Matt Atwood and the strange business of needing more CO₂

Matt Atwood had a carbon dioxide problem. There wasn’t enough of it where he needed it. For someone working on climate technology, this was an awkward complaint. The atmosphere had an excess; his algae needed feeding. The distance between those two facts would eventually become the basis of a company.

In 2009, while looking for CO₂ supplies for algae cultivation, Atwood encountered direct air capture at the Copenhagen climate conference. Here was a way to obtain the molecule from the surrounding air. He was approaching the technology with a buyer’s shopping list. That detail helps explain the business he later built.

Atwood launched Aircapture in West Berkeley in 2019. Its premise puts the customer close to the machinery: capture atmospheric CO₂ at the place where a business needs to use it. A brewery can want a dependable ingredient. A concrete producer can want a different carbon supply. The grand atmospheric question arrives attached to a production schedule.

The algae had to eat

Atwood’s route began in biofuels around 2002, studying renewable fuels and their carbon effects. He founded an algae company in 2008. The attraction was a process that could combine wastewater treatment with growing biomass and making useful energy products. Sewage, viewed through a chemist’s eyes, offered rather more possibilities than its public reputation suggested.

His collaborator was John Perry Barlow, a Grateful Dead lyricist and cofounder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Barlow had also grown up ranching in Wyoming. A wastewater venture gave this unlikely partnership another line of work. By 2014, Algae Systems had completed a pilot plant in Daphne, Alabama, growing algae offshore in large plastic bags using wastewater, an approach with roots at NASA.

Atwood later recalled seeing a small plastic bag floating in a sink at NASA with Barlow. They were asked to imagine a much larger version, filled with sewage, on the ocean. To these two, it looked like a business worth attempting. There are tidier entrepreneurial origin stories. Few involve so much water.

The work extended beyond growing algae. In 2017, Atwood and Heath Wintz coauthored a technical article about hydrothermal liquefaction, the conversion of wet organic material into biocrude using heat and pressure. They examined equipment, energy yields, capital costs, and operating expenses. Resource recovery had to survive a spreadsheet as well as a demonstration.

Their comparison set hydrothermal liquefaction against anaerobic digestion, considering how much treatment capacity an investment could buy. It was a practical exercise in choosing equipment for a utility, with energy recovery and future operating costs included in the calculation.

The paper described engineering work to fit equipment within a standard shipping container. That is a revealing early appearance of a question that returns at Aircapture: how do you turn an elaborate process into something that can be built, moved, and installed repeatedly?

A factory with a buyer next door

Algae Systems also supplied a commercial lesson. Atwood has described the difficulty of selling a startup’s technology to wastewater utilities that can take a decade to make infrastructure decisions. The technology might work while the company waits. A founder has to finance the waiting, too.

With Aircapture, he pursued a market in which customers already buy the material he plans to supply. The machines are modular, allowing installations to match different levels of demand. In his explanation of the strategy, making more small machines offers an earlier route into manufacturing and operating experience than concentrating everything in a few enormous projects.

“We are solving problems for our customers today,” Atwood said in a 2025 conversation. The sentence has the plainness of someone who expects a follow-up question about price. Aircapture announced a $50 million Series A in June that year, led by the Larsen Lam Climate Change Foundation, to expand manufacturing, deployment, and its engineering teams.

“We are solving problems for our customers today.”

Matt Atwood

At a policy conference in 2023, he explained the machinery in direct terms. A fan moves air across contactor surfaces that collect CO₂. Heat, often supplied as low-temperature or waste steam, releases the collected gas. It can then be processed for a customer’s application. Capturing it is only part of the job; useful quality and delivery matter.

The brewery cannot wait for a truck

In March 2026, that customer argument acquired a particularly sociable demonstration. Aircapture and Almanac Beer Co. announced Flow - Clean Air Edition, carbonated with atmospheric CO₂ captured at Almanac’s Alameda brewery. The system fed beverage-grade gas into an existing brewing operation. The resulting drink still had to do the familiar work of being beer.

The supply question was less leisurely. Almanac had lost two days of production the previous autumn when CO₂ deliveries failed to arrive. It could not can beer. The brewing schedule backed up, and catching up required an additional shift. A missing gas delivery had become a staffing problem, a packaging problem, and a sales problem.

