The world’s first technology for direct air capture of CO2

Website: climeworks.com

Founded Date: 2009

Country HQ: Switzerland (Zurich)

Business model: B2B, B2C

Industry: CO2 capture and storing

Applications: Food, Agri

Team: 100+

FOUNDING MOMENT

Climeworks was founded in 2009 by two mechanical engineers, Jan Wurzbacher and Christoph Gebald. Both of them studied at ETH, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, where they did their masters and went on to do their PhDs in the topic of direct air capture. The motivation to found Climeworks came from them being engineers and wanting to build something useful, coupled with the fact that they were concerned about climate change. During their university holidays, they would spend weeks in the Alps and had seen year on year how the glaciers were receding. So, they decided they wanted to found a company and develop a technology that could help reverse climate change.

“They wanted to found a company and develop a technology that could help reverse climate change”

*Christoph Gebald & Jan Wurzbacher, Founders of Climeworks*

THE INNOVATION

The focus of Climeworks is to develop direct air capture technology. You can think of our technology essentially as a big box, which we call CO2 collector. It’s a modular system with a fan on the side, which draws air into the collector, where we have a highly selective filter material that captures just CO2 on its surface. You can imagine the filter material being like a sponge. Dunk a sponge in water, it will fill up with water. The same thing happens with our filter material - it “fills up” with CO2. We have sensors inside the collector that know exactly when it is fully saturated. Once it is saturated, we close the collector, and heat it up at a temperature between 80 and 100 degree celsius—so relatively low temperatures—in order to break the bond between the CO2 molecules and our filter material. In that way we can collect and deliver the CO2 to where it is needed.

*Climeworks Plant to Sky (Photo by Julia Dunlop)*

How does the relationship between CO2 emitted and CO2 captured in the full lifecycle of your collector look like?

We have currently a net efficiency of 90%. So, essentially for every 100 grams of CO2 that we capture from the air, we rid the air of 90 grams. Over the lifetime of our CO2 collector we will release 10 grams back into the atmosphere.

APPLICATIONS: MARKETS & INDUSTRIES

We have two business models running in parallel. On the one hand, we capture CO2 from the air and we sell it on to other companies for them to use the captured CO2 in their products. For example, we are selling to greenhouses that use CO2 as a fertilizer,and to the drinks industry, which uses our CO2 for drinks carbonation. We also make it available to manufacturers of carbon neutral fuels, where CO2 is used as a key raw material to create a CO2 neutral fuel. That’s the one model - the recycling of CO2 into other products, and these are already industries that are great off-takers of CO2 as raw materials.

*Climeworks plant with greenhouse in background (photo by Julia Dunlop)*

*Greenhouse Meier CO2 pipe, Switzerland (photo by Julia Dunlop)*

The second business model is capturing CO2 from the air and then permanently and safely storing it underground, and we offer this as a service. We offer that to corporates wanting to guide them net-zero, carbon-neutral, even carbon-negative with their footprint and, since last summer, we have also offered this service to individual people. So that anyone—like you or I—if we wanted to reduce our own personal footprint, we can do so through Climeworks.

*Iceland Carbon Dioxide removal, Infographic (Climeworks)*

*Hellisheiði Power Station, Iceland - Credit ON Power (photo by Arni Saeberg)*

Have you thought about selling this service to governments as well, given their role as central stakeholders in the transition?

We are in discussion with them.

FUTURE PLANS

Long-term, our focus lies on the second business model, so the combination of our direct air capture with permanent storage of CO2. For the next months, we will be focusing heavily on scaling up our direct air capture and storage capacity and plan to be building a larger plant in Iceland within the next 12 months.

How much CO2 have you been able to capture so far and what’s your future objective?

When we started back in 2009, we were capturing just milligrams of CO2 in a laboratory, and we have now—a decade later—achieved quite a nice scale-up of a factor of a billion. Currently, with our installed capacity, we are capturing several thousand tons of CO2. Ultimately our goal is to achieve a similar scale up over the decades to come, so move from capturing thousands of tons to capturing billions of tons, becoming truly climate-relevant.

We see ourselves very much as part of the solution, and definitely not the only one. We are part of a portfolio of different solutions, all of which will be needed.

“We are part of a portfolio of different solutions, all of which will be needed”

VISION FOR THE DECADE OF ACTION

We are determined to contribute to helping the world achieve its climate targets and the part we see ourselves playing in the next years is being able to capture climate-relevant amounts of CO2 from the air.

May 2020

A conversation between Louise Charles & Emanuele Di Francesco