The UK firm on a mission to shake up direct air capture technology

For anyone who has been (very understandably) avoiding the news of late, humanity’s battle against climate collapse isn’t going so well. Aided by El Nino, 2024 was the hottest year on record, with average temperatures on Earth pushing 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels for the first time. Meanwhile, global emissions continued to grow, even with the rapid expansion of renewables. 

At times like these, hope is a precious commodity. One company in the marketplace is Mission Zero, a London-headquartered startup looking to shake up direct air capture (DAC), the process of removing CO2 from the atmosphere.

Not to be confused with CCS (carbon capture and storage), DAC extracts historical CO2 from the air rather than capturing emissions as fossil fuels are burnt. As we’re currently on track to massively overshoot the Paris Agreement targets – see the untimely death of 1.5°C above – it’s widely agreed that DAC is vital to stabilise atmospheric CO2 levels as the century progresses. But for that to happen, new methods of monetising CO2 need to evolve, allowing the technology to scale commercially.

“If you can find ways to utilise CO2, then you can actually change the narrative on that and provide alternative pathways for carbon-based products to make our relationship with carbon more sustainable,” Nicholas Chadwick, co-founder and CEO of Mission Zero, told The Engineer.

Mission Zero was spun out of Deep Space Ventures (DSV) in June 2020, where co-founder and CTO Gaël Gobaille-Shaw, was working at the time. Shiladitya Ghosh, chemical engineer and COO, rounds out the co-founding team alongside Gobaille-Shaw and Chadwick, who are both chemists.

It’s clear DSV places a premium on founders with scientific backgrounds as well as entrepreneurial chops. It acts as a sort of hothouse for startups, identifying areas that are ripe for innovation, spinning out the company and founders, and investing alongside other partners.

Last year saw Mission Zero raise £21.8 million in Series A funding and the company counts Bill Gates amongst its backers. Its value proposition is built around CO2 utilisation, but that CO2 first needs to be extracted from the atmosphere as efficiently as possible. DAC costs are largely tied to the energy input required to release CO2 back from the capture medium. Minimising that energy is vital.

“Really, if you look at the total energy consumption, the engineering complexity, and therefore the implied cost of direct air capture, it usually comes from how you get the CO2 back from whatever medium you captured it in,” Chadwick explained.

The technology takes it cues from human biology. Fans breathe in air from the atmosphere, with CO2 then dissolved in a water-based solvent developed in-house by Mission Zero. Rather than energy-intensive heat, electrodialysis is used to release the CO2 from the solvent, which can then be reused. According to Chadwick, using electricity rather than heat to extract the CO2 is a key point of difference and makes the technology ultra efficient.

“We’re able to selectively extract and regenerate the CO2 using just electricity,” he said. “CO2 comes out at very high purity, at the right use cases for most of the utilisation pathways that we’re talking about, and then this regenerates the solvent at the same time.”

According to Chadwick, some parts within the tech stack will need occasional replacement, but for the most part the system can tick along with no intervention and low running costs. And while the in-house solvent is something of a secret sauce, it’s claimed it can be produced at scale using existing supply chains, as can the rest of the stack. 

“All we’re really doing is taking technologies that have been around for multiple decades and pulling them together, bringing them together in new ways from a process perspective that allows us to achieve cheap, economical direct capture,” said Chadwick. “And it’s nowhere near optimised to where it really could be.”

Once captured, it will be up to individual customers how that CO2 is used. Mission Zero currently has three deployments under way, each with a different use case. The University of Sheffield’s Translational Energy Research Centre (TERC) is using the tech to produce sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) from air and water. The project is said to be the UK’s first commercial DAC plant, pulling 50 tonnes of CO2 from the air each year.

In Norfolk, OCO Technology is combining CO2 from Mission Zero’s DAC with waste fly ash, producing carbon-negative limestone for construction. The containerised system will extract 250 tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere annually.

Lastly, Canadian company Deep Sky is also deploying a 250-tonne capacity system in Quebec, where CO2 from DAC will be permanently sequestered in rock, creating carbon credits. Deep Sky has plans to scale up commercial facilities capable of operating at the megaton level in the coming years.

“We think that DAC fits quite nicely into these different utilisation cases,” said Chadwick, “and we want to be demonstrating that it can fill all these different use cases quite nicely.”

Mission Zero should also gain a large body of knowledge from the three deployments, enabling it to refine its technology and increase efficiency. By 2030, Chadwick believes the process could be fine-tuned to the point where it’s the cheapest form of DAC on the market.

“What I will say about price is that we think will be cheaper, faster, than basically anyone else,” he said.

According to the CEO, carbon removal credits are currently going for $400-$1000 a tonne, but industrial consumers are often paying more than that for CO2 supplies. As more renewables come online, periods of overcapacity should in theory become more frequent. DAC could benefit from cheap electricity in these instances, helping push the price of capture down. What’s more, DAC can give companies reliant on CO2 a steady supply of the gas at high purity levels, which sectors like the food industry may put a premium on after recent shortages. 

“One of the key things we’re able to do for customers is to say you actually have control over your CO2 supply,” said Chadwick. “The idea with the business models is to provide flexibility around what we will do in the future as the market shapes up.”

Mission Zero is hedging its bets, happy to offer DAC as a solution to most. It does not, however, work with oil and gas companies, which use huge quantities of CO2 for enhanced oil recovery (EOR), pumping it into depleted oil fields to aid extraction. As its name suggests, the company is focused on net zero and climate-positive CO2 utilisation as a means to get there. 

“We think we deliver the highest climate benefit by removing residual historical emissions from the atmosphere,” said Chadwick. “We believe that synthetic fuels and building materials are where you deliver the maximum benefit.”

It’s early days, but Mission Zero believes CO2 has the potential to displace fossil fuels as our primary source of carbon, with DAC as the key enabling technology.

“In a gold rush, you need pickaxes,” said Chadwick. Here’s hoping we start digging in the right direction.