2022
Project Hummingbird, a partnership between Octavia's pilot DAC facility and Cella’s Geological Storage plant
70
Gender equality, youth education, green skills & community employment
Drive down the cost curve of direct air capture while increasing impact, catalyzing green growth and climate justice
Nairobi, Kenya
Buyers often place greater scrutiny on projects in the Global South. Combined with the fact that Direct Air Capture is still seen as an intangible commodity, Octavia Carbon needed to demonstrate that their CDR credits are of the highest quality.
The Octavia team engineered its technology with dMRV at the core to ensure trust and eliminate uncertainty. This has allowed them to focus on making rapid improvements to their technology and driving down costs, while showing their progress to their credit buyers.
The year was 2021, and Duncan Kariuki was headed to his hometown, where he hadn’t lived in seven years. His time at the University of Nairobi had been interrupted by the COVID lockdowns, and he was headed back to his hometown of Karatina, where his family worked as farmers. What he saw when he arrived, however, shocked him to the core.
With that year’s harvest ravaged by one of Kenya’s longest drought, farmers in the town had resorted to cutting down trees to make ends meet. For Kariuki, a mechanical engineer by trade, he knew that this was a classic example of a feedback loop: something caused by external factors of climate change while also worsening the problem. And as he watched these trees fall, he also knew that his home country of Kenya would be among those most affected by climate change over the coming years.
It was at this moment that the idea for Kenya’s first Direct Air Capture (DAC) plant was born.
The Great Rift Valley in east Africa runs through the middle of Kenya. Formed by the splitting of the African tectonic plate, this unique geological feature might be the very best place in the world to build a DAC facility.
Direct air capture projects have two major prerequisites to consider when deciding where to place their facility: a medium to durably sequester captured CO2, and a low-cost, low-carbon source of energy for the capture process. With abundant sources of renewable geothermal energy being generated by the continental rifting process, and plentiful sources of nearby basalt, a rock uniquely well-suited for carbon sequestration, Kenya was the perfect location for Project Hummingbird, Octavia Carbon’s pilot DAC plant. The site would be co-located with Cella Mineral Storage, a CO2 storage company, to enable the team to significantly enhance their storage efficiency by injecting captured CO2 underground.
The brainchild of co-founders Kariuki and CEO Martin Freimüller, who had first moved to Africa at the age of 16 and had independently been working on strategies to boost prosperity in Kenya through carbon removal, this plant would be the first DAC facility in the Global South, built with speed, innovation, and cost in mind. Working together, the two would manifest Kenya’s natural advantages in renewable energy, geology, and talent into a thriving business. But in order to scale and iterate the type of facility they were looking to create, they needed to build from a foundation of quality.
“We’re selling an intangible commodity, so the thing that differentiates that is the trust that buyers have in it. What source of energy is being used and how much? What sort of materials are going into this? These are the things we spend a lot of time optimizing, so that we can guarantee our customers the highest quality credit. That’s why we engineered our technology with MRV at the heart of it.”
Duncan Kariuki
CTO and Co-Founder, Octavia Carbon
From the outset, Octavia built transparency into its technology and operations. Careful consideration of energy sources, material inputs, and lifecycle emissions was already part of their engineering approach, since these factors directly affect both crediting and costs. Carbonfuture MRV+ supports this by providing a consistent and verifiable data trail, helping Octavia demonstrate the quality of their credits while keeping their focus on improving DAC technology itself.
Octavia made the decision to build their own DAC technology, rather than rely on third parties. This was a key focus of their vertically integrated approach, which valued the development of this technology, modular manufacturing and rapid field deployment. With high-quality data management already integrated into operations, Octavia’s first pilot was designed and commissioned in just six months.
The second-generation unit, released earlier this year, has seen CO2 capture become twelve times more productive than earlier models, while being more energy efficient. Through this approach, Octavia has also managed to reduce unit costs by half while increasing manufacturing efficiency by more than 80 percent.
As technologies like Octavia’s continue to improve, Direct Air Capture facilities will need independent dMRV and verification to ensure a transparent chain of custody throughout the entire carbon removal journey. In addition to supporting alignment with future regulatory changes, dMRV systems like Carbonfuture MRV+ enable auditability and compliance for buyers and suppliers, while adding data integrity from a trusted, third-party source.
Beyond that, the business case for dMRV is clear for DAC innovators like Octavia Carbon. With the integration of Carbonfuture MRV+ and their commitment to ensuring quality, Octavia became the second-ever company to receive the AAA rating from BeZero, placing them in the top 0.1% of all rated projects. They’ve also been able to secure two multi-year contracts for future credit deliveries.
In 2023, months before ground broke on Project Hummingbird, the Carbonfuture team visited Octavia Carbon to talk through quantification methods for removals and how to ensure accuracy. Today, Octavia is a pioneer of transparency and data management in the carbon removal space, with aims to scale to hundreds of thousands of tonnes removed by the early 2030s. They’ve broken ground on a scaled second-generation plant with 4 DAC modules, increasing their production capacity and driving costs down.
To support this growth, Octavia has scaled their operations to build a team of more than 70 people, nearly all of whom call Kenya home. This community-focused approach extends beyond the business of carbon removal – Octavia launched the Breaking Barriers gender equality program earlier this year, which has distributed sanitary towels to nearly 400 girls, and trained more than 1,000 adolescents on menstrual health. This was part of their broader community engagement strategy, released in January of 2025, which also included the launch of a green skills and apprenticeship program for dozens of students. Octavia recently welcomed four of these apprentices into full-time roles.
For Kariuki, this focus on community empowerment directly leads back to his motivation in building Octavia Carbon: solving climate change. “One of the biggest defenses that people in the Global North have against climate change is prosperity,” explained Kariuki. “For me, building prosperity is one way of building resilience against climate change, while addressing it and ensuring we can reverse the harm that’s already been caused.”
Direct air capture utilizes sorbent- or solvent-based systems to capture carbon dioxide directly from the air, allowing it to be sequestered either in durable materials like concrete or by injecting it directly into deep rock formations underground. Learn more: https://www.carbonfuture.earth/cdr-technology/direct-air-carbon-capture-and-storage
Digital monitoring, reporting and verification is a set of processes and protocols used to track, measure, report, and verify the amount of carbon dioxide removed from the atmosphere and durably sequestered from carbon removal activities. Learn more: https://www.carbonfuture.earth/products/mrv
The Great African Rift Valley is a series of depressions extending more than 4,000 kilometers through eastern Africa. The area is particularly well-suited for direct air capture, owing to its abundant geothermal potential and the unique geological features.
Direct air capture is an energy-intensive procedure. Having an abundant low-carbon source of reliable and inexpensive renewable energy available significantly reduces the costs and environmental impact associated with the DAC process.
Buyers
At Carbonfuture, we build trust throughout the carbon removal journey with our rigorous, data-driven approach, ensuring unmatched quality and reliability of carbon removal.
