RepAir Uses EIC Accelerator Money for Battery-Based Air Capture

Carbon dioxide makes up about 0.04% of the air, the figure the StackDAC project starts from, and RepAir's answer is a capture cell that runs on electricity instead of heat. The Israeli company was founded in 2020. Its cell has two nickel-based electrodes separated by a membrane: an electric current binds CO2 from the incoming air as carbonate and bicarbonate ions on one side and releases it as a concentrated gas on the other, and the polarity is reversed every few hours, as described by TechCrunch and Quantum Commodity Intelligence. Chief executive Amir Shiner calls it "more like a fuel cell, but operated more like a battery".

The EIC Accelerator selected RepAir DAC Ltd. for blended finance at its March 2025 cut-off, one of 40 companies chosen from 150 interviewed, per the EIC's announcement of 30 June 2025. CORDIS records a signed grant agreement for the project, StackDAC, with an EU contribution of €2,499,999 from 1 November 2025 to 31 October 2027. The project is a year into its two years, and this article sets out what it promised and what can already be checked.

An electric cell instead of a heated sorbent

According to a company release of 29 November 2023, the system runs at ambient temperature without liquids or solvents and consumes under 600 kWh of electricity per tonne of CO2 removed, including regeneration, which the company puts at 70% less than competing liquid-sorbent methods. The same 0.6 MWh figure appears in the company's January 2025 Pelican release, and its head of strategy told Tech.eu that most competitors need 2.5 MWh. In slides shown at a US Department of Energy project review on 9 August 2024, RepAir says the sub-600 kWh figure was "demonstrated by 5,000 hours of continuous data". No independent measurement of the energy figure has been published.

Quantum Commodity Intelligence reported in January 2024 that the electrochemistry was pioneered by Yushan Yan, a chemistry professor at the University of Delaware, and is used under a global exclusive licence; TechCrunch listed Yan as a board member in 2021. The difference TechCrunch draws against established direct air capture is the release step: where other systems heat a solvent to free the captured CO2, RepAir drives the reaction with electricity. The company says on its website that this lets the process ramp up on demand as the power supply fluctuates.

The building block is the StackDAC module. The 2024 DOE slides give its specifications: 200 to 300 cells, each with 0.8 to 1.2 square metres of active area, hardware of recycled polymers made by injection moulding, a footprint of 2.8 by 1.4 by 1.4 metres for a 300-cell stack, and a capture capacity of 50 to 70 tonnes of CO2 a year. The cell architecture borrows from alkaline exchange membrane fuel cells and uses nickel electrodes of the kind already made at scale for batteries, which is the basis of the company's plan for what it calls battery-inspired gigafactories.

What StackDAC promised

The CORDIS objective is short on measurable targets. It argues that direct air capture is "the only solution that can permanently and verifiably remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere" and says RepAir is developing "fully electric DAC technology, engineered as a trully scalable solution at the gigaton scale". It names no tonnage, no site, no cost and no readiness level to be reached by October 2027. CORDIS lists no total project cost and, a year in, no results or deliverables. No EIC Fund equity investment in RepAir has been announced by the company or the EIC, and the equity amount behind the blended-finance selection is not public.

1. Fully electric capture cellPrototype existsTRL 6 field prototype announced in November 2023, before the grant.
2. Energy below 0.6 MWh per tonneCompany figureCompany releases and slides; no independent test published.
3. A stackable, mass-manufacturable moduleSpecifiedSpecifications in the 2024 DOE slides; no installed commercial stack reported.
4. Scale towards gigatons a yearToo earlyThe project runs to October 2027; CORDIS shows no results yet.

A pipeline of agreements, not of plants

Since the prototype, RepAir has announced three projects with named storage or hub partners, each at an early stage. Its 2024 DOE slides also list sites in Texas, Illinois, Iceland and Kenya and a pre-purchase agreement, without naming a buyer or a volume.

