Aerleum plans to turn CO2 directly into fuel for cargo ships and, eventually, airplanes
The first one came from Marble, a startup studio based in Paris. They had a scientist looking for help founding a company that would remove carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere — what experts call direct air capture, or DAC.
“They approached the subject as being a DAC company, and I was like, ‘No, no way. I won’t go in that space,” Fiedorow told TechCrunch. “I didn’t want to invest in DAC.”
But he kept an open mind and met with the scientist, Steven Bardey. After a few meetings with his co-founder, he was “all in,” he said. “Once we dug into the numbers, once we did a back-of-the-napkin techno-economic assessment, that was the switching point for me.”
Fiedorow and Bardey started Aerleum in 2023 to refine the DAC technology that Bardey had been working on. Most DAC companies focus on the capture part of the process, designing what are essentially large sponges that can soak up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. It’s not easy or cheap: Even at today’s elevated levels, CO2 represents just 0.04% of the air we breathe.
Once captured, many DAC startups then have to find a buyer for that carbon dioxide. They can compress it and sell it to oil companies, which force it into reservoirs to squeeze out more oil, thereby blunting it as a solution for climate change. Or they might sell it to a sequestration startup, which simply injects it deep into the Earth for storage. Still other companies might sell it to chemical companies, which transport it to their facilities and turn it into other compounds.
