Carbon Capture Tech in 2026: Climeworks Mammoth, 1PointFive, Heirloom, CarbonCure, and the 45Q and CBAM Realities

Carbon capture in 2026 finally has receipts. The Climeworks Mammoth plant in Iceland came online in May 2024 with a stated nameplate capacity of 36,000 tonnes per year — the largest operating direct-air-capture facility in the world. The 1PointFive Stratos plant in Texas, run by Occidental’s subsidiary, is on track to be the next major DAC online with a target of 500,000 tonnes per year at first phase. Heirloom’s first commercial plant in Tracy, California opened in 2023. CarbonCure has tens of thousands of cumulative tonnes of CO2 sequestered into concrete worldwide. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law’s expanded 45Q tax credit and the EU’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism are starting to shape the economics in measurable ways.

The honest version: capture cost is still high, the scale-up needs orders of magnitude more capacity, and the policy framework is still maturing. But it is no longer the slideware industry it was five years ago.

The categories actually shipping in 2026#

The phrase carbon capture covers a heterogeneous set of technologies with very different economics and use cases.

Direct air capture (DAC). Pull CO2 directly out of ambient air. Climeworks, 1PointFive (Carbon Engineering technology), Heirloom, Avnos, Mission Zero, several others. Highest cost per tonne — currently around 600 to 1000 USD — but the only technology that can address legacy atmospheric carbon. Permanent storage in geological formations is the typical use.

Point-source capture. Capture CO2 from the flue gas of industrial sources — cement plants, steel plants, gas-fired power plants. Cheaper per tonne (around 50 to 150 USD) because the CO2 is at much higher concentration than ambient air. Used at scale at Quest in Alberta, Petra Nova in Texas (decommissioned in 2020, restarted in 2023), Boundary Dam in Saskatchewan, and increasingly at industrial sites in Norway under the Longship project.

Carbon utilization in concrete and minerals. CarbonCure, Solidia, Carbon Upcycling. Inject CO2 into fresh concrete or use it in calcium-silicate cement. Lower volume per project but the embedded CO2 is permanently mineralized.

Bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS). Burn biomass for energy and capture the resulting CO2. Drax in the UK is the largest demonstration, with ongoing controversy over the biomass supply chain accounting.

This post focuses on the technology and economics of DAC, mineralization, and the industrial point-source capture that is now scaling on the back of the 45Q credit.

Climeworks Mammoth and the operational reality#

The Climeworks Mammoth plant near Hellisheidi, Iceland came online in May 2024 as the company’s second commercial facility. Mammoth is roughly nine times the nameplate capacity of the earlier Orca plant, with 36,000 tonnes per year of CO2 capture. The captured CO2 is mixed with water and injected by Climeworks’s partner Carbfix into basalt rock formations, where it mineralizes into stable carbonates over a period of months to years. The mineralization is durable — geological-storage-grade — and is one of the cleanest verifiable storage stories in the industry.

The 2024-2025 operational experience for Mammoth has been mixed in the way that a first-of-kind plant typically is. The published throughput numbers in the months after commissioning were well below nameplate, with ramp-up taking longer than projected. Climeworks’s own communications have been clear-eyed about this — the first year of a plant of this design is in part a learning exercise for the second and third plants. The 2025-2026 operational data points to throughput climbing as the team works through routine engineering issues.

The cost picture: Climeworks’s per-tonne removal price for early customers was in the high hundreds of USD per tonne. The published path to lower costs is via larger plants, sustained operation that amortizes capex, and the 2030-target plant designs that should knock substantial cost out per unit captured.

1PointFive Stratos and the Texas scale-up#

1PointFive — Occidental Petroleum’s DAC subsidiary using Carbon Engineering’s technology, after Occidental’s acquisition of Carbon Engineering in 2023 — is building the Stratos plant in the Permian Basin in West Texas. Stratos has a target nameplate of 500,000 tonnes per year at first phase, more than ten times Mammoth, with commissioning targeted through 2025 and full operation in 2025-2026.

Stratos is interesting for two reasons. First, the Carbon Engineering chemistry (potassium hydroxide aqueous absorption with high-temperature calcium-looping for CO2 release) is a fundamentally different approach from Climeworks’s solid sorbent design, and the comparative cost economics will be a real-world test. Second, Occidental’s underlying business model includes both geological sequestration (qualifying for the 45Q tax credit at 180 USD per tonne for direct air capture) and the option to use the CO2 for enhanced oil recovery — which is the most contested part of the deal. The accounting and the policy framing around EOR-tied capture is one of the live debates of 2026.

