A team of engineers at MIT has developed a new type of nanofiltration membrane that could make carbon capture and storage (CCS) systems six times more efficient. Their innovation addresses one of the biggest technical challenges in carbon capture: when the ions used in the process mix together, they create water and reduce efficiency.
Current CCS systems rely on two key chemical reactions. The first pulls diluted carbon dioxide (CO₂) from the air; the second releases that CO₂ in pure form for long-term storage. But when the positively and negatively charged ions used in both steps combine, they produce water. This not only weakens the chemical reactions but also wastes energy.
MIT’s new membranes act like tiny barriers that separate the ions. This prevents them from reacting with each other too early. As a result, the CCS process uses less energy, improves output, and could cut costs by up to 30%.
CCS Is Getting a Boost from Innovation
This breakthrough comes at a time when CCS technology is growing quickly. The International Energy Agency (IEA) said global CO₂ capture and storage capacity hit over 50 million metric tons in early 2025. The IEA expects this number to climb to 430 million metric tons by 2030.
The MIT team’s membranes could help reach those goals faster. Making carbon capture cheaper and more efficient makes it more appealing to industries that emit a lot of CO₂.
Nano But Mighty: What Makes the Membrane Different
MIT engineers offer a key carbon capture innovation: nanofiltration. This method uses membranes with tiny holes. These holes can filter out ions while allowing other molecules to pass. These filters keep the key ingredients for CCS from mixing too early, which prevents them from forming water and weakening the reaction.
Before this technology, many CCS systems had to deal with a trade-off between reaction speed and purity. The faster the process ran, the more the ions would combine in unwanted ways. That led to higher energy use and lower CO₂ capture rates.
With the new filter, reactions can run faster without losing performance. That could make CCS more practical for real-world use—not just in research labs, but in factories, power plants, and even ships or mobile units.
The better process helps smaller companies and countries use CCS. This is great for those who didn’t have the resources before. If used widely, this membrane could ease a big hurdle in carbon removal projects around the world.
As the IEA predicts, major CCUS projects will launch this year, including the world’s largest cement capture site in Norway and the biggest DAC plant in the U.S. North America and Europe still dominate, holding 80% of the projected 2030 capacity.
However, China and the Middle East are rising players, with over 15 Mt of capacity under construction—more than Europe. Supply chain challenges are emerging as demand for custom-built equipment grows. This creates opportunities for countries and companies that can scale up mass manufacturing for capture technologies.
Major tech companies are especially interested in supporting CCS growth.
Why Big Tech Cares About Carbon Capture
Big Tech companies are now key players in the fight against climate change. They want to protect the environment and meet their own sustainability goals.
As companies create more energy-demanding data centers for AI, cloud services, and digital storage, their carbon footprints are increasing quickly, alongside their growth, as shown below. Rising energy use leads companies like Microsoft, Apple, and Google (the hyperscalers) to seek reliable ways to balance their emissions. Carbon capture and storage offers one of the most promising tools for this.
CCS is different from traditional offsets like tree planting. It removes carbon dioxide from the air and stores it underground or in stable materials. This is key for Big Tech. Their climate goals often need removal-based offsets. These offsets actively take CO2 out of the air. They can’t just rely on avoidance methods that cut future emissions.
According to expert analysis, tech firms rely on carbon removal offsets more than other industries, such as oil, gas, or aviation. Their growing reliance on carbon removal aligns with the surge in demand for new CCS technologies.
MIT’s carbon capture nanofiltration membranes are a great innovation. They could make CCS six times more efficient and cut costs by 30%. This is exactly what companies need.
The team’s analysis revealed that current systems cost a minimum of $600 per ton of carbon dioxide captured. However, by adding the nanofiltration component, the cost drops to around $450 per ton.
Simon Rufer, one of the authors of the study, noted:
“People are buying carbon credits at a cost of over $500 per ton. So, at this cost we’re projecting, it is already commercially viable in that there are some buyers who are willing to pay that price. It’s just a question of how widespread we can make it.”
As pressure mounts from investors, customers, and regulators, Big Tech needs scalable, science-backed solutions. That’s why they’re not only buying carbon credits. They’re also investing in science and engineering for the next generation of carbon removal.
Carbon Markets Are Booming, Driving CCS Growth
The carbon market is growing fast. Here, companies buy and sell credits to offset emissions. Carbon removal credits are key to this growth.
In 2024, the volume of newly contracted carbon removal credits increased by 74%, according to Bloomberg. These credits let companies reduce their emissions. They do this by funding projects that capture or remove CO2 from the air. This includes nature-based projects like reforestation as well as advanced carbon capture and storage systems.
The market is expected to further grow in 2025, driven largely by demand from major corporations. Microsoft made up almost two-thirds of new carbon removal contracts last year. That’s about 5.1 million credits, followed by Google. These figures show how seriously companies are taking climate commitments. Many aim for net-zero emissions within the next two decades.
CCS technologies, like those from MIT, are boosting interest. They help meet demand by providing high-quality removal solutions.
In the coming years, carbon markets will likely become even more important. They offer a flexible way for companies to meet climate goals while supporting innovation in emissions reduction.
Carbon capture is no longer just a scientific idea—it’s becoming a major industry. And innovations like MIT’s carbon capture nanofilters could help it scale faster than expected. As countries and companies face pressure to reach net-zero emissions, CCS offers a critical solution for sectors that can’t easily go fully green.
The post MIT’s Nanotech Breakthrough Supercharges Carbon Capture And May Cut Costs by 30% appeared first on Carbon Credits.
