The goal is for each of Noya’s modules to remove about 60 tons of CO2 from the atmosphere per year. When the material becomes saturated with carbon, electricity is applied to the material and a light vacuum collects a pure stream of carbon. The company’s material solution consists of an activated carbon monolith and a proprietary chemical feedstock that binds to the carbon in the air. A fan blows air through tiny channels in each unit that contain Noya’s carbon capture material. Noya’s new systems will combine thousands of its modular units to create massive facilities that can capture millions of tons of CO2 right next to existing injection wells.Įach of Noya’s units is about the size of a solar panel at about 6 feet wide, 4.5 feet tall, and 1 foot thick. The founders pivoted in response to the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022 because their machines weren’t big enough to qualify for the new tax credits in the law, which required each system to capture at least 1,000 tons of CO2 per year. The initial idea for Noya was to attach carbon capture devices to cooling towers to keep equipment costs low. Eventually he decided electric vehicle technology couldn’t solve climate change on its own, so in the spring of 2020 he founded Noya with friend Daniel Cavaro. It shaped a lot of how I view my career.”Īfter graduation, Santos worked at Tesla, then at Harley Davidson, where he worked on electric powertrains. Going to MIT is a huge privilege, and it makes me feel like I have a responsibility to put that privilege to work to the betterment of society. “LeaderShape teaches students how to lead with integrity, and the core lesson is that any privilege you have you should try to leverage to improve the lives of other people,” Santos says. More than the coursework, though, Santos says MIT instilled in him a desire to make a positive impact on the world, in part through a four-day development workshop called LeaderShape that he took one January during the Institute’s Independent Activities Period (IAP). He also learned about startups through courses he took at the MIT Sloan School of Management and by taking part in MIT’s Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP), which exposed him to researchers in the early stages of commercializing research from MIT labs. When Santos came to MIT as an undergraduate, he took coursework related to climate change and energy systems, eventually majoring in chemical engineering. “I realized how much climate change can impact people.” “The storm left a really big mark on me and how I thought about the world,” Santos says. When they returned, their church was gone. One year a hurricane forced his family to evacuate their town. Growing up in the southeastern U.S., Santos says he first recognized climate change as an issue by experiencing the increasing intensity of hurricanes in his neighborhood. “I don’t think any of this would be possible without the way in which MIT opened up my horizons by showing me what’s possible when you work really hard.” “I need to thank all of my MIT professors,” Santos says. Santos says the ambitious approach, which is driven by the urgent need to scale carbon removal solutions, was influenced by his time at MIT. Noya has already secured millions of dollars in presales to help build its first facilities from organizations including Shopify, Watershed, and a university endowment. The three-year old company is currently building its first commercial pilot facility, and says its first full-scale commercial facility will have the capacity to pull millions of tons of carbon from the air each year. “We can stack these boxes in a LEGO-like fashion to achieve scale in the field.” “Think of our systems for direct air capture like solar panels for carbon negativity,” says Santos, who formerly played a role in Tesla’s much-publicized manufacturing scale-up for its Model 3 electric sedan. Using third-party auditors to verify the amount of carbon dioxide captured, Noya is selling carbon credits to help organizations reach net-zero emissions targets. The company plans to power its system with renewable energy and build its facilities near injection wells to store carbon underground. The startup Noya, founded by Josh Santos ’14, is working to accelerate direct-air carbon removal with a low-power, modular system that can be mass manufactured and deployed around the world. Such technologies are still in their infancy, but many efforts are underway to scale them up quickly in hopes of heading off the most catastrophic effects of climate change. One method for achieving carbon removal is direct air capture and storage. In order to avoid the worst effects of climate change, the United Nations has said we’ll need to not only reduce emissions but also remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
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