Storegga, a British climate tech startup, has signed Petrofac, a global oil field services company, as the first customer of its proposed large-scale direct air capture (DAC) facility in North East Scotland. 

Petrofac has committed to purchasing an undisclosed amount of carbon dioxide permanent removal from Storegga’s proposed facility, which aims to be operational by 2026. 

Founded in 2020, Storegga develops carbon capture, hydrogen, and other subsurface renewable projects in the UK and internationally. In July 2020, Storegga acquired Pale Blue Dot Energy, through which the company became the lead developer of the Acorn CCS Project, the UK’s first large-scale carbon capture project. In June 2021, Storegga partnered with Carbon Engineering, a Canadian DAC startup, to initiate the engineering and design of the new facility, which could remove between 500,000 and one million metric tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere annually. 

Analyst QuickTake: With the signup, Storegga joins Climeworks and Carbon Engineering as first movers to commercialize DAC. Climeworks has been selling DAC carbon removals since 2019 and has attracted more than 6,000 individual and business customers to date, including several high-profile clients such as Stripe, Shopify, and Audi. Carbon Engineering, Storegga’s technology partner, signed Shopify as its first customer in March 2021, having reserved 10,000 tons of permanent carbon removal capacity from a future carbon capture project. Carbon Engineering also partnered with BeZero for a joint retail offering in July 2021.