A new carbon capture innovation is good news for the planet — and Big Tech
The method could make removing atmospheric carbon 6x more efficient, meaning even more carbon credits for companies like Microsoft to buy.
MIT engineers reported on Tuesday that they’ve developed nanofiltration membranes to help solve the bottleneck hindering current carbon capture methods. Put simply, carbon capture and storage (CCS) systems rely on two reactions: one that removes diluted CO2 from the air, and one that releases pure CO2 from the system to be stored. When the ions that power these reactions mix, they produce water, making the process less efficient.
According to the paper, the new filtering membranes, which would work by separating these ions, could make CCS systems 6x more efficient and cut costs by as much as 30%. While reducing atmospheric CO2 is a boon for the environment, it’s also paradoxically beneficial to the emission-producing industries that buy carbon credits to meet sustainability goals.
Ready, offset, go
Carbon capture is becoming a big business. Some of the world’s largest (and top-polluting) companies have come to rely on carbon offsets to hit net-zero targets. At present, these offsets are mostly natural solutions like tree-planting projects, but there’s been a huge upswing in CCS systems recently.
Last month, The IEA reported that while the first quarter of 2025 saw over 50 million metric tons of CO2 capture and storage capacity in operation, capacity is projected to grow strongly, reaching ~430 million metric tons by 2030.
A major driving force behind the surge in CCS developments is the eye-watering growth of Big Tech. According to analysis from Carbon Brief, tech companies like Microsoft and Apple generally use higher proportions of removal-based offsets than other industries like oil or airlines, and demand has only increased as these giants have gone all in on energy-guzzling data centers to power AI.
In its global carbon markets outlook for 2025, Bloomberg outlined that new contracted volumes of carbon removal credits increased by 74% last year, predicted that they’ll double this year, and detailed that Microsoft alone bought nearly two-thirds of new contracts last year, or ~5.1 million carbon removal credits.
