In early May 2024, the Swiss Direct Air Capture (DAC) company Climeworks announced the launch of their latest Direct Air Capture + Storage (DAC+S) solution, Mammoth. This massive facility is targeted to have 72 collector containers, when fully operational. The plant has opened with 12 in operation onsite and is supported by partnerships with geothermal energy company ON Power and storage partner Carbfix.
One year on, and perhaps in part due to investigative journalism from the Icelandic outlet Heimilden, where the carbon captured by Climeworks was well below targets, the company has recently announced a 25% staff reduction to the 400-person company. Its two mechanical engineer founders, Dr. Jan Wurzbacher and Dr. Christoph Gebald said in a statement, “In light of current macroeconomic uncertainty, shifting policy priorities where climate tech is seeing reduced momentum in some areas, and the pending clarity for our next plant in the U.S., Climeworks is proactively adapting its business plan to stay future-oriented.”
As the most well-funded startup in the DAC sector, both the article and layoff announcement are a tremendous setback for the founders and the company. The two were classmates at ETH Zurich, where they completed their undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral studies. Additionally, Wurzbacher studied at the University of New South Wales, and Gebald at UC Berkeley.
They formed Climeworks in 2009 following the release of the IPCC's sobering 4th Assessment Report in 2007, which raised yet another global alarm about the impact of carbon dioxide emissions on an increasingly warming earth. The two entrepreneurial engineers believed that the necessary policies to curtail global emissions would either never materialize, take too long, or lack the regulatory oversight to change corporate behavior. As emissions have continued to increase, their decision proved prescient.
Wurzbacher and Gebald decided to focus on a direct air capture solution instead. Given the increasing amount of carbon dioxide being released, they aimed to develop a scalable solution to capture CO2 and store it deep underground for thousands of years, all powered by clean, renewable energy.
DAC has had its detractors from the start, and Dr. Jonathan Foley, CEO of Project Drawdown has written extensively on the topic, especially his frustrations with the Biden administration for continuing to provide subsidies to the oil and gas industry for these projects.
Foley writes, “Industrial carbon capture is Big Oil’s favorite form of climate action because it greenwashes the industry, distracting us from the need to phase out fossil fuels, all at taxpayer expense.”
Climeworks’ investors, however, have been undeterred. After multiple funding rounds, including several grants through technology prizes, two early-stage rounds, and three late-stage rounds, Climeworks debuted the world's first commercial carbon air capture industrial plant, Orca, in October 2021. The company followed Orca's launch by raising a whopping $650 million Series E round in April 2022, on a market valuation of just over $1 billion.
Orca, based in Iceland, has been an invaluable working prototype, targeted to extract just over 10 tonnes of carbon from ambient air every day. However, its $10 million price tag is a barrier to scale, which Wurzbacher acknowledged in his October 2022 'Countdown to Climate Solution' TED talk:
"It sounds quite expensive. However, when thinking about cost, we should keep in mind one thing. There's one thing that we cannot buy and that is time. And we need to be quite fast here. So that is why Orca is not there to demonstrate costs. Orca is there to show in the field, out there in the weather, [that] plant is operating. And Orca is working."
Climeworks announced the next industrial plant in its carbon capture mission called Mammoth. Also based in Iceland, Mammoth is almost ten times larger than Orca and is expected to capture 36,000 tonnes of carbon annually. The plant was slated to open in late December 2023, and after some construction delays, it went online in May. Soon after, Climeworks hosted their annual Carbon Removal Summit and topped the Mammoth opening with the announcement of their Generation 3 DAC technology.
"In parallel, we have, over the past five years, been developing our Generation 3 technology. The development is based on real field data, enabling the scale-up to megaton removal capacities," Wurzbacher stated in the Climeworks press release.
The new technology is scheduled to go online as a component of Climeworks's megaton-scale cube-shaped direct air capture hubs. Climeworks was set to begin on the first, Louisiana-based Project Cypress DAC Hub, in 2026, funded by the United States Department of Energy. Funding and momentum for that project has stalled under the Donald Trump’s administration.
Climeworks has bet that there DAC technology would a much more cost-effective investment. The company is targeting total costs of $400 to $600 per ton of net carbon removal by 2030, which is up to a 50% cost reduction compared to today. Recent reports have highlighted however that the cost per ton is well over $1,000.
Gebald and Wurzbacher remain committed, despite the recent setback. “Carbon removal is not a dream, it’s a necessity. A necessity that can make the difference when scaled toward gigaton capacities. We remain focused on the long term. With gratitude and determination, we continue to move forward.”