Most businesses that decide to act on their net-zero targets reach the same point of friction. Buying carbon credits has meant tracking down brokers, sitting through sales calls, and requesting a quote just to learn a price, sometimes with limited proof of what you are buying.
The earnings calls that quietly reframed climate from sustainability question to operating risk.
Three earnings calls in the last 18 months tell the story without any help from a press release.
Hershey, May 2024: cocoa price exposure compresses margin, and the company attributes part of the cost shock to West African weather. Olam, July 2024: coffee climate exposure quantified in the annual report. JBS, January 2025: supply chain climate disclosures expanded materially in response to investor pressure and regulatory expectation. None of these companies issued the announcement as climate news. They issued it as financial news. The climate-linked supply chain risk did not arrive with a sustainability framing; it arrived as a P&L line.
You are probably reading this article because you suspect the same thing is happening to your business. This piece walks through what is showing up on which earnings calls, how procurement and finance leaders are quantifying the exposure, and what serious corporates are doing about it before the regulator asks.
Where climate risk has already appeared in earnings
The pattern is consistent across resource-intensive sectors. A weather event compresses supply, the price spikes, the cost flows through the income statement, and the analyst on the call asks whether the event is anomalous or structural. Increasingly, the honest answer is the second one.
Cocoa is the cleanest example. The 2023 to 2024 West African harvest fell sharply on the back of erratic rainfall and disease. Cocoa futures more than tripled. Companies with concentrated West African sourcing absorbed the cost; companies with diversified sourcing absorbed less. The exposure was not climate as ESG topic. It was climate as cost of goods.
Coffee follows the same pattern. Brazilian and Vietnamese harvests have moved on weather more sharply across the last several seasons. Roasters with long-tenor supplier relationships and origin diversification have managed the volatility; roasters with spot-market exposure have not. Wheat, sugar, palm oil, beef: the same dynamic in different commodities, a pattern the IPCC AR6 Working Group II report projects will intensify across agricultural systems through mid-century.
What this means: climate risk is no longer a footnote in the 10-K. It is a line item the CFO has to explain on the call.
The three commodity exposures that hit margin first
For most companies with material Scope 3 exposure, three exposures dominate the near-term P&L risk.
- Concentrated single-origin sourcing in a climate-vulnerable region. If your tier-one supply for any material commodity sits in one geography, you have a concentration risk that climate amplifies. Diversification across origins is the obvious hedge, but it takes years to build and requires relationships you cannot acquire by tender.
- Supplier financial fragility under climate stress. Smallholder farmers, who supply a large share of the global cocoa, coffee, and palm oil market, do not carry the balance sheets to absorb yield shocks. When yields collapse, they exit. When they exit, your supply base shrinks, and the surviving suppliers raise prices. The risk is structural, not cyclical.
- Logistics and storage exposure to extreme weather. Hurricane disruptions to Gulf shipping, drought-driven Panama Canal restrictions, flooding in European inland waterways: each of these has moved input costs in the last three years, a pattern documented in Munich Re’s natural catastrophe data. The exposure shows up as a one-quarter event in the financial press but accumulates over time on the cost line.
TCFD and ISSB disclosure changes
The disclosure architecture has now caught up with the risk. The Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures, whose recommendations are now embedded in the ISSB’s IFRS S2 climate standard, requires companies to disclose climate-related risks across physical and transition categories, with quantification where possible.
For physical risk specifically (the climate-linked supply chain risk you are reading about), the disclosure must address both acute exposures (extreme weather events) and chronic exposures (gradual changes in temperature, precipitation, and growing seasons). The disclosure must address the time horizon over which the risk is material, the parts of the value chain exposed, and the financial impact under different scenarios.
The CSRD imposes similar requirements under European law, with double materiality (both financial and impact materiality) embedded in the assessment. The practical effect: your auditors and your investor relations team now need a defensible answer to the climate-linked supply chain risk question, and the answer needs to be quantified.
What procurement and finance can do now
Three actions matter near-term.
Map your exposure. Most companies do not have a clear view of which tier-one and tier-two suppliers sit in which climate-vulnerable geographies. Without the map, you cannot quantify the risk, and without the quantification, you cannot disclose it credibly. The map is the foundation, and World Resources Institute climate risk research provides useful public tooling to start.
Diversify and deepen, in that order. Diversification across origins reduces concentration risk, but the deeper move is to invest in the resilience of the suppliers you already have. Regenerative practices, agroforestry, soil health interventions: these reduce yield volatility under climate stress and protect your input cost trajectory.
Embed the climate spend inside procurement, not outside it. Treating climate risk as a sustainability cost line subordinates it to the ESG budget. Treating it as a procurement and resilience investment puts it in the budget that matters, which is the cost-of-goods budget that the CFO defends quarterly.
Nature-based supply chain investments are the asset class designed for exactly this purpose. They sit inside the value chain, they reduce climate-linked supply risk, they generate verifiable Scope 3 reductions, and they produce the documentation an auditor and a regulator can both test.
If you are quantifying climate-linked supply chain risk in advance of the next earnings cycle or the next disclosure period, the carbon and sustainability experts at Carbon Credit Capital can help you map your exposure and structure a Dual-Value Model response that addresses reduction, resilience, and disclosure-readiness in a single program. Schedule a consultation.
More and more small and medium-sized businesses are hearing the same question from their larger customers: What is your carbon footprint? That question now travels down entire supply chains, and it arrives next to tender requirements, certification criteria, and rising customer expectations.
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