GE’s direct air capture (DAC) prototype is ready for large-scale demonstrations beginning next year, the company said on March 21.

The project passed testing in GE’s CAGE (Climate Action@GE) Lab following a more than two-year effort with a team representing the Department of Energy (DOE), the department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy (ARPA-E), the University of California at Berkeley, the University of South Alabama, TDA Research and others.

“We know that to truly bring an economical, commercial-scale solution in DAC to the market, it will require a collaborative effort with government, industry and academic partners,” David Moore said, GE’s carbon capture breakout technology leader, in a press statement. “If we do this right, we could have a commercially-deployable DAC solution around the end of this decade.”

The DOE and ARPA-E have supplied $2 million in funding for the project, which developed new sorbent materials to remove CO2 from the air, GE said. The design is derived from thermal management heat exchanger technology developed for GE’s power turbine and jet engine platforms.

The company said it was employing a similar approach in a project with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to capture clean, potable water from extremely arid, desert-like air.

The CAGE Lab is a research hub for all of GE’s decarbonization technologies. In addition to DAC, the team is working on post-combustion carbon capture technologies, and atmospheric water extraction to promote zero emission technologies.