Heirloom and the mineralization approach#

Heirloom’s approach uses limestone — calcium oxide — as the sorbent. CaO chemically absorbs CO2 from the air to form calcium carbonate (limestone again), which is then heated in a kiln to release pure CO2 and regenerate the CaO. The captured CO2 goes into concrete (via CarbonCure or similar partners) for permanent mineralization. The first Heirloom commercial plant in Tracy, California opened in 2023 at thousand-tonne-per-year scale.

The Heirloom thesis is that the limestone feedstock is abundant and cheap, the chemistry is well-understood and decades-old industrial process, and the integration with concrete makes the storage permanent without a geological-sequestration well. The trade-off is that the kiln step is energy-intensive — done with renewable electricity, the energy cost is high; done with fossil fuels, the net carbon math gets bad fast.

Heirloom’s 2024-2025 expansion plans include larger facilities in Louisiana under the DOE Direct Air Capture Hub program. The DOE 1.2 billion USD funding for DAC hubs in 2023 — going to the South Texas Direct Air Capture Hub (1PointFive plus partners) and Project Cypress in Louisiana (Heirloom, Climeworks, Battelle) — is the largest single policy intervention in the DAC industry to date.

CarbonCure and the concrete pathway#

CarbonCure has the largest deployment footprint of any carbon-utilization technology. The CarbonCure system injects CO2 into ready-mix concrete during mixing, where it reacts with calcium ions to form calcium carbonate nanoparticles dispersed through the concrete. The mineralization is permanent and improves concrete compressive strength enough that the mix can use slightly less cement without losing performance.

By 2025 CarbonCure systems were installed at hundreds of concrete plants across North America, Europe, and parts of Asia. The per-tonne CO2 utilized is small per plant but the aggregate over thousands of pours per year is meaningful. The 45Q credit applies to mineralization in concrete at the lower utilization rate. The 2024-2025 work has been on integrating CarbonCure with mainstream construction-tech procurement and on getting building codes to recognize the lower-cement mixes.

The 45Q credit and the policy economics#

The 45Q tax credit in the US — substantially expanded in the Inflation Reduction Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law — is the single most important policy lever for carbon capture economics. The headline numbers as of 2026: 180 USD per tonne for direct air capture with geological sequestration, 130 USD per tonne for DAC with utilization, 85 USD per tonne for point-source capture with geological sequestration, 60 USD per tonne for point-source with utilization. The credit is direct-pay for tax-exempt entities and transferable to third parties, which dramatically improved the financeability of projects through 2023-2025.

The 45Q does not by itself close the cost gap for DAC — at 600-1000 USD per tonne cost, a 180 USD credit covers part but not all of the economics. The voluntary carbon market and the corporate offtake agreements (Stripe, Microsoft, Frontier coalition members) cover the rest for many of the active projects. The path to DAC becoming economically self-sustaining without grants and voluntary offtake is the central question for the 2027-2030 phase of the industry.

The EU CBAM and the imported emissions question#

The EU Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism started its transitional reporting phase in October 2023 and moves to full financial application in 2026. CBAM applies a carbon price to imports of cement, steel, aluminium, fertilizers, electricity, and hydrogen entering the EU, equalizing the price between EU producers under ETS and producers outside the EU. The phase-in through 2026-2034 is steep enough to materially affect industrial supply chains.

The CBAM-and-carbon-capture link is real. Cement and steel plants outside the EU that want to keep selling into the EU market are increasingly looking at point-source capture to reduce their CBAM exposure. This is one of the more straightforward channels for industrial-scale carbon capture to find paying customers without depending solely on tax credits or voluntary markets.

What this means for technology teams#

For the platform and data teams supporting carbon capture operators, the 2026 picture is that the industry is becoming a regular industrial operation — telemetry from capture plants, MRV (measurement, reporting, verification) workflows for credits and offtake, supply-chain data for biomass and mineralization inputs, integration with the 45Q and CBAM reporting requirements. The data platform underneath all of this looks recognizable to anyone who has built data engineering pipelines for industrial sites — time-series telemetry from plant sensors, structured MRV data for third-party verifiers, financial reporting feeds for the tax-credit accounting. We have helped operators stand up the early versions of this; the value compounds with scale.

Related reading#

• Direct air capture economics in 2026
• Green hydrogen production in 2026
• Climate tech carbon accounting in 2026

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Carbon capture is operational, the policy framework is real, and the cost trajectory matters more than the marketing. If your organization is sizing MRV or plant-data infrastructure for a capture operator, our data engineering team has built this kind of pipeline. Tell us what you are scaling.