Climeworks

“So the way that the various technology providers, including ourselves, make money is by selling long-term off-take contracts for the CDR, carbon dioxide removal, that we produce, kind of an ironic way to say you produce CDR, Kind of remove CO₂ and store it in …”

“And the reason we made that second pivot, To direct air capture and storage is that's really what we needed to be able to scale.”

“There's plenty of storage around the world, and ultimately, if we want to be negative in our CO₂ removal, we need to be storing it and not reusing it. Otherwise, it's just kind of a circular economy there.”

“So, we still kept it on balance sheet, and actually by the time we did get it built and running, it being mammoth what your typical numbers you would expect for off-take contracts by FID, we'd, we'd well exceeded that.”

“So what we did keep in-house was the design of the core hardware, so those collector units that you see, and then also for the process engineering nerds out there, so the core heat and material balance, the process flow diagram, and the process instrumentation…”

“So we're going from now eight collector containers to 72, and then within these containers there's filter elements, which went from hundreds to thousands.”

“The filter element, which is the one that experienced the most design change. We were, while we were testing the prototypes, we actually did see some failures that were earlier than we had expected. And that then comes that decision of, all right, we're also d…”

“We decided to continue with the ones that were already there and essentially deploy a field patch or a field reinforcement to kind of strengthen the failure mode that we had seen, but then in parallel also work on an improved design as well. So that we could t…”

“So we were awarded one of the two. I lose track of all the years now, but it was last year and we've received the first phase of that, which is the fifty million, and then further up to six hundred million once we reach the Discrete milestones in our project d…”

“Yeah, the thing that keeps me up most is definitely that first one that you mentioned, the market and the demand because your second one, like you said, the project financing that will come if the demand is there. So, having more businesses beyond those first …”

“A lot of direct air capture is currently in its first of a kind stage, but we do, and Climax has been able to show that now we're past that original folk valley, and now we're up to a fourth of a kind, which is still a folk, but a fourth, and this should reall…”

“Climeworks operates Orca, the 4000 ton per year DAC plant that began operation in 2021, which was the first commercial DAC plant in the world.”

“Orca has nominal capacity about 4000 tons. What do we mean with that? That means it's that's what the plant was designed to capture at maximum efficiency. So maximum run rate, et cetera. And there's some losses that go away from that.”

“On the backbone of operating Orca, and having that in the field, we then launched a new fundraise, our Series F already at the time, and that was sort of the first time when large institutional investors came into the cap table, and we managed to raise about s…”

“We are of the fundamental opinion that it doesn't really work to you know, deploy in the lab or at very small scale at pilot scale, and then go from that straight to the size that is required for the plant to be profitable, because that's a huge technological …”

“The key milestone was scaling that technology by a factor of about 10 improving on the cost curve deploying more on the offtake side, so really building the market for these project-financeable offtakes and also making an improvement on the technology.”

“If you do direct air capture, that's the other nature is you have to deal with the weather, how it is, because it's quickly becoming completely uneconomical if you have to pre-treat any of your incoming feedstock, so to say, right? The air that comes in.”

“The sensitivity of the sequestration on the purity of the CO two and your ability to deliver that purity, 24, seven with all the things that happen in this type of production environment, you have to deliver really, really pure CO two doesn't really matter on …”

“The way that certifications work today is you deduct all of the life cycle emissions that exist for the construction of the plant as well as for the operation of the plant, the energy that you use, et cetera. And we could predict some of these, but others requ…”

“We can reach now a performance of around two and a half thousand to 3000 tons of run rate. And that took us About two and a half years to get there.”

“What we're worried about is what's going to happen if people are not transparent about the challenges is that, that people will lose face at some point, you know, when they say, well, this is just an industry that makes a lot of promises, but doesn't really ke…”

“And the next one that we'll build is about 250,000 tons. So another sort of seven to eight X scale up that will be our first plant in the US.”

“So Orca and Mammoth are luckily they're already completely sold out. For the life that we expect the plant to operate.”

“We've worked really hard over the last, I would say, four years to move the market to something that will actually work for project finance. In terms of offtake. So that means long duration contracts, right, over five years plus ideally 10 years or 15 years, l…”

“For example, in Iceland, we have very, very long duration energy contracts with fixed pricing and a certain indexation. So we reflect that in the customer agreements.”

“We actually already executed a project debt facility in one of our projects that was for Orca. And that was definitely very hard to get over the line. Also had to be subsidized because Orca isn't profitable at the size where it is.”

“Our own tech is less than 50% of the CapEx that we need to deploy.”

“Things have started to change in the back half of 2023 where we got our first ocean deliveries from Running Tide, and then our first DAC credit delivery from Climeworks, which is the first batch of credits we've received from them from the contract that we sig…”

“You know, like in 2012, they build demo. Few years later, they did a bigger demo. 2017, they did their first commercial scale. And now, like a few years ago, they did Orca, and now they're going to be doing Mammoth. So they took multiple steps to get to commer…”

“Like to take a ton of CO₂ out of ambient air, you need to filter around two million cubic meters of air.”

“If you build machines like we are doing, you can do it on much, much less area. So you are about a thousand times more area efficient. So at the same area where you can take one ton out of the air with trees, you could take a thousand tons out of the air with …”

“Our first Plant we built here in Switzerland, and that is taking, that's still an operation, that is taking CO₂ out of the air to then sell the CO₂ to a greenhouse. They are fertilizing their plants with CO₂, and also to Coca-Cola, who are making sparkling dri…”

“Like, in terms of climate effects, that market is totally irrelevant. Like, is that a market? Could you grow a sustainable business on that? Yes, sure. So you, we could have decided just to become a small, medium-sized company developing direct air capture pla…”

“They have developed this method where they inject the CO₂ in underground porous rocks, where the CO₂ is mineralizing with the rocks, so within two years, the CO₂ is just turned into stone there”

“And that's the same, what has had to happen in our industry, and I'm sure that will happen over the next two decades to come.”

“This industry is set up to scaling up to the million tons per year scale in the next couple of Years towards the end of this decade. So that's what will happen. We are doing that like a handful of other companies are working towards that.”

“You would need something like 750,000 containers for that, which Is that a large number? It's actually not a large number. It's actually what goes through Shanghai port in two weeks, right? It's like, it's not a lot compared to global economy.”

“Everyone has eight containers, so that ends up then with a total nominal capacity of, ah, 4000 tons of CO₂ per year that can be captured.”

“Like, based on that, we are now building a 10 times larger plant.”

“We've had since beginning over 14,000 customers, and that's increasing”

“95% of the population Would likely only do this when they are forced to it. And that's eventually to get to billions of tons of CO two removal. We need regulation. We need corresponding legislation. We need governmental procurement programs that might be CO tw…”

“Transportation and storage of CO₂ streams is something that we are seeing a lot of the companies that apply to Stripe Climate struggle with. You know, they will have a really compelling capture technology and can essentially use lots of different storage They …”