Climeworks is a Swiss Company specializing in carbon dioxide air capture technology. The company filters the CO2 directly from the ambient air through an adsorption-desorption process.
Projects
In May 2017 the company opened the world's first commercial CO2 project filtering from the ambient air in Hinwil. There are 18 with Direct air capture modules 900 tons CO2 each year and then sold to a greenhouse operator for use as fertilizer. In October 2017, a demo project followed, in which a module on CO2 filter is used at the Hellisheiði Power Station in Iceland. As part of the Horizon 2020 research project CarbFix2 will become the CO2 filtered from the air and then stored underground as a stone. Climeworks refers to the filtering of CO2 from the ambient air for underground storage also as Carbon dioxide removal.
History
In November 2009 Climeworks AG was founded by Christoph Gebald and Jan Wurzbacher as a Spin-off from ETH Zurich. The two German founders were fellow students in mechanical engineering and had in the context of their studies and the subsequent doctorate with technologies for chemical and physical CO2. In 2011, Climeworks received capital from investors for the first time to develop a prototype with a modular structure. Since 2011 then, the rapid scaling has followed today's module technology, which has been available since 2014. In the course of the enterprise development a partnership with the automaker Audi succeeded. Further support was provided by Climeworks from 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. Among others, the production of synthetic fuels on the basis CO2. Since 2018 a Swiss mineral water bottler in Vals, took a CO2 plant in operation to make drinks with carbon dioxide from the air. The company's goal by 2025 is to achieve one percent of its annual global CO2 emissions filtered from the air. This requires the construction of 250,000 systems, comparable to the one in Hinwil. A German subsidiary Climeworks Deutschland GmbH opened in Cologne.
Commercialization
Climeworks has the only existing commercial direct air capture machine. Although several companies aim to commercialize direct air capture systems, Climeworks is the furthest along in the market process, selling to a comparatively small market in high-cost CO2. 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.
