Disclosure certainty 4/5 debate potential 1/5

Climeworks deployed field reinforcements while simultaneously designing collector retrofit packages

Doug Chan · Building the world’s biggest DAC facility · Jan 8, 2025 · at 16:56

Doug Chan, COO of Climeworks, explains how the company managed hardware module failures during the construction of the Mammoth direct air capture plant in Iceland.

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“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 then roll out essentially a retrofit package at a later date.”

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Assertion Not checkable as stated
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