Gael Gobaille-Shaw

When he was a Ph.D. student, Gaël Gobaille-Shaw, 34, was tired of feeling like a glorified lab robot. Instead, he dreamed of applying his creativity to real-world climate solutions. One night, he literally dreamed about a special membrane that could use electric charge to pull CO2, in the form of carbonate ions, out of the air. “It was the first scientific dream I ever had that actually made chemical sense,” he says.

Gobaille-Shaw soon turned that dream into reality with Mission Zero, his first company, which builds direct air capture (DAC) machines to suck up historic atmospheric CO2 and convert it into green carbon. He later led a second startup and ideated a third. Each one is rooted in his vision that air, water, and renewable energy can build a world beyond fossil fuels.

Unlike many DAC systems that must burn fossil fuels to release captured carbon, Mission Zero uses electrochemistry. Its devices pull in air, bind CO2 with an alkaline solution, and then use an acidic solution and a membrane-based electrodialysis process to release pure CO2 gas. This heat-free system runs on just electricity and water. Compact and modular, it can be mass-produced and deployed nearly anywhere. With funding from Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and the UK government, one plant is already capturing 50 tons of CO2 annually for jet fuel; a second will supply 250 tons per year for building materials.

His second company, Supercritical, tackles hydrogen. While hydrogen produced by splitting water is theoretically a clean fuel, conventional electrolysis generates it in a low-pressure form that must be compressed—an energy-intensive step with explosion risk. Supercritical’s high-temperature, high-pressure alkaline electrolyzer instead compresses the water before splitting it. As a result, hydrogen emerges already pressurized. This process, Gobaille-Shaw says, nears 100% energy efficiency, a particularly promising result given that most of the world’s food supply depends on hydrogen-based ammonia fertilizer.