- Noya Labs is turning cooling towers into CO2 emissions capturing devices
- The technology managed to lower the price of captured CO2 they plan to sell
- The business model of selling the captured CO2 could allow further development of vertically integrated CCS technology
A new startup called Noya Labs is taking steps towards something truly revolutionary in the carbon capture technology space. The company wants to turn the 2 million cooling towers across the U.S. into CO2-sucking weapons against climate change. The tech, based on a home DAC device, can be applied to industrial cooling towers and capture between half a ton and a ton of CO2 per day.
Noya’s CC technology works by adding CO2-absorbing chemicals to the water circulating in the cooling towers. Then, an attachment is added to the cooling tower that activates a process called regeneration, to convert the captured CO2 back into gas. The company plans to resell the captured CO2 to industrial consumers.
According to founders Josh Santos and Daniel Cavero, buyers are in a race for the CO2 that Noya Labs will offer. They mention companies like Aether Diamonds who make “diamonds from air”. Synthetic fuel producers like Dimensional Energy, Prometheus Fuels, or Opus12, which all use CO2 are also potential clients.
The company has a slight competitive advantage – a low production price. From an average market price of $125 per ton to $5,000 per ton of CO2, they would produce for less than $100 per ton. In comparison, Direct Air Capture companies right now sell their CO2 from somewhere between $600 to $700 per ton.
A Green Technology?
However, they don’t call their carbon technology exactly “green” yet. CO2 is being recirculated in the economy instead of sequestered, but it generates less emissions than the existing sources of CO2 currently available in the market, coming from ammonia and ethanol plants. What they aim to do initially, is create a profitable business from locally produced low-cost air captured CO2. Then they can generate revenue to develop vertically integrated carbon capture and sequestration technology long-term.
What makes their project stand out from the DAC space is the revenue potential and scalability as they leverage existing industrial equipment. Their business model makes it profitable to actually remove 1 gigaton-plus CO2 a year.
Noya Labs is an example from the growing collection of companies focused on developing innovative revenue inducing cleantech out there. Experimenting with carbon chemistry via carbon capture tech is what more companies choose to do.
It’s great to know that there are options these days wherein the towers would have less than $100 of cost per ton. I can imagine how helpful it would be to be getting a more affordable material such as the cooling tower parts when you are starting out with this business. In my opinion, finding available options that are more affordable will be beneficial for those who are new to the industry.