Nearly two months after announcing where its first carbon capture facility will be built, Los Alamos-based direct air capture startup Spiritus Technologies said it inked a deal with one of the world's largest oil and gas groups to advance the startup's laboratory spinout technology.
Spiritus said May 17 it signed a memorandum of understanding with Saudi Arabian Oil Co., or Saudi Aramco, a global oil and gas group majority owned by the Government of Saudi Arabia. That MOU is intended to "explore further collaboration" between the New Mexico startup and the Saudi company, which could include joint pilot and commercial-scale projects within the large Middle Eastern country.
The MOU could also include carbon purchasing, said Charles Cadieu, Ph.D., co-founder and CEO of Spiritus, where the Saudi group would buy carbon offsets from Spiritus through the New Mexico startup's carbon removal operations.
Cadieu announced the MOU with Aramco Senior Vice President of Technology, Oversight and Coordination Ali Al-Meshari in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, alongside U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm and Saudi Arabia Energy Minister Abdulaziz bin Salman Al-Saud.
The New Mexico startup also said on May 17 it previously received investment from Aramco Ventures, the corporate venture arm of Aramco. Cadieu didn't say how much Aramco Ventures invested but said it was part of the startup's seed investment round of $11 million, announced in September 2023 when Spiritus emerged from stealth. Khosla Ventures, based in Menlo Park, California, led that round.
Cadieu said Aramco and Spiritus started discussing collaboration after the startup announced that first investment. Conversations moved "very quickly" between last fall and May's deal signing, he added.
"It's a huge opportunity for climate, for Spiritus, this partnership," Cadieu said. "Aramco's new ambitions are quite global."
Spiritus' approach to direct air capture — a method of removing carbon from the air at standalone sites rather than at the source of emissions — involves a type of sorbent technology in the shape of balls, first developed by the startup's Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Matt Lee at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
The startup plans to deploy those sorbent "balls" at direct air capture facilities called "Carbon Orchards," where the balls would passively absorb carbon, release it to be stored underground and then reused at the same location.
The goal, according to Spiritus, is to bring its cost of direct air capture down to under $100 per ton of carbon dioxide captured.
It announced the general location of its inaugural Carbon Orchard facility in mid-March, saying that first site will be built in Central Wyoming. Called "Orchard One," Spiritus expects it to be operational in 2026.
Cadieu said at the time New Mexico could house future Carbon Orchard facilities and that Spiritus is readying a pipeline of an additional two to 10 sites.
He didn't provide a specific timeframe for when work under the MOU with Aramco could start, noting that the startup is focused on readying its Orchard One facility for operations in 2026. He added Spiritus is at the Orchard One site "very regularly" to complete necessary permitting for facility construction.
Saudi Aramco signed MOUs with two other U.S. companies on May 17, Reuters reported. Those include Aeroseal, a leakage technology company headquartered in Miamisburg, Ohio, between Cincinnati and Dayton; and Rondo Energy, an energy storage company based in Alameda, California.
The global oil and gas group aims to achieve net zero scope one and scope two greenhouse gas emissions across its wholly owned assets by 2050.
"We believe direct air capture has the potential to play an important role in reducing carbon emissions from hard-to-abate sectors of the economy, and we see Spiritus' approach to have the potential to scale globally, and specifically in the Middle East," Al-Meshari, Aramco's senior vice president of technology, oversight and coordination, said in a statement.
