Prediction Not checkable as stated
Apley: DAC market will be increasingly supply-constrained for 2030 and 2035
“If people are trying to secure the volumes for 2030, 30 or 20, 35, when they potentially want to actually fulfill their net zero ambitions, then I clearly see this will become more and more supply constraint.”
Disclosure
Apley: Orca runs at 2,500 to 3,000 tons after 2.5 years
“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.”
Opinion
Climeworks CFO: DAC startups risk destroying industry trust through overpromising
“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…”
Disclosure
Climeworks has signed direct air capture offtake contracts up to 15 years
“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…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Apley: Very few carbon removal intermediaries can sign offtakes beyond 2030
“A lot of the intermediaries today in the market, they don't have the balance sheet of a Microsoft or JP Morgan. So, so not all of them are really credit worthy of worthy off takers over a period of 1015 years. And many of them come from an environment where th…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Apley: Some DAC startups might fail due to unrealistic promises
“I think at the moment there might be a little bit too many unrealistic promises in the market, and that might also mean that some of the companies will not make it to that next stage.”
Assertion Supported
Climeworks raised a $650M Series F, a record for Switzerland
“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…”
Insight
Climeworks CFO: Jumping directly from pilot to profitable commercial scale fails
“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 …”
Insight
Apley: Pre-treating incoming air makes direct air capture completely uneconomical
“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.”
Insight
Apley: Direct air capture must dump CO2 if purity standards fail
“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 …”
Insight
Apley: Upfront lifecycle emissions accounting heavily reduces sellable early DAC volume
“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…”
Disclosure
Climeworks plans a 250,000-ton DAC plant for its first US facility
“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.”
Disclosure
Climeworks: Orca and Mammoth DAC plants are completely sold out
“So Orca and Mammoth are luckily they're already completely sold out. For the life that we expect the plant to operate.”
Assertion Supported
Permanent CDR purchases grew from 100k tons in 2021 to 5.7M today
“At the time when we raised, when we last raised money, so sort of by the end of 20, 21, globally sold volumes were only about a 100,000 tons. And now we talk about, I think, 4.6 million tons last year and 5.7 million tons year to date already this year.”
Disclosure
Apley: Climeworks secured subsidized project debt for Orca DAC facility
“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.”
Disclosure
Apley: Proprietary technology is under 50% of Climeworks' project CapEx
“Our own tech is less than 50% of the CapEx that we need to deploy.”
Assertion Supported
Climeworks' Orca DAC plant has a nominal capacity of 4,000 tons
“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.”
Disclosure
Climeworks pitched 10x scale and cost curve improvements to equity investors
“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.”
Disclosure
Apley: Climeworks uses indexed long-duration power contracts in Iceland
“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.”
