DCVC DTOR 2025: One way to stop adding carbon to the air is to get the carbon we need from the air

Nature has an efficient way to use sunlight, air, and water to create hydro­car­bons: it’s called photo­syn­thesis. Twelve, which we’ve backed since 2018, invented an industrial equivalent of photo­syn­thesis in the form of a ​“black leaf” elec­trolyzing membrane embedded with a novel CO₂-reducing catalyst. Pumping CO₂ and H₂O through an electrified stack of these membranes yields CO and H₂. This combination is known as syngas, and it can be used as a feedstock to make many other hydro­car­bons, including jet fuel. If the power for the elec­trolyzer comes from renewable sources, and if the CO₂ comes from industrial facilities where it otherwise would have been vented into the air, then the overall process is highly carbon-negative.

At a plant under construc­tion in Moses Lake, Wash., Twelve plans to produce up to a million gallons per year of its E‑Jet sustainable aviation fuel. Last year the company signed a 14-year agreement to supply 260 million gallons of E‑Jet to Inter­na­tional Airlines Group (IAG), the holding company for British Airways, Iberia, and Aer Lingus. DCVC’s Zachary Bogue calls this agreement ​“a significant vote of confidence” in Twelve’s technology, but adds that it also signals a shift in the way we perceive and use CO₂. ​“By converting a destructive byproduct of industrial activities into something as valuable as aviation fuel, Twelve is leading a paradigm shift in redefining the possi­bil­i­ties of carbon trans­for­ma­tion,” Bogue says.

Circularity Fuels is also contributing to that rede­f­i­n­i­tion. The company, which was incubated here at DCVC and is led by entre­pre­neur-in-residence Stephen Beaton, has developed a reactor called Ouro that can take CO₂ out of the atmosphere or an industrial waste stream and turn it directly into almost any hydrocarbon fuel or feedstock. The reactor combines sorbents and proprietary catalysts to reduce the number of steps involved in carbon conversion, leapfrog­ging the complex and expensive refining processes used by most other electrofuel makers. Circularity’s first product is high-purity methane. This is the most expensive form of methane to make if you’re starting from fossil sources, and Circularity can already produce it at lower than the prevailing cost. It’s selling this methane to companies that use it to grow diamond, graphene, and other advanced carbon materials.

Beaton wants to scale up manu­fac­turing of the Circularity reactors so that the company can offer electrofuel methane as a carbon-neutral, drop-in replacement for natural gas, which we already know how to store and transport efficiently. Says Bogue: ​“This type of drop-in replacement is crucial for tran­si­tioning off fossil fuels, because the world doesn’t have a century to build out trans­porta­tion and storage networks for other energy-carrying molecules like hydrogen, ammonia, or methanol.”

There’s carbon all around us, in the air and in our factories’ waste streams. As soon as companies like Twelve and Circularity Fuels have perfected cheap ways to extract it and make it into useful chemicals, we’ll be able to leave fossil carbon where, given the option, it belongs — in geological formations deep underground.