Luke Shors

Luke Shors came to water the long way around, and that backstory is most of what makes Capture6 interesting. Before any of this he spent two years as a Peace Corps water-and-sanitation volunteer in Nepal, building toilets and smokeless stoves and running hygiene trainings, and then close to fifteen years as a global health and development consultant for the World Bank, the OECD, UNICEF and USAID, working across more than twenty countries. He earned a doctorate from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a joint public-health and business degree from Johns Hopkins along the way, so he arrived at carbon removal as someone who had spent a career on how big systems actually get financed and deployed, not as a chemist with a membrane to sell.

Luke Shors co-founded Capture6 during the pandemic, and the way he tells it, the company started on a hike. He suggested to an old friend, the economist Ethan Cohen-Cole, that it would be fun to build something together, and the two of them set themselves a tricky brief: do carbon removal without making the world's water problem worse. That constraint matters, because most direct air capture, which is the family of technologies that pull carbon dioxide straight out of the atmosphere, is extremely thirsty, and Shors and Cohen-Cole did not want to fight climate change by draining aquifers. So instead of starting from a technology, they started from a wishlist and, in his words, backed themselves into a solution that fit it.

Luke Shors describes the chemistry at the heart of Capture6 as a transformation of salt, the humble mineral nobody writes about. The company takes salty water (reverse-osmosis reject, brackish groundwater, produced water, any of it), separates out the sodium, and uses electrochemistry to split the rest of the water into an acid and a base. React the sodium with the base and you get sodium hydroxide, a strong, widely-used industrial chemical, which Capture6 then exposes to large volumes of air in cooling towers. The CO2 in that air bonds with the sodium hydroxide and locks into solid sodium carbonate, and along the way the process keeps recovering fresh water. The brine, as Shors puts it, simply ceases to exist.

Luke Shors is careful about why this design choice is the whole game, and it comes down to money rather than chemistry. He points out that in any government's climate budget, emissions reduction and resilience soak up almost every dollar, and carbon removal is left fighting for the last two cents. By making each project water-positive, Capture6 can draw on the much larger budget for water security as well, which is how it escapes that zero-sum trap. That logic is already on the ground at the Palmdale Water District in California, where the company's first facility valorizes brine that would otherwise need up to a hundred acres of evaporation ponds, with similar projects underway in Australia and South Korea.

Luke Shors moved from president to a co-founder role focused on capital and investment in 2025, which fits a founder whose hardest problem has always been the cheque rather than the chemistry. He has a sharp, slightly rueful read on that gap, because when he walks engineering firms through Capture6's process they vet it in about ten minutes (these are well-understood, high-readiness building blocks, more Lego than moonshot), while investors, most of whom do not come from the sector, see a black box. With $27.5 million raised and the first plants coming online, his bet is that a few operating facilities will turn that black box into something the market can finally price. Capture6 is the kind of company my Leviathan database tracks closely, because it sits exactly where the water sector and the climate sector overlap.

“You very rarely read an article in Forbes saying salt is key to the energy transition. It's always some more exciting metal like palladium. And yet salt is really pervasive, it's very expensive to deal with, and it's often in the wrong places. The chemical transformation of salt is fundamentally how we connect water and carbon removal.”

Luke Shors is, in the end, a development economist's idea of a climate founder: someone who treats a wasted brine stream and an underfunded carbon-removal market as two halves of the same fixable problem.