Direct air capture (DAC) is a frontier technology for atmospheric carbon dioxide removal, with significant potential for mitigating climate change and providing feedstock for carbon utilization pathways. Despite DAC’s potential, multiple barriers exist to its large-scale implementation, and we aim to address some of these limitations by using more accurate techno-economic models for large-scale DAC systems. Here we report how the potential overestimation of DAC capacity due to considering simplified gas mixtures in wet-lab studies can result in an underestimation of DAC cost and spatial footprint. In particular, we focused on how to accurately account for the influence of oxygen on CO2 absorption capacity, saturation, and regeneration time. This systematic investigation addresses this critical knowledge gap by quantifying the impact of other air constituents on CO2 absorption capacity in different solvents at conditions relevant to integrated carbon capture and conversion systems. Our results identify a major discrepancy between laboratory measurements and real-world efficiency of DAC systems with specific case studies and techno-economic analysis.
