Spiritus thinks it can capture carbon from the air for less than $100 per ton.
Pretty much every startup that’s building machines to suck carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and stash it underground has claimed it will be able to get its costs down to less than $100 per ton — eventually.
But a new contender in the race, a San Francisco-based company called Spiritus, is making a compelling case that it could get there faster. On Tuesday, Spiritus announced plans to build its first direct air capture, or “DAC” project in central Wyoming, nicknamed Orchard One. The company will start small but ultimately wants to expand the facility to capture 2 million tons of CO2 per year.
Achieving that scale at the sub-$100 price point would be game-changing for direct air capture, which is still far too expensive to be a viable climate solution. Most companies in the field are cagey about revealing their current costs, but the industry-average price is believed to be between $600 and $1,000 per ton.
So what makes Spiritus different? Here are three reasons we’ll be keeping an eye on the company.
Spiritus’ project will not look anything like the industrial-style shipping containers full of fans that have become the defining form factor for DAC plants. The company’s central innovation is a squishy white ball that founder Charles Cadieu describes as an artificial lung.
“While it looks kind of simple, it's actually a breakthrough material that has an incredible amount of surface area,” he told me over Zoom, while holding one up and squeezing it like a stress relief toy. “And it has holes all over it that allow the CO2 to go right inside.” Though it’s about the size of a tennis ball, its branch-like interior structure has a surface area equivalent to a tennis court, he said.
Courtesy of Spiritus
The ball is made of a proprietary material that selectively attracts CO2 molecules. As air wafts through it, CO2 sticks to its interior surfaces like a magnet. Spiritus will manufacture millions of these balls, lay them out on trays, and stack the trays on tree-like rigs — hence the name Orchard One. Concept images depict a small colony of cylindrical structures that will house the trays, almost like miniature Wilco towers, sprouting up amid the Wyoming sagebrush.
Courtesy of Spiritus
After a few hours exposed to the elements, the balls, which Spiritus prefers to call “fruits,” will be full of carbon. The company will then transfer them to a separate chamber and apply heat, causing them to expel the CO2. That stream of carbon will be compressed and delivered to an underground CO2 storage well, while the fruits will be returned to their towers to live the same day over and over again.
Though the concept is somewhat whimsical, the company is making serious claims about its cost and performance. The biggest expenses for direct air capture projects are materials and energy, and Spiritus has made significant improvements on both fronts. Cadieu told me they can manufacture their sorbent for a tenth of the cost of other, “state of the art sorbents that are out there today,” and that “furthermore, it’s 10 times as effective” at capturing carbon. In other words, Spiritus claims it can capture more carbon from the air at a time, using fewer, cheaper materials than other methods.
Since the capture part of the process is passive, the company doesn’t need to use energy-intensive fans to filter the air. Also, the temperature required for the second step, where heat is applied to the balls to release the CO2, is lower than 212 degrees Fahrenheit — low enough to be generated using electricity. Cadieu said Spiritus plans to procure energy from renewable sources so that the entire process has net-negative greenhouse gas emissions.
Spiritus isn’t the only company with a low-cost sorbent and passive capture method. Notably, the DAC process pioneered by Heirloom, which opened its first commercial-scale plant in California last year, shares those features, but it requires much higher temperatures — 1,650 degree Fahrenheit — to isolate the captured carbon.
Though Spiritus still has to prove this all works as promised in the real world, the company has earned an early vote of confidence from Frontier, the coalition of tech companies with a $1 billion fund to help carbon removal scale. Last year, Frontier paid Spiritus $500,000 to buy its first 713 removal credits, each of which represents a ton of carbon that will be permanently sequestered underground. (The money is more of a development grant than anything indicative of the company’s costs.)
“We look for companies that learn and iterate quickly, and we were impressed by what we saw from Spiritus when they applied,” Joanna Klitzke, the procurement and ecosystem strategy lead at Frontier, told me. “And actually, since then, the team has made really strong improvements and steady progress on both their sorbent and their process performance.”
According to the company’s application for funding from Frontier, Spiritus estimates that for the first phase of Orchard One — when the project is capturing less than 2,000 tons per year — its levelized cost per ton of carbon will be about $149, not including the cost of burying the carbon underground. By phase two, at a scale of about 500,000 tons per year, it expects to get that cost down to less than $100. And by phase three, at the full scale of 2 million tons per year, it expects to achieve sub-$75 capture.
