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Climeworks CFO: DAC startups risk destroying industry trust through overpromising

Andreas Apley · DAC’s bumpy road to commercial scale · Oct 3, 2024 · at 19:13

Andreas Apley is the CFO of Climeworks, discussing the influx of new venture-backed direct air capture startups and the dangers of aggressive cost and deployment targets.

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“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 keep them.”

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More from Andreas Apley

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.”
Andreas Apley Oct 3, 2024 ▶ 40:42 DAC’s bumpy road to commercial scale
Disclosure
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Andreas Apley Oct 3, 2024 ▶ 17:32 DAC’s bumpy road to commercial scale
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…”
Andreas Apley Oct 3, 2024 ▶ 27:27 DAC’s bumpy road to commercial scale
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…”
Andreas Apley Oct 3, 2024 ▶ 32:51 DAC’s bumpy road to commercial scale
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.”
Andreas Apley Oct 3, 2024 ▶ 38:04 DAC’s bumpy road to commercial scale
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…”
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