Climeworks CFO Andreas Apley forecasts a shakeout among early-stage direct air capture startups as they confront the physical realities of commercial deployment.
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…”
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…”