Cadieu told me the company is already in talks with large buyers to purchase carbon removal from Orchard One for “far less” than the per-ton price Frontier paid.
Spiritus doesn’t expect to have phase one of the project up and running until 2026. But it already has a running start. The land lease is locked down, the underground pore space where the company will inject the captured carbon has been identified, and a monitoring well is already scheduled to be drilled — according to its Frontier application.
Wyoming has proved to be a relatively welcoming place for this emerging industry. Orchard One is joining another direct air capture plant already under development in the southwest part of the state called Project Bison. Cadieu gave three reasons the project landed there: There’s a local workforce with relevant experience from the oil and gas industry, the state has the ideal geology to trap the captured carbon underground, and Wyoming has been at the forefront of developing clear regulations for carbon sequestration. It was one of the first states to gain authorization from the Environmental Protection Agency to permit carbon storage wells, and as of December had already permitted three. Another advantage in Wyoming is abundant renewable energy from wind farms.
Spiritus has yet to reveal exactly where in Wyoming Orchard One will be built, but Cadieu told me he has been in close contact with officials at the town, county, and state levels, and that the reception has been enthusiastic. He said the project will create “hundreds of jobs during construction” and “many dozens of jobs” when the facility is operating, and that the company will deliver a portion of its profits back into the community.
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On Energy Transfer’s legal win, battery storage, and the Cybertruck
Current conditions: Red flag warnings are in place for much of Florida • Spain is bracing for extreme rainfall from Storm Martinho, the fourth named storm in less than two weeks • Today marks the vernal equinox, or the first day of spring.
A jury has ordered Greenpeace to pay more than $660 million in damages to one of the country’s largest fossil fuel infrastructure companies after finding the environmental group liable for defamation, conspiracy, and physical damages at the Dakota Access Pipeline. Greenpeace participated in large protests, some violent and disruptive, at the pipeline in 2016, though it has maintained that its involvement was insignificant and came at the request of the local Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. The project eventually went ahead and is operational today, but Texas-based Energy Transfer sued the environmental organization, accusing it of inciting the uprising and encouraging violence. “We should all be concerned about the future of the First Amendment, and lawsuits like this aimed at destroying our rights to peaceful protest and free speech,” said Deepa Padmanabha, senior legal counsel for Greenpeace USA. The group said it plans to appeal.
The Department of Energy yesterday approved a permit for the Calcasieu Pass 2 liquified natural gas terminal in Louisiana, allowing the facility to export to countries without a free trade agreement. The project hasn’t yet been constructed and is still waiting for final approvals from the independent Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, but the DOE’s green light means it faces one less hurdle.
CP2 was awaiting DOE’s go-ahead when the Biden administration announced its now notorious pause on approvals for new LNG export facilities. The project’s opponents argue it’s a “carbon bomb.” Analysis from the National Resources Defense Council suggested the greenhouse gases from the project would be equivalent to putting more than 1.85 million additional gas-fueled automobiles on the road, while the Sierra Club found it would amount to about 190 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent annually.
President Trump met with 15 to 20 major oil and gas executives from the American Petroleum Institute at the White House yesterday. This was the president’s first meeting with fossil fuel bosses since his second term began in January. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and Energy Secretary Chris Wright were also in the room. Everyone is staying pretty quiet about what exactly was said, but according to Burgum and Wright, the conversation focused heavily on permitting reform and bolstering the grid. Reuters reported that “executives had been expected to express concerns over Trump’s tariffs and stress the industry view that higher oil prices are needed to help meet Trump’s promise to grow domestic production.” Burgum, however, stressed that oil prices didn’t come up in the chat. “Price is set by supply and demand,” he said. “There was nothing we could say in that room that could change that one iota, and so it wasn’t really a topic of discussion.” The price of U.S. crude has dropped 13% since Trump returned to office, according to CNBC, on a combination of recession fears triggered by Trump’s tariffs and rising oil output from OPEC countries.
The U.S. installed 1,250 megawatts of residential battery storage last year, the highest amount ever and nearly 60% more than in 2023, according to a new report from the American Clean Power Association and Wood Mackenzie. Overall, battery storage installations across all sectors hit a new record in 2024 at 12.3 gigawatts of new capacity. Storage is expected to continue to grow next year, but uncertainties around tariffs and tax incentives could slow things down.
