475,000 gallons of clean water. That’s supposedly what falls out the other side of a machine designed to eat CO2. Direct air capture has spent years collecting hype and pilot projects; Project Brighton, Avnos’ new facility in Bridgewater, New Jersey, is meant to collect something more useful — operational data. The U.S. Office of Naval Research thought that was worth funding. That’s not nothing.
Two Outputs, One Machine
This New Jersey facility doesn’t just pull carbon from the air — it produces clean water as a byproduct, without requiring external heat.
Standard direct air capture pulls carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and stops there. Avnos’ Hybrid Direct Air Capture system — HDAC — claims to do that while simultaneously producing water, and without requiring external heat to run. Brighton says it can capture up to 450 tons of CO2 annually alongside those 475,000 gallons of water. Whether those numbers hold under sustained real-world conditions is exactly what the Bridgewater site exists to find out.
“Brighton demonstrates our ability to deliver infrastructure at increasing scale,” said Will Kain, citing the facility’s role generating “real-world performance data” for future commercial deployments.
Brighton isn’t saving the planet. It’s running the experiment that determines whether saving the planet is actually on the table.
Pentagon Money and Jet Fuel: The Bigger Picture
Defense funding for carbon removal is less surprising than it sounds — the Navy has a documented sustainable aviation fuel shortage, and captured CO2 is a direct feedstock candidate.
The U.S. Office of Naval Research backed Brighton for a reason. Jet fuel made from captured atmospheric carbon isn’t science fiction; it’s an active development pathway, and the Navy has strong institutional incentive to see it work. Brighton’s output is reportedly intended to feed exactly that — turning atmospheric carbon into sustainable aviation fuel inputs. It’s still an intended application, not a confirmed pipeline, so treat the SAF angle as directional rather than delivered.
Chris Edwards described the project as evidence of technology companies “building real infrastructure at scale.” Avnos is backing that claim with more than one site. Project Cedar, a second HDAC deployment with up to $17 million in project financing, is designed to test whether Avnos can build faster and repeat the process more cheaply. Brighton writes the playbook; Cedar stress-tests it.
Avnos has operated its R&D campus on Milltown Road since 2024. Brighton entered operations in September 2026 and is the largest HDAC deployment the company has run to date. The operational data it generates will determine whether this technology can credibly scale — and whether direct air capture finally earns a place in the broader, fiercely contested fight over carbon removal infrastructure.
