Spiritus

Matt Lee had been creating nanostructured materials for all sorts of applications at Los Alamos National Laboratory for 10 years when his friend Charles Cadieu came to him with the idea of removing carbon dioxide from air. Direct-air-capture (DAC) technology was gathering steam, and Climeworks was about to launch the first large-scale DAC facility, in Iceland.Lee knew he had just the materials technology needed to address the “grand challenge” of DAC at a fraction of the Iceland facility’s cost. “It was serendipitous that I was developing materials with next-generation performance but incredibly low-cost, simple manufacturing,” the chemical engineer says.Lee and Cadieu, who already had two successful start-ups under his belt, founded Spiritus in stealth mode in 2022. The company, named after the Latin term for “breath,” is on pace to capture 1,000 metric tons (t) of CO2 at its pilot facility on Nambé Pueblo tribal land in New Mexico by early 2026.Current commercial DAC facilities use giant fans to blow air over sorbents that soak up CO2 and then need high temperatures to release the trapped gas for permanent storage or for use. The process ends up costing $600–$1,000 per metric ton of CO2, according to the World Economic Forum. Using a sorbent that passively pulls CO2 from air, Spiritus aims to shrink that number to $100 per metric ton, a benchmark for viability set by the US Department of Energy.Lee, now chief technology officer at Spiritus, specializes in colloid science and complex fluid engineering. As a graduate student at