How a diamond company is giving carbon capture a boost

Diamonds are usually more focused on the ground than carbon dioxide emissions. One diamond company is trying to make the gems a lever in the fight against climate change by growing diamonds from carbon sucked out of the air.

Aether is a lab-grown diamond startup that just raised $18 million in a funding round led by a global problem solving organization. Lab-grown diamonds are a hot market, and there are many companies that claim that they are more ethical or eco-friendly than their Earth-mined counterparts. Aether claims to be making diamonds in a process powered by clean energy and that it is pulling 20 metric tons of CO2 out of the atmosphere.

The luxury jewelry brand says it can easily absorb all of the carbon that would be captured by a cement company. The world needs businesses that can pay for direct air capture and still make money if the technology is ever going to make a difference in climate change.

It is too expensive to suck one metric ton of CO2 out of the air on a price per ton basis. Direct air carbon culture needs to get that price point down in order to get economies of scale.

Scaling up direct air capture has been part of Aether's mission. The company was founded by CEO Ryan Shearman and COO Daniel Wojno after they read about direct air capture. The direct air capture market has attracted considerable interest from tech industry philanthropists in recent years but few customers that can afford to pay for the service, which is why Shearman has always been to sell enough diamonds to meaningfully support the market. Microsoft pays Climeworks $600 a ton to capture a ton of CO2.

Aether wouldn't say how much it pays for direct air capture services. One ton of CO2 can be transformed into million of dollars worth of diamonds. The type IIa diamonds that are difficult to find in nature sell for between $4,900 and over $10,000 per carats. Shearman says that the price range is higher than other competitors because of the additional work that goes into making the fabrication process as clean as possible.

Aether buys carbon dioxide from Climeworks in Switzerland and ships it to the United States, where the diamonds are grown. Aether uses a proprietary process to convert CO2 into high purity methane. The methane is injected directly into the company's diamond reactor, where it is used to grow rough diamond material over the course of several weeks.

The process of heating gasses to very high temperatures requires a lot of energy. The process and other manufacturing stages are powered by carbon-free sources, according to Shearman. Once the diamonds finish growing, they are shipped to India, where they are cut and polished before being sent back to New York City.

Photography by Steven DeVilbiss

Shearman says that Aether's entire operation is carbon neutral, with carbon offsets used to cancel out the emissions from its New York facilities and those that occur when the company's products are shipped by air and sea. Shearman says the manufacturing process tips into carbon-negative territory when the carbon is taken from the air.

Shearman says that they envisioned this as a manufacturing technology that would allow them to produce diamonds of the same quality as the best diamonds on the market.

A small amount of carbon dioxide is all it takes to make diamonds. The company says it removes an additional 20 metric tons of carbon from the air using a mix of direct air capture and other carbon removal methods. According to Shearman, most customers can expect to cancel a year's worth of personal emissions by purchasing an Aether diamond, because the average American has an annual carbon footprint of 16 metric tons.

In the middle of 2021, Aether began shipping diamonds to customers. Shearman wouldn't give specific sales figures, but he did say that the company produced hundreds of carats of diamonds last year. The fuel that is going to enable us to increase our production footprint this year is the $18 million in Series A funds raised by Helena.

The organization invests in companies that areprovably addressing or will address a societal problem, and it saw Aether as tackling two problems at once: the high cost of direct air capture, and the environmental and human rights. The approach of turning CO2 into methane, and from there into physical things, could be applied to many industries.

Aether isn't going to solve all of the challenges facing direct air capture, and direct air capture alone isn't going to solve climate change. Some environmentalists see the climate technology as a distraction from the hard work of curbing the world's fossil fuel use, even as many models agree we will need to pull carbon from the air to stabilizing global temperatures at safe levels this century.

Whether Aether's sales pitch of a cleaner diamond pulled from the air is appealing enough to turn a significant number of would-be diamond owners away from gems forged deep inside the Earth remains to be seen. The stakes look higher than one jewelry company's fortunes.