The Tiny Swiss Company That Thinks It Can Help Stop Climate Change

[OKIsItJustMe]

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/12/magazine/climeworks-business-climate-change.html

The Tiny Swiss Company That Thinks It Can Help Stop Climate Change
Two European entrepreneurs want to remove carbon from the air at prices cheap enough to matter.

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The machines themselves require a significant amount of energy. They depend on electric fans to pull air into the ducts and over a special material, known as a sorbent, laced with granules that chemically bind with CO₂; periodic blasts of heat then release the captured gas from the sorbent, with customized software managing the whole catch-and-release cycle. Climeworks had installed the machines on the roof of the power plant to tap into the plant’s low-carbon electricity and the heat from its incineration system. A few dozen yards away from the new installation sat an older stack of Climeworks machines, 18 in total, that had been whirring on the same rooftop for more than a year. So far, these machines had captured about 1,000 metric tons (or about 1,100 short tons) of carbon dioxide from the air and fed it, by pipeline, to an enormous greenhouse nearby, where it was plumping up tomatoes, eggplants and mâche. During a tour of the greenhouse, Paul Ruser, the manager, suggested I taste the results. “Here, try one,” he said, handing me a crisp, ripe cucumber he plucked from a nearby vine. It was the finest direct-air-capture cucumber I’d ever had.

Climeworks’s rooftop plant represents something new in the world: the first direct-air-capture venture in history seeking to sell CO₂ by the ton. When the company’s founders, Christoph Gebald and Jan Wurzbacher, began openly discussing their plans to build a business several years ago, they faced a deluge of skepticism. “I would say nine out of 10 people reacted critically,” Gebald told me. “The first thing they said was: ‘This will never work technically.’ And finally in 2017 we convinced them it works technically, since we built the big plant in Hinwil. But once we convinced them that it works technically, they would say, ‘Well, it will never work economically.’?”

For the moment, skeptics of Climeworks’s business plan are correct: The company is not turning a profit. To build and install the 18 units at Hinwil, hand-assembled in a second-floor workshop in Zurich, cost between $3 million and $4 million, which is the primary reason it costs the firm between $500 and $600 to remove a metric ton of CO₂ from the air. Even as the company has attracted about $50 million in private investments and grants, it faces the same daunting task that confronted Carl Bosch a century ago: How much can it bring costs down? And how fast can it scale up?

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Climeworks’s current goal is to remove 1 percent of the world’s annual CO₂ emissions by the mid 2020s. Yet meeting such a benchmark, if it’s even possible, would require bringing the cost of direct air capture down by nearly an order of magnitude while maintaining and expanding their roster of clients substantially. At the moment, Wurzbacher and Gebald have planned for several generations of Climeworks machines, with each new model promising declining prices. “Basically, we have a road map — $600, down to $400, down to $300 and $200 a ton,” Wurzbacher said. “This is over the next five years. Down to $200 we know quite well what we’re doing.” And beyond $200, Wurzbacher suggested, things get murkier. To move below that price would depend on “new developments” in technology or manufacturing.

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[Hotler]

1. Very cool. Thank you for sharing. nt

[OKIsItJustMe]

2. You're Welcome!

Even if we eliminate all carbon emissions (a good first step) we will need to use some technology like this to actively remove carbon from the atmosphere.