Spiritus Technologies, the Los Alamos direct air capture startup that emerged from stealth in early September, has hired a former big-name company executive to further grow its leadership team nearly three months after the startup brought on four other exec team members.
Mindy Ren, who's worked with large corporations including Tesla Inc., Meta Platforms Inc. and ExxonMobil Corp., has joined Spiritus as its head of carbon removal infrastructure. In her new role with the startup, Ren will oversee the construction of Spiritus' first "Carbon Orchard" direct air capture (DAC) site, as well as ensuing DAC facilities, according to a Tuesday news release from the startup.
Previous experience with Tesla, where she managed engineering, procurement and construction for the company's battery facilities in California, in particular, suits her new role with Spiritus well, Ren told New Mexico Inno.
"That's what I worked on when I was with Tesla, piloting their in-house battery manufacturing facilities," she said. "We had a bit of trial-and-error, there were decision points where we had to pivot very quickly and strategically, and I think having those experiences will be able to help me prepare Spiritus to pivot as well if needed down the road."
Those "Carbon Orchard" sites are at the core of Spiritus' plans to break into the growing DAC market, CEO Charles Cadieu, Ph.D., and Chief Technology Officer Matt Lee, Ph.D., told New Mexico Inno in early November. The orchard sites will use a type of sorbent technology, shaped in the form of small balls, that passively absorb carbon dioxide using air contractors.
Sorbent balls can be reused once the carbon they capture is regenerated through a desorption process, then permanently stored in a process called carbon sequestration. The balls would be spread out across Spiritus' Carbon Orchard sites, similar to how apples scatter across apple orchards, and then recycled and reused on-site.
Spiritus claims its DAC approach is more energy efficient and less cost-intensive than competing approaches, at under $100 per ton of carbon dioxide removed. The startup hasn't disclosed details on where its first Carbon Orchard site will be, saying only that it'll be "in the Western U.S."
"Coming from the infrastructure and the construction background, I think there are a couple of really attractive points," Ren said about Spiritus' DAC technology. "First of all, it's a passive air compacting, which is not going to require lots of energy, which is fantastic."
"And also it's a clean process," she continued. "The water and solutions we're going to use are pretty clean, so in that regard, it's going to make the process very quick to deploy and very easy to scale."
Alongside her work with Tesla's battery facilities, Ren helped lead onshore and offshore construction worldwide for ExxonMobil and oversaw hyper-scale data center projects at Meta.
"I came from a very diverse background, different sectors from oil and gas to battery manufacturing to the [artificial intelligence] data center space," Ren said. "Climate tech is not by itself, and removing carbon is not one sector's responsibility."
Ren's hire follows a string of other Spiritus executive hires that came in late September. Those include Jon Rau, who joined as vice president of engineering; Dan Opila, Ph.D., the startup's chief architect; Manny Tafoya, Spiritus' director of engineering; and Eric Cole, who came on as director of manufacturing.
Three of those four hires have links to Los Alamos National Laboratory, where co-founder and CTO Lee worked as well before leaving to launch the startup.
"Mindy [Ren] has a breadth of experience in construction and project management across complex capital-intensive projects, making her a perfect fit to help us deploy Carbon Orchards for direct-air capture of carbon dioxide," Cadieu, Spiritus' co-founder and CEO, said in a statement. "As a first-of-its-kind form of DAC, the construction of our Orchards requires a forward-thinking leader capable of inventive solutions for the practical deployment of new technologies."
Cadieu said there are over 20 people "contributing to Spiritus currently," and he added that the startup is actively hiring for roles related to research and development, engineering, manufacturing and business development.
Khosla Ventures, a venture firm based in Menlo Park, California, that counts artificial intelligence firm OpenAI and food delivery giant DoorDash among its portfolio, is Spiritus' lead investor.
This story was updated to correct the spelling of Mindy Ren's last name.
