A visit to Heirloom, the first DAC facility in the US

October 2023

Last week, I had the pleasure of touring Heirloom’s California headquarters, the location of the first ever direct air capture (DAC) facility in the United States. After a year of reading (and producing content) about their work, I was curious to discover the physical space behind their carbon removal operation.

Heirloom’s unique process begins by removing carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere with the use of limestone, an abundant resource which naturally captures CO2. By accelerating the rock’s absorption of CO2, from its natural timeline of years to just days, Heirloom is then able to sequester the absorbed carbon into underground permanent storage. The company has also partnered with CarbonCure for the world’s first sequestration of atmospheric CO2 into concrete, to be used in local Bay Area building projects.

As I was led through the California facility, I was amazed at the simplicity of the science behind Heirloom’s process and by the subsequent complexity of measuring, validating, testing, and scaling such an operation with the goal of permanently removing 1 billion tons of CO2 from the atmosphere by 2035 — Heirloom’s current mission.

The team was brimming with climate knowledge and a fierce commitment to the company’s mission. With recent momentum from a historic deal announcement with Microsoft to remove 315k metric tons of CO2, Heirloom is on a fast track to address emissions on a wide scale. For further reading on Heirloom, check out this interesting piece on DAC in Cipher co-authored by co-founder Noah McQueen.