Climeworks

A machine that literally sucks carbon dioxide out of the air to help fight climate change.

It's called Direct Air Capture, or DAC, and one of the companies leading the way is Climeworks, based in Switzerland.

At present, carbon capture technology is like the first smartphone, expensive, clunky, not perfect, but potentially world-changing.

Let's dive in.

In 2021, Climeworks switched on Orca, the world's first commercial DAC plant, built in Iceland.

Orca looks like eight giant metal boxes, but together they can pull more than 10 tons of carbon dioxide out of the air every day.

Now, building Orca cost over $10 million.

The UN's climate science body, the IPCC, says carbon removal is a necessary part of the solution because emissions haven't fallen fast enough.

Well, you went from WWF, became the entrepreneur created original beans through in the day-to-day operation, and you shifted now to resolving another major issue with sacred forests.

So what is the challenge you're trying to achieve with sacred forest? Because there's been a lot of chatter about conservation and carbon removal and nonsense like Climeworks and other stuff, but very little money goes into conservation, even though it's the cheapest, easiest way to address carbon drawdown.

Nobody seems to be really pouring money into it.

And you've taken a completely different approach, which I found fascinating.

And I confronted one of them.

And I said, you're very outspoken about people in the voluntary carbon market.

But have you ever written an article about Climeworks, which raised a billion dollars to suck CO2 out of the air in Switzerland and Iceland? And they admitted they produce more CO2 than they suck out of the air.

It's

So there's lots of different ways of using Earth energy as opposed to manmade electricity or other kinds of forms of manmade energy to run most or all of the carbon cycle.

And as just one example, the Climeworks system in, uh, Iceland used geothermal heat to run the capture cycle and used basalt soil chemistry to sequester the CO2 in the ground.

So, uh, and it did use some manmade energy, also from geothermal heat by the way, to run fans and pumps and things like that.

But the actual-

Also, you'll see a lot of kind of technology leadership.

We have a lot of climate unicorn founders and CEOs, like from Fervo and Climeworks and Emerald AI and Nersha and Marvel Fusion, Twelve, Deep Sky, and Phydra.

So really companies that are experienced meteoric growth, but they're still in the relative infancy.

A lot of them haven't IPO'd yet.

It's not like with bio-CCS where I could tell you, "You know, they assumed X for transport and storage and X for energy." It all comes from the McKinsey report that I mentioned earlier, and the McKinsey report is a black box, sadly.

The only thing we know from it is that they interviewed people from Climeworks, 1PointFive, and Carbon Direct in 2023.

So we can assume that a lot of this data comes from projected costs in Iceland and Texas, but we don't have any specific hard essentially numbers we can work against.

So they, they took these numbers directly from McKinsey.

So, last month, Climeworks announced they'd sold out their entire capacity for the next five years.

That's a huge deal, but it also tells you how small this market still is.

Wait, sold out? Like every ton of carbon they can pull from the air for the next five years is already bought?

Exactly.

And the eye-popping part is the price.

Climeworks is charging around $1,000 per ton of CO2 removed.

For comparison, the voluntary carbon market average for a nature-based credit is somewhere around $10 to $20 a ton.

So we're talking 100 times more.