Viridas Pressurised DAC, El-Sayed

In this episode, @geoengineering1 speaks with Ahmed El-Sayed of Viridas Technologies, a company aiming to revolutionize Direct Air Capture (DAC) by redesigning the process from the ground up, including the fan system itself.

The conversation explores why DAC remains expensive, largely due to the extremely low concentration of CO2 in ambient air. While most research focuses on developing new solvents and materials to reduce energy use, Ahmed argues that the thermodynamic limits of capture efficiency may already have been reached. Instead, Viridas is pursuing a different strategy i.e. increasing the volume of air processed.

Their proposed high-pressure system reduces contactor size by 70x while delivering more than 3100x better performance through major gains in absorption capacity and absorption rate. Ahmed also discusses the use of scalable, oxygen-resistant solvents derived from widely produced industrial chemicals, and why the future of DAC may depend on breakthroughs in turbomachinery and membrane technologies to drive costs down to ultra-low levels and enable gigaton-scale deployment.

Paper Discussed: Elsayed, A., & Alawadh, T. (2026). Scaling Carbon Removal to Gigaton Capacity using Pressurized Direct Air Capture. https://doi.org/10.26434/chemrxiv.15002130/v1

Viridas Technologies: https://www.viridastechnologies.com/

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