Climeworks

Climeworks AG is a Swiss company specializing in carbon dioxide air capture technology. The company filters directly from the ambient air through an adsorption-desorption process. Climeworks refers to the filtering of from the ambient air for underground storage as carbon dioxide removal.

History

Christoph Gebald and Jan Wurzbacher founded Climeworks in November 2009 as a spin-off from ETH Zurich. The two German founders were fellow students in mechanical engineering and had worked with technologies for chemical and physical in the context of their studies and subsequent doctorates. In 2011, Climeworks received capital from investors for the first time to develop a prototype with a modular structure. Since then, rapid scaling has led to their present module technology, which has been available since 2014. In the course of the enterprise's development, a partnership with the automaker Audi succeeded. Further support was provided by the Swiss Federal Office of Energy, which enabled the accelerated commercialization and scaling of the technology. Climeworks is part of several European research and development projects. This includes the production of synthetic fuels from . Since 2018 a Swiss mineral water bottler in Vals has been producing beverages with carbon dioxide from the air.

The company's goal by 2025 is to filter one percent of annual global emissions from the air. This requires the construction of 250,000 systems comparable to the one in Hinwil.

A German subsidiary, Climeworks Deutschland GmbH, has opened in Cologne.

On 20 July 2021 the Swiss and Icelandic governments agreed to jointly develop "negative emission technologies" which involve extracting from the atmosphere and storing it underground using Climeworks and CarbFix (-to-stone).

The corporate offices of Climeworks AG are in Zürich.

Projects

In May 2017 the company opened the world's first commercial project to filter from the ambient air in Hinwil. It consists of 18 direct air capture modules that filter 900 tonnes of each year, which are then sold to a greenhouse operator for use as fertilizer.

In October 2017, a demo project followed, in which a module on filter is used at the Hellisheiði Power Station in Iceland. As part of the Horizon 2020 research project, will be filtered from the air and then stored underground as a mineral.

In September 2021, Climeworks's Orca carbon capture plant came online. As of September 2021, it is the largest direct air capture facility in the world, capturing 4,000 tonnes of per year. Like the pilot project, the operating facility is located at Hellisheiði Power Station.

The carbon dioxide captured from Orca is passed to a second company, Carbfix, who inject it underground in such a way that within two years it becomes stone.

Following Orca, a second, larger plant "Mammoth", will capture 36,000 tonnes a year, once completed in 2024.

Commercialization

Climeworks has the only existing commercial direct air capture machine. Although several other companies aim to commercialize direct air capture systems (e.g., Carbon Engineering, Global Thermostat), Climeworks is the furthest along in the market process, selling to a comparatively small market in high-cost (i.e., used in greenhouses to enhance productivity may cost more than $1,000 per tonne if the greenhouse is located far from a source). This market is too small to support a robust ecosystem of small innovators necessary to explore the large number of chemical recipes and physical machinery that might decrease direct air capture prices. Thus, like photovoltaics or hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling, the development of direct air capture will likely require long-term government investment in incentives.

See also

* Carbon capture and storage
* Hellisheiði Power Station
* EDL Anlagenbau Gesellschaft

References

Sources

*

External links

* {{Official website

2009 establishments in Switzerland
Companies based in Zürich
Corporate spin-offs
Direct air capture