The carbon is leaving anyway. Remora wants to sell it.
Somewhere on an interstate right now, a semi-truck is burning diesel and breathing out carbon dioxide at highway speed. Most of the climate industry would build a billion-dollar facility to scrub that same molecule out of the open sky years later. Remora's answer is less romantic and more stubborn: catch it at the tailpipe, before it gets away.
The company makes a box. It sits between the cab and the trailer, or rides along a freight locomotive, and it threads exhaust through a bed of adsorbents that grab the CO2 and let everything else pass. No giant plant. No waiting for the gas to disperse across a continent. Just a retrofit on equipment that already exists, doing the unglamorous work of not letting the carbon scatter in the first place.
And here is the part that makes investors lean in: the captured CO2 is not waste. It gets liquefied and sold - into a US industrial market that is, improbably, short on the stuff. The trucking company or railroad gets a cut. Decarbonization, reframed as a revenue line.
It seemed inefficient to let CO2 scatter into the atmosphere and then try to collect it again. So we catch it at the source.
- Paul Gross, co-founder & CEOFreight runs on diesel, and diesel doesn't quit
Trucks and trains move nearly everything you own at some point in its life. They also emit roughly 375 million tons of CO2 a year in the United States alone. Unlike a passenger car, you cannot simply hand a long-haul fleet a battery and wish it luck - the energy density, the routes, the duty cycles all conspire against a clean swap. Electrification of heavy freight is coming, slowly, on a timeline measured in decades.
Which leaves an awkward middle. Millions of diesel engines will keep running for years whether or not anyone likes it. The conventional climate playbook had little to offer them beyond patience. Remora's founders looked at that gap and saw not a lost cause but an enormous, rolling, addressable source of carbon - already concentrated, already in one place, conveniently funneled through a pipe.
375 million tons of CO2 leave US trucks and trains every year. We want to grab it before it leaves the tailpipe.
- Remora, on the size of the problemA Yale hunch, a Michigan thesis, and a wrench
The hunch belonged to Paul Gross. As a Yale student he kept circling the same thought - that capturing carbon at the point it's made beats chasing it across the atmosphere. The science to back the hunch already existed, buried in a doctoral dissertation at the University of Michigan written by Christina Reynolds, a former EPA scientist who had spent years on mobile-source carbon capture: two years of bench testing, two years on vehicles, then a stint validating the work inside the EPA's own emissions lab.
Gross found the thesis, then found Reynolds, and convinced her to leave a stable government job for an unproven startup. They added Eric Harding, a mechanic turned engineer who could make the thing actually bolt onto a truck. Three people, one of whom had literally spent her PhD proving this could work, betting that the cheapest place to do carbon removal is the place everyone else ignored.
The Yale student who wouldn't drop the idea.
Ex-EPA scientist; the PhD thesis is hers.
Mechanic-turned-engineer; makes it fit on real trucks.
The slow, deliberate climb
// From a dissertation to thousands of vehicles
Zero-backpressure, which is a fancy way of saying it won't choke the engine
The trick with strapping anything to an exhaust system is that engines hate resistance. Push back against the flow and you hurt fuel economy and reliability - the two things a fleet manager cares about most. Remora's pitch hinges on the word "zero-backpressure": capture the carbon without making the engine work harder for the privilege.
Inside the box, exhaust passes through a molecular sieve - an adsorbent riddled with pores sized to trap CO2 and ignore the rest. Waste heat from the exhaust then releases a stream of pure CO2, which is compressed and stored onboard. At a truck stop or distribution center, the operator offloads it, and from there it heads to a buyer or to permanent storage in an EPA-permitted well. The same box also knocks down soot, particulate matter and NOx to Tier 4 levels - cleaner air as a side effect.
Truck capture device
Mounts between cab and trailer, captures 80-90% of exhaust CO2, stores it onboard for offload.
Locomotive system
Modular, zero-backpressure capture retrofit for freight locomotives, Tier 4 on pollutants.
CO2 offtake & revenue share
Captured CO2 is sold to industry or sequestered - and the operator gets a cut.
We turn a cost center - emissions - into a revenue stream for the operator.
- The Remora business model, in one sentenceValidated where it's hard to fake it
Climate hardware is generous with renderings and stingy with results. Remora's counterweight is third-party validation: the underlying technology was tested at the EPA's National Vehicle and Fuel Emissions Laboratory, not just on a company slide. A single truck device can capture north of 100 metric tons of CO2 a year - the kind of number that sounds small until you multiply it by a fleet.
Then there's the customer list, which is the part that's genuinely hard to argue with. Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern - two Class I railroads - plus short lines like Pacific Harbor Lines on the rail side. Ryder, Werner, Estes, Covenant and Purolator on the trucking side. Shippers like Shopify buying the removal. These are not pilot-shy logos.
The capture math
// Why catching it at the source beats chasing it later
Make the clean choice the profitable one
Plenty of climate companies ask operators to sacrifice - to pay more, run slower, or accept worse equipment for the sake of the planet. Remora's wager is that sacrifice doesn't scale and incentives do. If capturing carbon puts money back in a railroad's pocket, the railroad doesn't need to be convinced. It needs an invoice.
That's the quiet radicalism here. The mission isn't framed as "save the world." It's framed as "generate revenue for railroads and trucking companies by extracting, purifying and selling CO2." The planet benefits because the math works, not the other way around. It is, if you squint, the most capitalist climate pitch going - and possibly the most durable for exactly that reason.
The US has a CO2 shortage. Remora's trucks are, improbably, a rolling supply.
- On the market nobody expectedDistributed infrastructure, hiding in plain sight
Heavy freight will burn fuel for years. That's not pessimism, it's logistics. The interesting question is what rides along with it in the meantime. If Remora's box ends up on enough trucks and locomotives, the freight network quietly becomes something it was never designed to be: distributed carbon-removal infrastructure, scaling one retrofit at a time, paid for by the value of what it captures.
So picture that truck on the interstate again. Same diesel, same highway, same carbon dioxide pushing out the back. Only now the carbon doesn't scatter. It gets caught, compressed, sold, and split with the person driving. The molecule that used to be a problem became a product somewhere around exit 47 - and nobody had to wait a decade for a battery to make it happen.