Khosla Ventures has invested $30 million in Spiritus, a startup developing direct air capture (DAC) technology to remove carbon from the air. The funding will support a pilot plant in New Mexico, expected to remove 1,000 tons of CO2 annually by late 2025, and plans for a larger facility in Wyoming. Spiritus's passive approach aims to reduce costs, and it has secured customers like Stripe and Shopify for carbon removal services. The company will not use captured CO2 for enhanced oil recovery.

LOS ALAMOS, N.M. RIYADH, Saudi Arabia--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Spiritus, the climate tech company pioneering cost-effective solutions for scalable direct-air-capture (DAC) of carbon removal, today entered into a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Aramco, one of the world’s leading global energy and chemicals companies, and has additionally announced that it received an equity investment in the company in November 2023, from Aramco Ventures. “Aramco has stated its ambition to achieve net zero Scope 1 and Scope 2 greenhouse gas emissions across its wholly-owned operated assets by 2050, and sees opportunities to build potential lower-carbon new energy business,” said Ali Al-Meshari, Sr. Vice President of Technology, Oversight Coordination, Aramco. “Innovative technologies deployed at scale can help reduce the costs of reducing carbon emissions, and we are investing in developing these through our RD, venture capital, and technology deployment programs. We believe direct air capture has the potential to play an important role in reducing carbon emissions from hard-to-abate sectors of the economy, and we see Spiritus’ approach to have the potential to scale globally, and specifically in the Middle East.”

LOS ALAMOS, N.M.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--In a significant development for climate action, Spiritus, the leading climate tech company designing solutions for market accessible carbon removal using direct air capture (DAC), has announced today that it will establish its first “Carbon Orchard” direct air capture and sequestration site in Central Wyoming. The facility, known as Orchard One, will be one of the world’s largest direct air capture facilities, capable of capturing and sequestering up to two megatons of carbon from the atmosphere annually. Orchard One will bring hundreds of jobs to Wyoming, and will begin carbon removal in 2026. Spiritus is pioneering a new offering for direct air capture, the gold standard for high-quality carbon dioxide removal (CDR), that makes direct air capture accessible within all net-zero portfolios by driving a tenfold reduction in cost from current standards. Increasing accessibility means bringing the cost of direct air capture and geologic sequestration under $100 a ton, a tenfold cost reduction, enabling stakeholders to achieve more carbon removal value for their high-quality CDR investments. Stakeholders can now include top-quality direct air capture from Orchard One in their portfolios, overcoming a major concern with alternative lower-quality lower-permanence carbon credits and offsets