A small laboratory scale cell with all components. The inlet and outlet ports transport the gas stream that interacts with the cell.
Photo credit: Buchen et al./Nature Energy
A small laboratory scale cell with all components. The inlet and outlet ports transport the gas stream that interacts with the cell.
Photo credit: Buchen et al./Nature Energy
The researchers tested a laboratory-scale device that consisted of nine cells stacked one on top of the other, each with an area of about half a sheet of letter-sized paper. A fan pushed air through winding air channels in the plates that hold each cell together (using components borrowed from fuel cells).
This small device used about 0.8 megawatt hours of electricity per ton of CO captured2. Current systems for carbon capture from the ambient air are around 1.5 to 3 megawatt hours per ton of CO2.
Control the process
Several of the researchers on the team are part of a startup called RepAir Carbon based on this technology, and part of the paper will be spent outlining large-scale financial feasibility.
Estimate of the cost of an initial small pilot plant (approximately $566 per ton of CO captured).2) they use the learning rate from the lithium-ion battery industry and some common cost scaling for larger plants to advance a few pilot generations. They estimate that for a plant with a thousand times the capacity of their pilot plant they could achieve $92 per ton of CO captured2.
That would be much cheaper than what has been achieved so far by companies like Climeworks, which aims to get down to $250 to $350 per ton by 2030 – and has shown how difficult it can be to meet optimistic scaling forecasts.
The goal in the world of carbon capture has long been to aim for $100 per ton, as such a low cost could lead to much wider adoption. Expanding the number of technologies pursued can increase the chances that one of them will achieve this goal.
Nature Energy, 2026. DOI: 10.1038/s41560-026-02129-z (About DOIs).
