Last week, in a wood-paneled auditorium in a New York University campus highrise, Will Kain unveiled his direct air capture company’s first demonstration project. Project Brighton, he said, is being built in partnership with the U.S. Navy, and will capture 450 tons per year of carbon dioxide — and about 2,250 tons per year of water.
“We have all our permits approved, and construction is now underway,” Kain told the Global Direct Air Capture Conference audience. “We anticipate that this unit will be online in the summer of 2025 so just a few short months away.”
The project is the first announcement in what Kain called the “year of commercialization” for Avnos, a company that uses a “hybrid” approach to DAC, pulling both carbon and water from the air. “We call it ‘hybrid’ to reflect the fact that we capture both water and CO2 from the same airstream in the same system,” Kain told Latitude Media at the conference. “We’re the only ones doing that.”
The California-based Avnos produces roughly five tons of water alongside every ton of carbon dioxide it removes. Most other DAC technologies consume water — between one and seven tons per ton of removal, according to the World Resources Institute. “We invert the water paradigm as it’s generally understood in DAC,” Kain said.
It’s that inversion that at least in theory promises to expand the kinds of customers, partners, and investors that Avnos can take on. And 2025, with its one public deal with the U.S. Navy and several more in the hopper, is the year that the company plans to test that theory, exploring potential partnerships with everyone from sustainable aviation fuel makers to data centers.
But it’s a complicated time to be among the new generation of DAC companies. While CDR has historically been supported by corporate buyers like the Stripe-led advance market commitment known as Frontier, federal support for the industry — such as via the $3.5-billion DAC Hub program or the CDR purchasing prize — became a crucial resource under the Biden administration. However, under the second Trump administration, that support isn’t guaranteed.
Where to go for funding
The company’s first commercial pilot is in Bakersfield, California — smack in the middle of the very water-stressed state. Launched in 2023, the $3.2 million project was funded with help from the Department of Energy and Southern California Gas. The facility is a testbed for the technology, which relies on a combination of dehumidifier-like equipment and filters, or sorbents, to capture carbon dioxide. Avnos claims this approach consumes 50% less energy than traditional DAC approaches that rely on heat.
In February 2024, Avnos raised a $36 million Series A, led by NextEra Energy Resources, the renewables subsidiary of the utility giant. Other investors included the venture arms of both oil and gas giant Shell and aviation and defence manufacturing company Safran.
The company’s first order of business was to open a research and development facility in Bridgewater, New Jersey, which opened in August. Project Brighton, announced last week, will be housed at the same site, with the aim of making it a “destination” for industrial companies to see DAC technology developments.
But several more projects are in the works. The plan for 2025, said Kain, is “to build larger and larger facilities in different climatic conditions with different potential commercial applications, and with improvements to the technology.” The Navy project is funded by the Department of Defense, but more announcements are coming later this year that rely on private funds to build out new systems for private customers.
“Over the course of 2025 and headed into 2026 really, we are in commercialization mode,” Kain said. “It’s putting steel in the ground; it’s deploying assets; it’s proving that the technology works at commercially relevant scale, in relevant climates, and…different potential commercial vectors to really build out our commercial muscle.”
Avnos is also starting to look outside of the U.S., especially to DAC markets that are “starting to come up the curve and get to be more mature,” such as Japan.
The right use case for DAC
One open question for Avnos is who the ideal partner is, given the novelty of the water-plus-DAC offering. The water that results from the process is of distilled quality, useable for anything from irrigation to data centers.
The latter is “a new commercial axis,” Kain said, given that many data centers are water-cooled. The artificial intelligence boom means that major tech companies are balancing their data center needs with climate commitments — and the local environmental costs of building so much so fast. Especially for those located in the booming markets of Salt Lake City, Las Vegas, and Phoenix, heat and drought add a layer of complexity to keeping computers cool.
It’s early days for Avnos’ pitch to data centers, but Kain sees bringing both water and carbon removal to an industry ravenous to build more and faster as an opportunity for “synergy” between water and decarbonization.
That said, the relationship between carbon removal and data centers isn’t straightforward. Microsoft’s energy lead Brian Marrs has argued that the data center emissions caused by the AI boom means that renewable energy offsets won’t be enough to reach 2030 targets, so CDR will be needed to “backstop” those commitments. But in many places, DAC plants like the now-paused Project Bison are already competing with those same data centers for clean energy.
For a data center customer intent upon decarbonization, sequestration would be the likeliest end-goal. But Avnos is also looking into utilization, Kain said: “We are a really interesting front-end for fuels, because two of the primary feedstocks there are water and CO2.”
While Avnos isn’t ready to go public with the specifics of deals beyond the one with the Navy, he did say that the company’s investors are strategic — meaning these are investors that “also happen to be partners” that are potentially interested in the technology for their own purposes.
“We chose that group of investors quite carefully in order to generate additional strategic opportunities with the NextEras and the Shells and the Conocos and the Safrans and the Jet Blues of the world,” Kain said.
The government as partner
So far, public financing — from both DOD and DOE, as well as the state of California — has been a major source of support for Avnos, like it is for many of its peers. The unique technology was developed at the Pacific Northwest National Lab. And the company is now a potential technology provider for several DAC hubs; these include the California DAC Hub and the Western Regional DAC Hub, led by Chevron.
However, the Navy announcement comes amid major upheaval for the direct air capture’s relationship with the federal government. Indeed, the tenor of many conversations at the conference where Avnos presented the project was uncertainty and fear over news of layoffs and sidelined funding, especially from in DOE.
Kain said Avnos’ communication has neither waned nor changed since Trump took office, though; it’s been “business as usual. The company has collected all of its funds for the Bakersfield facility. That’s not the case for the new Bridgewater facility, but Kain said he’s not concerned given the company’s “existing relationship” with the Office of Naval Research, which is the DOD office funding the project. And as far as Kain has heard, the first phase of DAC hub projects are also proceeding as expected.
(DOE was accepting concept papers and pre-applications for the second phase until the window closed on January 31; the fate of that tranche of funding is more uncertain. The Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations, which has been facilitating the program, is reportedly at risk for major cuts.)
“We continue to work with the government and access funds from the government,” Kain said. “But something that we’ve been very intentional about from the very earliest days of the company…is not having too many eggs in any given basket.”
