Building the world's largest direct air capture facility

The Stratos facility in West Texas is set to become the world’s largest commercial-scale direct air capture (DAC) plant, aiming to begin operations by the end of 2025. Designed to capture 500,000 tonnes of CO2 annually—about 14 times the capacity of the current largest DAC plant in Iceland—Stratos represents a critical test of whether DAC technology can be scaled beyond pilot projects. DAC is a cutting-edge carbon removal method that extracts CO2 directly from ambient air, which contains CO2 at a very low concentration (~0.04%), requiring the processing of massive volumes of air through chemical systems that bind and then release concentrated CO2 for underground storage. DAC differs fundamentally from traditional carbon capture and storage (CCS), which captures CO2 from concentrated emission sources such as power plants. Because atmospheric CO2 is roughly 1,000 times more dilute than point-source emissions, DAC systems must handle much larger air volumes, resulting in higher energy use, costs, and engineering challenges