Data centers are a growing climate problem, as the energy needed to train AI models inflates tech companies’ carbon footprints. Startup X, spun out of Google’s Moonshot Factory, says its technology could offer a potential solution: It can extract carbon dioxide from the air, run partly on waste heat from servers, and even produce water to cool data centers more efficiently.
A company called 280 Earth just closed a $40 million deal to capture carbon emissions for major corporations through Frontier, an initiative launched by Stripe, Alphabet, Meta, Shopify and McKinsey to support emerging carbon removal technologies in 2022. Buyers include Frontier’s founding members, as well as brands like Autodesk, H&M Group, JPMorgan Chase and Workday.
Filtering carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is becoming popular among companies struggling to meet sustainability goals while reducing their carbon emissions as they transition to clean energy. Frontier has also brokered deals between big tech companies and other startups looking to capture carbon using rocks, liquid smoke and even sewage.
“When we started 280 Earth as a moonshot at X, our vision was always to find a radically effective, affordable, and scalable way to remove billions of tons of carbon from the atmosphere. We’re excited to see this momentum from Frontier buyers,” Astro Teller, moonshots lead at Alphabet’s X, said in an email.
Filtering carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is becoming popular among companies trying to meet sustainability goals.
280 Earth makes modules that contain an absorbent material called a sorbent, which filters CO2 from the air. This is similar to the large industrial facilities called direct air capture (DAC) plants that other companies have started building in recent years. But 280 Earth says its modules run more efficiently and can work in conjunction with data centers to draw power from their waste heat.
Other DAC technologies work in large batches by waiting until the adsorbent is fully saturated and then heating the filter to high temperatures (over 100 degrees or 212 degrees Fahrenheit) to release and capture the captured CO2. do not have By continuously transferring the adsorbent between the two chambers rather than working in batches, the energy losses associated with reheating, cooling and pressure changes within a single chamber are avoided.
280 Earth CEO John Pimentel says it’s like the difference between a home oven and a professional pizza oven: A home oven loses heat and energy every time you turn it on and off and open and close the door, while a pizza oven retains heat better and stays the same temperature.
280 Earth’s technology not only captures CO2, but also sucks in water vapor, extracts it, and provides water to customers. Pimentel says the company can collect two to four tons of water for every ton of CO2 captured.
All of this should create a win-win situation for 280 Earth and data centers, or other industrial facilities that need water and produce waste heat. One criticism of DAC technology is how much energy it requires to heat the filters. 280 Earth’s adsorbents work at temperatures low enough to harness industrial waste heat. Data centers, on the other hand, consume a lot of electricity and water to run their servers and keep them from overheating. 280 Earth could help in that regard by absorbing waste heat and producing water for cooling systems.
But the biggest impact will be eliminating the carbon emissions that contribute to climate change. For example, Google’s carbon footprint has increased by nearly 50 percent since 2019, mostly due to new and expanding data centers used to train AI. That’s why some environmental groups worry that relying on new strategies to capture carbon pollution already emitted is risky. After all, these are new technologies that have yet to be proven at scale, and are currently prohibitively expensive.
280 Earth just finished building a pilot facility in Oregon in May, which will be used to capture 61,600 tons of CO2 by 2030 as part of a $40 million contract, at a cost of more than $600 per ton of captured CO2. The company is still finalizing plans for where to sequester the captured CO2, but most of it will likely be shipped by truck or rail to underground storage wells somewhere in the U.S.
For comparison, Google caused 14.3 million tonnes of carbon dioxide pollution in 2023 alone, which shows how small the impact of this initial carbon removal deal will be on the company’s overall carbon emissions, and how expensive it will be to pay to capture the bulk of its climate pollution.
Pimentel says scaling up carbon removal will reduce costs. He also thinks it will buy companies time to transition to cleaner energy. “We’d like to believe that the transition away from fossil fuels will happen quickly, but it’s going to take decades,” he says. “In the meantime, we’re continuing to put more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, compounding the problems we already have. So I’m a big believer in ‘all solutions.'”
