Direct air capture costs around $200 per tonne of CO₂ today. That’s already competitive with some biogenic carbon sources — but it needs to come down dramatically to scale. Brineworks, a 15-person Amsterdam startup, has a specific thesis about how to get there: redesign the electrolyzer from scratch.
CEO Gudfinnur Sveinsson presented their approach at the European CO2 Summit in Rotterdam, speaking to gasworld’s industrial gas audience. The talk is worth watching in full.
The Core Insight: Intermittency Is a Feature, Not a Bug
Most DAC systems are designed for continuous operation — which means they need reliable, round-the-clock power. That’s expensive. Brineworks’ electrochemical approach is designed to run on cheap, intermittent renewable energy: run hard when wind and solar are abundant, pause when they’re not.
This changes the cost structure fundamentally. Instead of competing for baseload power at premium prices, the system can chase the cheapest electrons on the grid.
Green Hydrogen as a Co-Product
The second piece of the puzzle is co-production. Brineworks’ electrolyzer captures CO₂ and produces green hydrogen simultaneously. The hydrogen revenue offsets the cost of capture — a trick that improves the economics without requiring the CO₂ price to do all the work.
This isn’t a novel idea in principle, but the integration into a single electrochemical system designed specifically for DAC is what makes their approach distinctive.
The Market Case: E-Fuels Need CO₂
Sveinsson’s framing for why DAC must scale is sharp: the e-fuels industry — critical for decarbonising aviation and shipping — will need “many hundreds of megatons of CO₂” as a feedstock. Natural sources won’t be sufficient or reliable enough. DAC is, in his words, the only truly scalable solution.
This is a demand-pull argument rather than a climate-push argument, and it’s the more durable one for attracting industrial investment.
Target: Sub-$100/tonne by 2035
Brineworks is targeting sub-$100 per tonne of CO₂ by 2035. That’s aggressive but not implausible given the learning curves of electrochemical systems and the continued decline in renewable energy costs.
Watch the full presentation: youtu.be/m7TlvhWJb9s
Brineworks is not a CDI portfolio company. We cover promising CDR startups regardless of investment relationship.