Climeworks chosen as one of 20 startups to present their technologies at the “Low-Emissions Solutions" conference
During the COP22 Climate Change Conference in Marrakech, for the first time ever, a “large-scale technical-solutions conference” for senior delegates by UNFCCC and experts of technology of the 196 states will take place. The focus during the three-day “Low-Emissions Solution Conference” is a presentation by 20 chosen cleantech start-ups that introduce their scalable technologies. Climeworks will show its efficient solution to filter CO₂ from ambient air and share the potential for climate protection.
The Climeworks CO₂ direct air capture (DAC) technology is based on a cyclic capture-regeneration process and a novel filter. During the capture process, atmospheric CO₂ is chemically bound to the surface of the filter. Once the filter is saturated, the CO₂ is released by heating it to a temperature of about 100 degrees Celsius, thereby delivering high-purity gaseous CO₂. The CO₂-free filter can be reused for thousands of capture-regeneration cycles. DAC allows for significant emissions reductions through the production of low-carbon fuels and eventually enables negative emissions when combined with a permanent carbon storage solution.
The Climeworks founders have set themselves an ambitious goal: to inspire 1 billion people to remove CO₂ from the air. Simply by changing the number of modules, Climeworks’ DAC technology can be freely scaled to meet the demands of any application and has a carbon removal potential that is relevant for achieving climate targets agreed upon in the Paris Agreement.
Climeworks’ technology has several commercial applications: In the short term, the company targets large merchant markets by selling air-captured CO₂ to customers like greenhouse operators or the beverage industry, which currently receive their CO₂ primarily as an industrial waste product and often from the combustion of fossil fuels.
In the mid-term, Climeworks seeks to close the carbon cycle by providing atmospheric CO₂ for the production of low-carbon fuels, which allows large-scale storage of renewable energies and further allows addressing CO₂ sources that are otherwise hard to capture, e.g., emissions from the past or mobile sources. For that reason, the company is in a close partnership with car maker Audi.
In the long term and in combination with storage technology, DAC is one of the only few technologies with the potential to capture and permanently remove several gigatons of atmospheric CO₂ per year. The usage of so-called Negative Emission Technologies (NET) is considered necessary in more than 85% of IPCC climate scenarios to limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius.
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