Fall 2025

The team looked at how cost effective and scalable the DAC applications for SAF in decarbonizing aviation based on the current landscape. They examined this through case studies on 4 diverse industry players headquartered around the world. 

Mission Zero, headquartered in London has a Sheffield plant which captures  50 tCO2/yr for e-kerosene (SAF) production. It was one of the only DAC companies with multiple deployed modular plants that are mass manufacturable. The second company, Climeworks, uses the Temperature-Vacuum Swing Adsorption method which is the most commercially validated solid-sorbent DAC pathway. Climeworks has 2 multi thousand ton DAC plants and is sustainable for synthetic SAF production. The third company DACLab was designed for integration with permanent sequestration, SAF and carbon-utilization pathways with the Kelvin pod being tested at e-fuel sites. Skytree was the last company looked at , which uses solar powered DAC units to develop liquid methanol.

In the techno-economic assessment, they looked at the chemical processes to determine the cost of the chemical process for carbon caption. They broke down the process into contacting, regeneration, and compression, and then looked at the energy usage for different chemical processes. Afterwards, they calculated the LCOE for each company, looking at different grid distributions and estimated the LCOE for each grid distribution. Afterwards the team looked at SAF conversion and current market competitiveness by looking at the Fischer-Tropsch Cycle modifications and the costs of different designs. Key takeaways were that quantifying DAC expenses mandates accounting for geographic and source energy costs, and companies need to be financed more competitively to improve standing in the market.