In early May, 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 will eventually have 72 collector containers, completed throughout 2024. The plant has opened with 12 in operation onsite and is supported by partnerships with geothermal energy company ON Power and storage partner Carbfix.

This is a phenomenal achievement for the 400-person company and its two mechanical engineer founders, Dr. Jan Wurzbacher and Dr. Christoph Gebald. 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.

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 will begin on the first, Louisiana-based Project Cypress DAC Hub, in 2026, funded by the United States Department of Energy.

The new technology is also poised to be 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.

Climeworks is well poised for growth on its journey to gigaton carbon capture plus storage capacity with involvement in two other U.S.-based megaton hub proposals. The company is also developing direct air capture projects in Norway, Kenya, and Canada.