Carbon Free has been capturing carbon dioxide since before carbon capture was cool. Since 2016, the company has been capturing flue gas from a San Antonio cement plant, turning 50,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide into baking soda annually. The so-called SkyMine produces three other valuable chemicals, including chlorine, for San Antonio's water system and last year earned more than $40 million in profits from the $150 million plant. Despite their hard-earned profits after years of perfecting their process, Carbon Free executives say they have a brand new plan. Because, as any innovator will tell you, doing something hard often teaches you to do the same thing more easily, a vital axiom to remember as carbon capture turns into a multi-trillion dollar global industry. “There are a lot of other carbon capture technologies that do different things,” Carbon Free CEO Martin Keighley told me. “But they don't do what we do.” Our patents do not overlap or interfere with what they do. We're operating in a pure white space.” Most climate scientists agree that to avoid the worst impacts of climate change, we need to capture carbon emissions, an area known as carbon capture, utilization and sequestration, or CCUS. Some companies capture carbon for other purposes, such as making cement or jet fuel, although these sometimes re-release the carbon. Many of them have carbon capture and permanent storage technology.(Chris Tomlinson, Comment)