Direct air carbon capture is currently far too costly but this London company says it can do it at enormous scale for a tenth the price, using engineered algal blooms in ponds located near desert coastlines. Oh, and it’ll de-acidify the ocean, too.

As humanity fights to keep its only planet from becoming inhospitable, most of the focus will rightly be on decarbonizing everything we practically can. But it won’t be enough. Direct air capture will need to be part of the equation, and it’ll need to be massively scalable, energy efficient and much, much cheaper than today’s technology, so it can become profitable quickly as carbon taxes and emissions trading schemes kick in globally.

London startup Brilliant Planet believes it has a carbon capture and sequestration model that ticks all the boxes, promising scalability up to billions of tons per year, near-negligible energy requirements, and costs around […]