China is delaying approval for construction of BYD’s Mexico plant because authorities worry the electric carmaker’s technology could leak into the United States, according to the Financial Times. “The commerce ministry’s biggest concern is Mexico’s proximity to the U.S.,” sources told the FT. As Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer writes, BYD continues to set the global standard for EV innovation, and “American and European carmakers are still struggling to catch up.” This week the company unveiled its new “Super e-Platform,” a new standard electronic base for its vehicles that it says will allow incredibly fast charging — enabling its vehicles to add as much as 249 miles of range in just five minutes.
Tesla has recalled 46,096 Cybertrucks over an exterior trim panel that can fall off and become a road hazard. This is the eighth recall for the truck since it went on sale at the end of 2023.
This fusion startup is ahead of schedule.
Thea Energy, one of the newer entrants into the red-hot fusion energy space, raised $20 million last year as investors took a bet on the physics behind the company’s novel approach to creating magnetic fields. Today, in a paper being submitted for peer review, Thea announced that its theoretical science actually works in the real world. The company’s CEO, Brian Berzin, told me that Thea achieved this milestone “quicker and for less capital than we thought,” something that’s rare in an industry long-mocked for perpetually being 30 years away.
Thea is building a stellarator fusion reactor, which typically looks like a twisted version of the more common donut-shaped tokamak. But as Berzin explained to me, Thea’s stellarator is designed to be simpler to manufacture than the industry standard. “We don’t like high tech stuff,” Berzin told me — a statement that sounds equally anathema to industry norms as the idea of a fusion project running ahead of schedule. “We like stuff that can be stamped and forged and have simple manufacturing processes.”
The company thinks it can achieve simplicity via its artificial intelligence software, which controls the reactor’s magnetic field keeping the unruly plasma at the heart of the fusion reaction confined and stabilized. Unlike typical stellarators, which rely on the ultra-precise manufacturing and installment of dozens of huge, twisted magnets, Thea’s design uses exactly 450 smaller, simpler planar magnets, arranged in the more familiar donut-shaped configuration. These magnets are still able to generate a helical magnetic field — thought to keep the plasma better stabilized than a tokamak — because each magnet is individually controlled via the company’s software, just like “the array of pixels in your computer screen,” Berzin told me.
“We’re able to utilize the control system that we built and very specifically modulate and control each magnet slightly differently,” Berzin explained, allowing Thea to “make those really complicated, really precise magnetic fields that you need for a stellarator, but with simple hardware.”
This should make manufacturing a whole lot easier and cheaper, Berzin told me. If one of Thea’s magnets is mounted somewhat imperfectly, or wear and tear of the power plant slightly shifts its location or degrades its performance over time, Thea’s AI system can automatically compensate. “It then can just tune that magnet slightly differently — it turns that magnet down, it turns the one next to it up, and the magnetic field stays perfect,” Berzin explained. As he told me, a system that relies on hardware precision is generally much more expensive than a system that depends on well-designed software. The idea is that Thea’s magnets can thus be mass manufactured in a way that’s conducive to “a business versus a science project.”
In 2023, Thea published a technical report proving out the physics behind its so-called “planar coil stellarator,” which allowed the company to raise its $20 million Series A last year, led by the climate tech firm Prelude Ventures. To validate the hardware behind its initial concept, Thea built a 3x3 array of magnets, representative of one section of its overall “donut” shaped reactor. This array was then integrated with Thea’s software and brought online towards the end of last year.
The results that Thea announced today were obtained during testing last month, and prove that the company can create and precisely control the complex magnetic field shapes necessary for fusion power. These results will allow the company to raise a Series B in the “next couple of years,” Berzin said. During this time, Thea will be working to scale up manufacturing such that it can progress from making one or two magnets per week to making multiple per day at its New Jersey-based facility.
The company’s engineers are also planning to stress test their AI software, such that it can adapt to a range of issues that could arise after decades of fusion power plant operation. “So we’re going to start breaking hardware in this device over the next month or two,” Berzin told me. “We’re purposely going to mismount a magnet by a centimeter, put it back in and not tell the control system what we did. And then we’re going to purposely short out some of the magnetic coils.” If the system can create a strong, stable magnetic field anyway, this will serve as further proof of concept for Thea’s software-oriented approach to a simplified reactor design.
The company is still years away from producing actual fusion power though. Like many others in the space, Thea hopes to bring fusion electrons to the grid sometime in the 2030s. Maybe this simple hardware, advanced software approach is what will finally do the trick.
The Chinese carmaker says it can charge EVs in 5 minutes. Can America ever catch up?
The Chinese automaker BYD might have cracked one of the toughest problems in electric cars.
