A press release landed claiming direct air capture at $30/ton by retrofitting 120,000 US gas stations. The company is PlanetWEST, the technology is called MIDAC G2, and the pitch is genuinely clever: while you pump gasoline in, the machine pumps captured carbon out. Solid carbon output, no CO₂ pipelines needed, zero water consumption, no chemical byproducts.

For context on those numbers: Climeworks’ Mammoth plant in Iceland is running at roughly $1,000/ton. The DOE’s Earthshot program has a target of $100/ton by 2030 — an ambitious goal that the field is working hard to hit. PlanetWEST is claiming $30/ton now, from a press release.

The concept has real appeal. Gas stations are already infrastructure nodes distributed across the country. Colocation reduces land acquisition costs. If the carbon output is genuinely solid and stable, you sidestep the entire CO₂ transport and storage problem that bedevils most DAC deployments. That’s not nothing.

But $30/ton from a press release deserves scrutiny, not celebration.

The gap between $30 and the current frontier (~$300-1,000/ton depending on the project) isn’t a rounding error — it’s an order of magnitude. Claims at that level require detailed cost breakdowns: capital expenditure per unit, sorbent cost and lifetime, energy source and consumption, maintenance, and what they’re actually counting as “captured.” Are these third-party verified numbers? What’s the CO₂ purity? How does the solid carbon get disposed of or utilized, and what’s that cost?

The “solid carbon output” claim is also worth probing. Producing solid carbon from atmospheric CO₂ is a chemically intensive process. Several companies are pursuing mineralization or solid-carbon pathways, and none of them are cheap. Solid carbon isn’t inherently more permanent than geologically stored CO₂ either — it depends entirely on what happens to it next.

None of this means PlanetWEST is wrong. Genuinely novel approaches do emerge, and gas station colocation is a distribution model worth exploring seriously. But the CDR field has learned — sometimes painfully — that press release claims and operational reality have a wide gap. The ask isn’t dismissal. The ask is data: independent verification, a published methodology, and pilot results before the $30/ton number gets repeated as fact.

Show the work.