1. Greece. In June 2024 RepAir and EnEarth, the carbon storage subsidiary of Energean, agreed to install RepAir's capture system at Energean's onshore facility at Prinos near Kavala and store the CO2 in the Prinos saline aquifer. EnergyTech and IENE reported operations expected in early 2026, starting with a first kiloton of CO2. A web search on 28 October 2026 found no announcement that the RepAir unit at Prinos has started.
2. France. In August 2024 RepAir Carbon US Inc. and the Dutch storage start-up C-Questra announced what they called the EU's first onshore direct air capture and storage project, at Grandpuits near Paris, aiming to remove 100,000 tonnes of CO2 a year by 2030 and megatons by 2035. Tech.eu and Renewable Carbon News reported that C-Questra had applied for a storage permit; no grant of that permit was found.
3. United States. In January 2025 Shell and Mitsubishi chose RepAir as one of three technology providers for the Pelican Gulf Coast Carbon Removal hub in Louisiana, per E&E News. The company's release describes Pelican as an early-engineering feasibility study and says Shell and Mitsubishi will provide up to $3 million of development funding, paid against milestones. The Department of Energy cancelled at least ten DAC hub awards in late 2025, according to Carbon180; whether Pelican was among them could not be confirmed from the sources found.

Funding in rounds, and a moving cost target

RepAir raised a $1.5 million seed round in October 2021, co-led by Counteract and ESIL, to advance what was then a TRL 3 prototype, per TechCrunch. A $10 million Series A led by Extantia Capital followed, with Equinor Ventures, Shell Ventures and Zero Carbon Capital, reported by Calcalist on 6 December 2022; Quantum Commodity Intelligence dates its close to November 2022. In April 2025 the company announced a $15 million Series A extension co-led by Extantia and Taranis Carbon Ventures, with Ormat Technologies and Repsol, alongside a separate $3 million grant from the Israel Innovation Authority, as reported by TechCrunch and World Bio Market Insights. The figures come from different announcements and are shown separately below.

The cost claim has moved with each announcement. In December 2022 the company said its process could bring capture to $70 a tonne. In January 2024 Shiner set a target of under $100 a tonne by 2030. In June 2024 RepAir projected $50 a tonne at gigaton scale. In April 2025 it told TechCrunch $70 to $80 a tonne, against about $600 a tonne for other approaches, an estimate TechCrunch attributes to experts. These are projections for plants that do not exist yet, and no cost has been reported from an operating unit.

The commercial story has also widened beyond the open air. The same 2025 coverage describes talks with aluminium producers and gas turbine developers, including turbines that power data centres, to capture CO2 from exhaust at concentrations below 5%, which Shiner described to TechCrunch as early-stage. The company's website now presents RepAir as a capture technology for streams of 0 to 5% CO2, covering both direct air capture and diluted point sources. An S&P Global interview published in July 2026 covers the modular approach; the article could not be opened for this review, so its figures are not repeated here.

Still active, with a new European base

On 31 March 2026 RepAir announced a European office in Luxembourg led by Jean-Philippe Hiegel, its VP Strategy and Growth, who previously spent seven years at the Northern Lights storage project in Norway, per CC Startup; a summary of TNW's report also names Hiegel as head of the office. The company said it would take part in Luxembourg's CCUS and CDR taskforce. A search for the company in the Israeli Corporations Authority register could not be completed online for this article, so its registration details, staff numbers and finances are not verified here, and the company has published no revenue figure.

Where it fits in EU policy

The European Commission's industrial carbon management policy aims to store at least 50 million tonnes of captured CO2 underground each year by 2030, and the Carbon Removals and Carbon Farming Regulation sets up EU-wide certification of carbon removals. Both of RepAir's European projects depend on storage sites, at Prinos and Grandpuits, that the cited reports describe as still in development, with full Prinos injection capacity planned for 2028 and the Grandpuits permit applied for.

The reporting is based on publicly available sources, listed below.