Almanac’s CEO, Damian Fagan, put the savings at 15% per pound of CO₂. Reliability mattered enough that he said he would have been willing to pay more for it. For Atwood, this is a customer whose motivation can be understood without a carbon-market forecast. The brewery wants to keep making and selling its product.

The distinction between that use and permanent removal remains essential. Carbon dioxide in beer eventually returns to the atmosphere. Supplying it locally can replace another supply chain, but a drink does not become a geological carbon store. The practical attraction is a working application through which capture equipment can be developed and improved.

Seventeen days, then a different ending

For the permanent-storage version, Atwood works with partners who take responsibility for what happens after capture. Project Hajar pairs Aircapture’s machines with 44.01’s mineralization technology. Captured CO₂ goes into subsurface rock formations, where the aim is durable storage through a chemical transformation. The molecule has a very different itinerary from a brewery ingredient.

The UAE installation offered a test of the modular approach. Aircapture reported reaching full operational status in 17 days. In April 2025, the collaboration received a $1 million XFACTOR award in the XPRIZE Carbon Removal competition’s Air track. The recognition belonged to a joint project: the capture system and the storage pathway had to work together.

There was earlier, less theatrical work behind that result. In 2023, the National Carbon Capture Center worked with Aircapture and the Southern States Energy Board to install and test its DAC recovery system. The center provided an industrial setting and technical support before commercialization. The short installation timetable in the UAE rested on a longer sequence of engineering and testing.

Atwood’s role therefore includes assembling capabilities his company does not supply alone. The capture machine, the energy source, the destination for the gas, and the financing all belong in the same project. Partnerships make the chain possible. They also make the performance of the whole chain the relevant measure.

The ceramic and the microwave

In March 2026, Corning and Aircapture announced that their collaboration was moving toward commercial deployment and scale-up. Corning supplies honeycomb ceramic materials engineered for CO₂ capture. The relationship joins a materials manufacturer’s production experience to Atwood’s system design and deployment work. A useful surface inside a machine can matter as much as the machine’s exterior.

Corning’s contribution draws on decades of ceramic-substrate engineering, including technologies developed for vehicle emissions control. In Aircapture’s application, the material must support airflow, capture chemistry, and repeated operation. The collaboration’s emphasis on durability and manufacturing makes Atwood’s ambitions more concrete: a system has to keep working after everyone has finished photographing it.

Another materials collaboration reached a field test in August 2026. Aircapture and NGK announced a demonstration at Aizawa Concrete’s Fukushima RDM Center in Japan. It combines Aircapture’s system with NGK ceramics and evaluates capture performance, operating characteristics, and durability. Possible use of the captured gas in concrete is part of the investigation.

Atwood’s team is also developing Lightswing, a microwave-based approach to releasing captured CO₂. Aircapture describes it as targeting the bond holding the gas to the sorbent, rather than broadly heating surrounding equipment. The engineering ambition is lower energy use and cost. Those improvements need to be demonstrated under operating conditions.

In June 2026, Aircapture announced its selection among 16 Tencent CarbonX 2.0 winners. Its associated plan calls for a 100-tonne-per-year Lightswing pilot in Kenya, within a shared hub testing different capture approaches. The capacity is a planned demonstration scale. The next useful evidence will come from running it.

A chemist’s unfinished shopping list

Atwood’s interests still extend beyond the current machines. Asked where else he would direct resources, he has pointed to wastewater treatment and reuse, particularly recovering energy while cleaning water. Project financing also remains on his list. These are concerns that fit a career spent moving between chemistry, equipment, customers, and the cost of building things.

He has advocated global carbon pricing while emphasizing the need for reliable buyers and demonstrated performance before large projects can attract conventional financing. The aspiration is broad; the requirements are specific. Someone must buy the output. Someone must manufacture the equipment. Someone must make the installation dependable enough to finance.

The algae that first needed feeding led him into a business where carbon dioxide can be an ingredient, a commodity, or material headed for rock. His job now is to make those pathways work in particular places, for particular customers. A brewer waiting for a delivery gives that ambition a useful deadline.