Making fuel from thin air used to be a chemistry demo. Now it’s a military procurement program.
C&EN reports that two startups — AirCo (formerly Air Company) and Prometheus Fuels — are both expanding their CO₂-to-fuel operations, each with a very different playbook.
AirCo: Fuel for the Frontlines
AirCo has secured $15 million in US Air Force funding to build containerized, deployable fuel reactors. The concept: shipping-container-sized modules that capture CO₂ from ambient air, combine it with hydrogen, and produce jet fuel on-site.
The military case is compelling. Transporting fuel to forward operating bases can cost hundreds of dollars per litre once logistics, security, and supply chain risks are factored in. A modular DAC-to-fuel unit powered by small nuclear reactors could eliminate the supply chain entirely.
AirCo uses a variation of the Fischer-Tropsch process with proprietary catalysts that produce methanol, ethanol, and jet-fuel alkanes. The company is building a manufacturing facility in Pennsylvania for mass-producing the modules, with the first units expected operational in 2027.
Prometheus: Skip the Hydrogen
Prometheus Fuels is taking a fundamentally different route. Their process uses an aqueous carbonate solvent to absorb CO₂ from air, then converts the carbonate ions directly into kerosene-range hydrocarbons (C6–C20) in an electrochemical cell.
The claimed advantage: no molecular hydrogen as an intermediate. That’s significant because hydrogen production is one of the most energy-intensive (and expensive) steps in conventional CO₂-to-fuel processes.
“I think we make Fischer-Tropsch obsolete,” said founder Rob McGinnis. Bold claim. The company has been running a pilot of its DAC + methanol reactor for four years and says the kerosene pathway can compete with petroleum-derived fuel on cost.
The Bigger Picture
These aren’t CDR companies in the traditional sense — they’re making fuel, not sequestering carbon. The carbon in the fuel gets re-released when it burns. But the CO₂-to-fuel pathway matters for CDR economics in two ways:
- It validates DAC at commercial scale. Every improvement in air capture technology benefits both utilization and sequestration.
- It creates revenue streams that can cross-subsidize pure removal. Companies like Climeworks and Carbon Engineering also explored utilization as a stepping stone.
The DAC-to-fuel market is also a forcing function for cheap renewable electricity — the same input that makes permanent CDR affordable.
Whether AirCo’s military-industrial approach or Prometheus’s electrochemistry wins the race, the fact that this race exists at all is a sign of how far DAC has come from lab curiosity to engineering reality.
Source: C&EN (American Chemical Society)