Atoco is a California-based climate technology startup founded in 2020 by Nobel Prize-winning chemist Professor Omar Yaghi. The firm – a compound of ‘atom’ and ‘company’ – is developing atmospheric water harvesting, direct air capture (DAC) and post-combustion capture.
How does the technology work?
Atoco is building its technologies around reticular chemistry – a field pioneered by Yaghi. The company engineers microscopic materials from metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) and covalent organic frameworks (COFs). Since these materials possess massive internal surface areas, they can be precisely tailored to selectively bind to and extract specific molecules.
Vice-President of Business Development Magnus Bach said, “We are in a position where we can actually design materials with very specific properties in mind, and we can actually scale the manufacturing of these novel materials.”
He said the surface areas serve as “parking lots for molecules”, regardless of whether they are CO2, hydrogen or water.
“The biggest difference is that on atmospheric water harvesting, we are OEM, so we produce containerised systems, whereas on the carbon capture side, we would produce capture modules that you could install into point source or a DAC system. It will be a gradual slope, entailing custom-developed solutions designed specifically for a carbon capture system process.”
What are its primary focus areas?
Atoco claims it can manufacture units that generate “thousands of litres of drinking water per day” by pulling moisture directly out of the air. Powered using low-grade waste heat or sunlight, these systems can even function in extremely dry, arid desert environments.
The company also develops solid-state post-combustion capture and DAC modules which aim to bypass the costly energy requirements of older carbon capture methods by avoiding the need to pre-dry airstreams and instead use low-grade waste heat to extract trapped carbon.