On Tuesday, BYD unveiled its new “Super e-Platform,” a new standard electronic base for its vehicles that it says will allow incredibly fast charging — enabling its vehicles to add as much as 249 miles of range in just five minutes. That’s made possible because of a 1,000-volt architecture and what BYD describes as matching charging capability, which could theoretically add nearly one mile of range every second.
It’s still not entirely clear whether the technology actually works, although BYD has a good track record on that front. But it suggests that the highest-end EVs worldwide could soon add range as fast as gasoline-powered cars can now, eliminating one of the biggest obstacles to EV adoption.
The new charging platform won’t work everywhere. BYD says that it will also build 4,000 chargers across China that will be able to take advantage of these maximum speeds. If this pans out, then BYD will be able to charge its newest vehicles twice as fast as Tesla’s next generation of superchargers can.
“This is a good thing,” Jeremy Wallace, a Chinese studies professor at Johns Hopkins University, told me. “Yes, it’s a Chinese company. And there are geopolitical implications to that. But the better the technology gets, the easier it is to decarbonize.”
“As someone who has waited in line for chargers in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, I look forward to the day when charging doesn’t take that long,” he added.
The announcement also suggests that the Chinese EV sector remains as dynamic as ever and continues to set the global standard for EV innovation — and that American and European carmakers are still struggling to catch up. The Trump administration is doing little to help the industry catch up: It has proposed repealing the Inflation Reduction Act’s tax credits for EV buyers, which provide demand-side support for the fledgling industry, and the Environmental Protection Agency is working to roll back tailpipe-pollution rules that have furnished early profits to EV makers, including Tesla. Against that background, what — if anything — can U.S. companies do to catch up?
The situation isn’t totally hopeless, but it’s not great.
BYD’s mega-charging capability is made possible by two underlying innovations. First, BYD’s new platform — the wiring, battery, and motors that make up the electronic guts of the car — will be capable of channeling up to 1,000 volts. That is only a small step-change above the best platforms available elsewhere— the forthcoming Gravity SUV from the American carmaker Lucid is built on a 926-volt platform, while the Cybertruck’s platform is 800 volts — but BYD will be able to leverage its technological firepower with mass manufacturing capacity unrivaled by any other brand.
Second, BYD’s forthcoming chargers will be capable of using the platform’s full voltage. These chargers may need to be built close to power grid infrastructure because of the amount of electricity that they will demand.
But sitting underneath these innovations is a sprawling technological ecosystem that keeps all Chinese electronics companies ahead — and that guarantees Chinese advantages well into the future.
“China’s decisive advantage over the U.S. when it comes to innovation is that it has an entrenched workforce that is able to continuously iterate on technological advances,” Dan Wang, a researcher of China’s technology industry and a fellow at the Paul Tsai China Center at Yale Law School, told me.
The country is able to innovate so relentlessly because of its abundance of process knowledge, Wang said. This community of engineering practice may have been seeded by Apple’s iPhone-manufacturing effort in the aughts and Tesla’s carmaking prowess in the 2010s, but it has now taken on a life of its own.
“Shenzhen is the center of the world’s hardware manufacturing industry because it has workers rubbing shoulders with academics rubbing shoulders with investors rubbing shoulders with engineers,” Wang told me. “And you have a more hustle-type culture because it’s so much harder to maintain technological moats and technological differentiation, because people are so competitive in these sorts of spaces.”
In a way, Shenzhen is the modern-day version of the hardware and software ecosystem that used to exist in northern California — Silicon Valley. But while the California technology industry now largely focuses on software, China has taken over the hardware side.
That allows the country to debut new technological innovations much faster than any other country can, he added. “The comparison I hear is that if you have a new charging platform or a new battery chemistry, Volkswagen and BMW will say, We’ll hustle to put this into our systems, and we’ll put it in five years from now. Tesla might say, we’ll hustle and get it in a year from now.”
“China can say, we’ll put it in three months from now,” he said.“You have a much more focused concentration of talent in China, which collapses coordination time.”
That culture has allowed the same companies and engineers to rapidly advance in manufacturing skill and complexity. It has helped CATL, which originally made batteries for smartphones, to become one of the world’s top EV battery makers. And it has helped BYD — which is close to unseating Tesla as the world’s No. 1 seller of electric vehicles — move from making lackluster gasoline cars to some of the world’s best and cheapest EVs.
It will be a while until America can duplicate that manufacturing capability, partly because of the number of headwinds it faces, Wang said.