Spiritus has signed three letters of intent with U.S. oil and gas producers representing more than 3 million tonnes of annual CO2 demand for enhanced oil recovery (EOR), the direct air capture company announced. The agreements span producers operating in the Rockies, the Midwest, and the U.S. Gulf Coast.

At industry-standard CO2 utilization rates and project lifetimes, the three projects could recover more than 70 million incremental barrels of oil from fields already drilled and developed.

What do the letters of intent cover?

Each LOI covers on-site CO2 delivery system development at the operator's field. Spiritus plans to install direct air capture units that produce CO2 at costs competitive with traditional supply and at industrial scale. The letters mark the first step toward long-term CO2 offtake agreements, not final commercial contracts.

Why is CO2 supply the binding constraint?

U.S. operators have injected CO2 for EOR for more than 50 years. The technique pushes compressed CO2 into a reservoir to mobilize oil left behind after earlier production. Federal studies estimate that CO2-EOR could unlock 137 billion barrels of technically recoverable U.S. oil.

The United States is the world's largest oil producer. Historic CO2-EOR operations have relied on natural underground CO2 deposits, mainly in Colorado, New Mexico, and Mississippi, piped to fields across the Permian Basin and elsewhere. Those natural supplies are finite, geographically concentrated, and increasingly expensive to develop. That mismatch is the constraint Spiritus is selling against.

"One of the biggest constraints on CO2 EOR deployment has been getting enough affordable CO2 to the fields that need it," said Charles Cadieu, co-founder and CEO of Spiritus.

What is Spiritus offering operators?

The company pitches on-site DAC systems that capture CO2 from ambient air at the wellhead, eliminating pipeline transport from natural source fields. Cadieu framed the opportunity around existing field infrastructure rather than greenfield development.

"Much of the next increment of U.S. oil production can come from fields that already have wells, pipelines and infrastructure around them," he said. "In many of those fields, the missing piece is affordable CO2. Spiritus is building a new source of supply around that constraint."

Spiritus said it is in active discussions with other U.S. operators across major producing regions and invited interested parties to contact its team.

How does this fit Spiritus's commercial pipeline?

The three LOIs are the company's first announced commercial offtake signal. Spiritus previously disclosed a collaboration with Aramco to advance next-scale DAC technology and has hired executives from the energy sector and Tesla to expand its carbon-negative infrastructure build-out. The company is competing for project capital with point-source carbon capture at industrial emitters, where most U.S. capture capacity sits today.

What happens next?

The LOIs convert into long-term offtake contracts once site development milestones are met. The pace of those conversions will determine whether Spiritus can move from three signed letters to first industrial-scale CO2 deliveries, and whether the 3 million-tonne aggregate demand figure grows. Two swing factors will set the project economics:

• Federal tax credit value under Section 45Q for sequestered or utilized CO2.
• The cost trajectory of DAC hardware, which sets the delivered CO2 price against natural-source CO2 and pipeline transport costs.

The first site development milestone from any of the three LOI counterparties is the next verifiable event for the company's commercial pipeline.