This Startup Is Making Diamonds By Sucking CO2 Out Of The Atmosphere

Aether Diamonds, a startup founded in 2018 by Ryan Shearman and Daniel Wojno along with Robert Hagemann, has become the first manufacturer to use atmospheric carbon to create sustainable diamonds.

According to Aether, each carat sold equals 20 metric tons of CO2 taken from the atmosphere, using a mix of direct air capture and other carbon removal methods that comprise long-term carbon sequestration. This has the potential to offset the average American’s carbon footprint by 1.25 years.

This will help remove carbon from the air while aiding the industry by preventing the violation of human rights in diamond mining. 

Direct air capture has been part of Aether’s mission from the beginning. Shearman and Wojno founded the company after reading about direct air capture in 2018 and searched to find a way to forge diamonds using the carbon pulled from the air.

The company produced “hundreds of carats” of diamonds last year and started shipping its first diamonds to customers in mid-2021.

Aether Diamonds can now add certified B Corp status to its credentials which is not easy to attain.

Aether starts the diamond manufacturing process by purchasing carbon dioxide from Climeworks facility, a leading direct air capture firm headquartered in Switzerland, and shipping it to the U.S. Aether puts the purchased CO2 through a proprietary process and converts it into high purity methane, or CH4. That methane is then directly injected into the diamond reactors, where the chemical vapor deposition method grows rough diamond material in a few weeks. The chemical vapor deposition process heats gasses to very high temperatures under near-vacuum conditions which consume high amounts of energy. But as the company tackles climate change, the chemical vapor deposition and other manufacturing stages of Aether are powered solely by carbon-free sources like solar and nuclear.

The grown diamonds are shipped to Surat, India. They are cut and polished there to be sent back to New York City’s diamond district for sale.