Key points
- Through advanced automation, the Carbon Capture Materials Acceleration Centre is developing direct air capture (DAC) technologies to remove CO₂ directly from the atmosphere.
- The centre uniquely brings together automated materials discovery, standardised testing, manufacturing scale-up and pilot-scale validation under one roof.
- While early technologies drew from CO2 removal used in space and deep-water exploration, open-air DAC is a tougher problem carrying a big cost challenge.
At CSIRO’s Perth campus, a new lab will deliver an integrated capability unique in the Southern Hemisphere: taking carbon capture materials from laboratory discovery through to pilot-scale demonstration under one roof.
For CSIRO team leader Dr Colin Wood, the new facility he is building is both a career-defining project and a response to a timeline that is running out.
Somewhere in a laboratory right now, a scientist is working on a material that could cost-effectively pull significant quantities of CO₂ out of the atmosphere. The chemistry might be genuinely novel, and the early results might be promising. But 10 years from now, that material could still be sitting on a lab bench.
That’s the problem Colin is trying to fix.
He’s leading construction of the Carbon Capture Materials Acceleration Centre, CCMAC, at CSIRO’s Waterford campus in Perth. CCMAC’s focus is Direct Air Capture (DAC): technology that removes CO₂ directly from the atmosphere rather than capturing it at the point of emission. It targets carbon that is already up there.
Funded through a $10.2 million partnership between CSIRO and the Western Australian Government, CCMAC will be among the first facilities globally to bring together automated materials discovery, standardised testing, manufacturing scale-up and pilot-scale validation under one roof.
Wood is blunt about what the sector is missing.
"Other groups globally have got different pieces of the puzzle – automated material discovery, advanced testing, pilot-scale manufacturing and testing. What we're doing with CCMAC is bringing it all together."
Why direct air capture – and why now
Wood holds that DAC solves a problem that other approaches can’t – how to deal with legacy emissions, carbon that’s already in the atmosphere.
“It also acts as a bridge for technologies that are hard to decarbonise,” he says. “It’s difficult to imagine how you couple carbon capture directly onto an airplane. DAC offers a path to allow those industries to transition.”
The technology works using sorbent materials that selectively bind CO₂ as air moves through or over them. Wood describes it as similar to an air filter in a ventilation system. The earliest DAC materials drew heavily on CO₂ scrubbers used in space and deep-water exploration, where concentrations are much higher and the chemistry is somewhat easier. Open-air DAC has to work at roughly 420 parts per million –a much harder problem.
DAC is relatively young as a field. Although the concept dates back several decades, serious commercial and research activity accelerated in the late noughties, but it remains early-stage. Startups are beginning to scale projects globally, but for Wood, the pace is not fast enough, and the cost figures explain why.
The International Energy Association’s (IEA) 2026 World Energy Investment report puts the capture cost for first-of-a-kind DAC systems at between US$500 and US$1,900 per tonne of CO₂, reflecting early-stage designs and limited deployment experience. The same report estimates that advances in capture materials, process efficiency and economies of scale could bring costs down to around US$300 per tonne by mid-century. Getting there requires roughly US$1 billion in public R&D funding already being mobilised globally, and exactly the kind of materials acceleration work that CCMAC is designed to do.
The IEA also references a structural problem that goes beyond cost: markets for durable carbon removal are still emerging, which means projects have struggled to secure the firm offtake arrangements needed to attract private finance. Until policy catches up, it’s public investment in the underlying science that is keeping the field moving.
Wood sees the materials gap as the logical place to push.
“A lot of the research groups working on this are focusing on lab-scale peak performance, but that tends to stay at smaller scale. We need to move away from just focusing on peak performance and actually design in the scalability piece. Does it work at large scale? Can it be scaled quickly?”
Twenty-five years in the making
CSIRO has been working on carbon capture technologies for more than 25 years. CCMAC draws directly on work done developing CarbonAssist, CSIRO’s own solid sorbent technology, which gave the team direct experience in scaling materials beyond the laboratory and understanding what it takes to move from discovery to larger-scale validation.
For Wood, the project pulls together threads from across his career, including high-throughput approaches from his PhD; manufacturing chemistry from research postings in the UK and the US, working on coatings for a range of applications including coatings for aortic stents; and pilot engineering expertise built at CSIRO over recent years.
“Those stent coatings and DAC sorbents are very different applications, but at the surface chemistry level they share more than you might expect,” he says.
Applying that accumulated capability to a big issue was a deliberate choice. “Climate change is a global problem. Opening this capability as a shared resource means you can start sharing real knowledge, infrastructure and technical capability more broadly across industry and the research sector.”
Who will use it?
CCMAC is designed for a range of users at different stages of development. A university group with a promising new material but no path to scale can bring it to the centre and find out whether it actually works at size. A startup needing to validate technology before seeking investment can run it through standardised testing. A company exploring whether a sorbent can be manufactured at commercial volumes can work with the team on chemical scale-up.
“Because we’ve got that whole value chain, you can see how a university might be interested in the early discovery end, whereas industry might be interested more in large-scale testing,” Wood says.
There is a less visible benefit too. Today, R&D organisations test materials in their own ways, making it almost impossible to compare results across the sector, or build reliably on each other’s work. Shared, standardised testing protocols change that.
The first material to go through the full CCMAC pipeline will be one CSIRO has developed in-house: a hybrid sorbent that sits between conventional solid and liquid-based systems. It begins in powder form, which is easiest to synthesise and test at bench scale. That same chemistry will then be assessed in other form factors more suitable for large-scale deployment.
Three years, four milestones
Funding for CCMAC will run for three years, released in stages tied to specific delivery points: first the automated discovery platform working with small volumes of material, then the testing infrastructure, then expanded standardised testing capability. The final stage is the pilot plant, which Wood says will target around 100 kilograms of sorbent – a scale that bridges the gap between laboratory testing and larger engineering systems.
Year one is building and commissioning the lab. Year two is running it and screening materials, moving from concept to real-world performance data, year three is bringing in external users. By year five, Wood wants to see genuinely deployable DAC technologies coming out of the pipeline, a cohort of trained researchers and engineers entering the workforce, and a centre funding itself through fees for service.
“It’s not just about building infrastructure,” he says. “It’s about identifying scalable solutions. If we can shorten that path from scientific discovery to real-world capture solutions, that aligns the research with what the climate actually requires.”
Achieving net zero by 2050 means capturing billions of tonnes of CO₂ annually. The materials to do that are being discovered right now, in labs around the world. CCMAC is being built to make sure they don’t languish there.
CCMAC is funded through a 50/50 partnership between CSIRO and the Western Australian Government’s Lower Carbon Grants Program - Gorgon Fund, administered by the Department of Energy, Mines, Industry Regulation and Safety.