Climeworks COO Doug Chan discusses the policy and market mechanisms necessary to scale carbon dioxide removal (CDR) beyond voluntary corporate buying.
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Climeworks faced premature filter failures during Mammoth's serial production
“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…”
Insight
Chan: Net-negative carbon removal requires permanent storage, not reuse
“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.”
Insight
Chan: Scaling direct air capture to billions requires non-recourse debt
“As companies look to get to scale, especially in direct air capture, and once you get to like triple digit, or even triple digit millions, or billions of dollars of capex, debt financing, non-recourse financing is, is ultimately going to be needed.”
Insight
Chan: CDR buyers waiting for proven deployment creates a vicious cycle
“So, kind of what we're seeing in the industry at the moment is people are kind of waiting to see that CDR can be deployed before they make the commitments as well. So, it's kind of this vicious cycle.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Climeworks financed Mammoth on-balance-sheet and exceeded typical FID offtake volumes
“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.”
Disclosure
Climeworks kept hardware design in-house while EPC built the facility
“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…”