How Marlon Brando’s private island inspired a plan to suck carbon pollution from the air

By Hilary Whiteman, Laura Paddison, CNN

(CNN) — A pristine atoll in the Pacific Ocean once owned by late acting legend Marlon Brando is the birthplace of a technology that could help solve a problem created far beyond its sandy shores.

Alex Gagnon and fellow oceanographer Julian Sachs, co-founders of Seattle-based Banyu Carbon, were on Tetiaroa island, north of Tahiti, a decade ago researching the impact of ocean acidification on coral reefs, when they realized what they were doing could help tackle a global crisis.

“We were having to move a lot of carbon in and out of seawater,” explained Gagnon, who’s also an associate professor at the University of Washington. Gagnon said he and Sachs asked themselves: “What if we turned it backwards to actually pull carbon dioxide out of the air?”

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Fast forward to today and they’ve just set up a unit on a strip of land in Western Australia to test a technology that uses dye and sunlight to pull carbon from the atmosphere. “We’re the only process that does sunlight-driven carbon dioxide removal,” Gagnon told CNN.

Carbon dioxide removal refers to a raft of techniques to scrub carbon pollution from the atmosphere and lock it away. Interest has soared as humanity is faced with the stark reality that maintaining a livable planet means not only drastically reducing emissions but also removing some of the carbon pollution already in the atmosphere.

Conventional methods such as tree planting make up the bulk of the existing carbon removal sector, but there’s a rush of interest in novel technologies. These include spreading crushed rock on land to cause chemical reactions, mixing a form of charcoal called “biochar” into soil, and — as Banyu Carbon is doing — pulling carbon from the air in a process called direct air capture.

“There’s an explosion of people trying different technologies at the moment… carbon dioxide removal has gone massively up the radar,” said Steve Smith, an associate professor of greenhouse gas removal at the University of Oxford.

For advocates, these technologies offer a vital tool in the climate fight, yet many remain at an early stage, are expensive to develop and a long way from being proven at scale.

The next few years will be a huge test for this nascent industry.

Back in 2016, in the turquoise waters of Tetiaroa island, Gagnon and Sachs were tasked with simulating the impact of rising levels of planet-heating pollution on a small patch of coral reef.

Part of the research assignment was to figure out how to more efficiently extract carbon from deep seawater and add it to the shallow water near the coral to simulate rising ocean acidity. They eventually landed on light-sensitive, carbon-absorbing molecules called photoacids.

The ability of photoacids — essentially dyes — to absorb and eject carbon dioxide was revealed in 2013 research from the Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, known as CSIRO.

A decade later, Banyu Carbon obtained the exclusive license to the photoacids. Gagnon’s team at the University of Washington then spent three years developing the chemistry to enable them to remove carbon pollution from the air at commercial scale.

The technology is now being demonstrated at CSIRO’s testing site just south of Perth in Western Australia.

It works like this: air is sucked into a pitch-black unit where it’s exposed to a water-based solution containing the dye molecules. The solution absorbs carbon dioxide and then is run through panels, where it’s exposed to sunlight, turning the dye acidic and causing it to release a stream of carbon dioxide.

The carbon can be stored or used in industrial processes such as chemical manufacturing. “Then, that dye just gets reused over and over and over and over again,” Gagnon said.

A key selling point for the technology is its low energy use. The process doesn’t need the heat required by many other direct air capture techniques. “We only need sunlight and air. There is no need for pipelines or large energy plants,” Gagnon said.

The demonstration model can remove one ton of carbon from the air over 12 months, a very small amount given the scale of climate pollution, and the carbon is being re-released for this trial. But the hope is to prove its potential for large-scale direct air capture and storage. “It represents a big step forward towards commercialization,” Gagnon said.

With enough support, Banyu Carbon aims to scale up in the early 2030s to extract around half a million tons per facility per year at a cost of $200 per ton.

Carbon removal has been much hyped. A 2023 report by McKinsey projected, with the right headwinds, it could become a $1.2 billion sector by 2050. But more recently, those winds don’t seem to have been blowing in its favor.

Last year, prominent direct air capture company Climeworks, which has two facilities in Iceland, announced it would lay off around 20% of its staff, blaming economic uncertainties and shifting climate policy priorities.

Then this year, Microsoft — a key player in the carbon dioxide removal market — dramatically cut its investment in the sector, according to a Bloomberg analysis. “At times we may adjust the pace or volume of our carbon removal procurement,” a Microsoft spokesperson said, but added that there was no “change in ambition.”

Still, it was interpreted as another potentially concerning sign for the industry, which remains a very long way from scaling up.

Carbon removal projects currently scrub around 2.2 billion tons of carbon from the air a year, with conventional removal projects like tree planting accounting 99.9% of this total. Novel technologies are growing fast but remove only around 0.002 billion tons — and direct air capture tech like Banyu’s makes up a tiny fraction of that tiny fraction, according to a recent scientific assessment report.

Financing is a major obstacle, said Mark Patel, a senior partner at McKinsey who focuses on climate tech. “Lenders and financiers need a clear signal that the products have value in the market, which is uncertain for many solutions today,” he said. He pointed to challenges including a lack of verifiable performance data and problems with project execution and timelines.

Unlike electric cars and renewable energy, which can be sold into existing electricity and auto markets, the market for carbon removal must be created from scratch, said Giana Amador, executive director of the Carbon Removal Alliance, a non-profit trade association.

Companies can pump carbon pollution into the atmosphere for free, so there’s little incentive for them to pay to remove it, she added. That puts it at the whims of company climate policies, which can shift with political winds. “The greatest existential threat to the carbon removal field is around demand,” Amador said.

Amador remains positive, however. The sector has surged from a handful of companies about a decade ago to hundreds today, working on a diverse range of technologies, she said. It’s currently in its “messy middle” era, she said, adding “I think we’re in the early stages of a mature market, and I think we have costs coming down (and) technology is getting better.”

So far, Banyu Carbon has raised $8.5 million from investors and said it has secured buyers including H&M and Shopify through a $500,000 pre-purchase contract.

Carbon removal technology is no substitute for reducing planet-heating pollution, Banyu’s Gagnon said. “The lowest energy, best for the planet, cheapest carbon removal is not putting carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in the first place, right?”

But with the world continuing to burn fossil fuels and ramp up temperatures to dangerous levels, he believes his work now must not just be researching the impact of carbon pollution — but finding a way to reduce it.

“You’ve got to be working on solutions, too,” he said. “Otherwise, it almost feels overwhelming.”

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