Latest news with #JanWurzbacher
CNN
30-05-2025
- Business
- CNN
This company says its technology can help save the world. It's now cutting 20% of its staff as Trump slashes climate funding
Climate change Donald Trump Air quality PollutionFacebookTweetLink Follow Two huge plants in Iceland operate like giant vacuum cleaners, sucking in air and stripping out planet-heating carbon pollution. This much-hyped climate technology is called direct air capture, and the company behind these plants, Switzerland-based Climeworks, is perhaps its most high-profile proponent. But a year after opening a huge new facility, Climeworks is straining against strong headwinds. The company announced this month it would lay off around 20% of its workforce, blaming economic uncertainties and shifting climate policy priorities. 'We've always known this journey would be demanding. Today, we find ourselves navigating a challenging time,' Climeworks' CEOs Christoph Gebald and Jan Wurzbacher said in a statement. This is particularly true of its US ambitions. A new direct air capture plant planned for Louisiana, which received $50 million in funding from the Biden administration, hangs in the balance as President Donald Trump slashes climate funding. Climeworks also faces mounting criticism for operating at only a fraction of its maximum capacity, and for failing to remove more climate pollution than it emits. The company says these are teething pains inherent in setting up a new industry from scratch and that it has entered a new phase of global scale up. 'The overall trajectory will be positive as we continue to define the technology,' said a Climeworks spokesperson. For critics, however, these headwinds are evidence direct air capture is an expensive, shiny distraction from effective climate action. Climeworks, which launched in 2009, is among around 140 direct air capture companies globally, but is one of the most high-profile and best funded. In 2021, it opened its Orca plant in Iceland, followed in 2024 by a second called Mammoth. These facilities suck in air and extract carbon using chemicals in a process powered by clean, geothermal energy. The carbon can then be reused or injected deep underground where it will be naturally transformed into stone, locking it up permanently. Climeworks makes its money by selling credits to companies to offset their own climate pollution. The appeal of direct air capture is clear; to keep global warming from rising to even more catastrophic levels means drastically cutting back on planet-heating fossil fuels. But many scientists say the world will also need to remove some of the carbon pollution already in the atmosphere. This can be done naturally, for example through tree planting, or with technology like direct air capture. The advantage of direct air capture is that carbon is removed from the air immediately and 'can be measured directly and accurately,' said Howard Herzog, senior research engineer at the MIT Energy Initiative. But there are big challenges, he told CNN. The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has been shooting upward, but still only makes up about 0.04%. Herzog compares removing carbon directly from the air to needing to find 10 red marbles in a jar of 25,000 marbles of which 24,990 are blue. This makes the process energy-intensive and expensive. The technology also takes time to scale. Climeworks hasn't come anywhere close to the full capacity of its plants. Orca can remove a maximum of 4,000 tons of carbon a year, but it has never captured more than 1,700 tons in a year since it opened in 2021. The company says single months have seen a capture rate much closer to the maximum. The company's Mammoth plant has a maximum capacity of 36,000 tons a year but since it opened last year it has removed a total of 805 tons, a figure which goes down to 121 tons when taking into account the carbon produced building and running the plants. 'It's true that both plants are not yet operating at the capacity we originally targeted,' said the Climeworks spokesperson. 'Like all transformative innovations, progress is iterative, and some steps may take longer than anticipated,' they said. The company's prospective third plant in Louisiana aims to remove 1 million tons of carbon a year by 2030, but it's uncertain whether construction will proceed under the Trump administration. A Department of Energy spokesperson said a department-wide review was underway 'to ensure all activities follow the law, comply with applicable court orders and align with the Trump administration's priorities.' The government has a mandate 'to unleash 'American Energy Dominance',' they added. Direct air capture's success will also depend on companies' willingness to buy carbon credits. Currently companies are pretty free to 'use the atmosphere as a waste dump,' said Holly Buck, assistant professor of environment and sustainability at the University at Buffalo. 'This lack of regulation means there is not yet a strong business case for cleaning this waste up,' she told CNN. Another criticism leveled at Climeworks is its failure to offset its own climate pollution. The carbon produced by its corporate activities, such as office space and travel, outweighs the carbon removed by its plants. The company says its plants already remove more carbon than they produce and corporate emissions 'will become irrelevant as the size of our plants scales up.' Some, however, believe the challenges Climeworks face tell a broader story about direct air capture. This should be a 'wake-up call,' said Lili Fuhr, director of the fossil economy program at the Center for International Environmental Law. Climeworks' problems are not 'outliers,' she told CNN, 'but reflect persistent technical and economic hurdles faced by the direct air capture industry worldwide.' 'The climate crisis demands real action, not speculative tech that overpromises and underdelivers.' she added. Some of the Climeworks' problems are 'related to normal first-of-a-kind scaling challenges with emerging complex engineering projects,' Buck said. But the technology has a steep path to becoming cheaper and more efficient, especially with US slashing funding for climate policies, she added. 'This kind of policy instability and backtracking on contracts will be terrible for a range of technologies and innovations, not just direct air capture.' Direct air capture is definitely feasible but its hard, said MIT's Buck. Whether it succeeds will depend on a slew of factors including technological improvements and creating markets for carbon removals, he said. 'At this point in time, no one really knows how large a role direct air capture will play in the future.'
CNN
30-05-2025
- Business
- CNN
This company says its technology can help save the world. It's now cutting 20% of its staff as Trump slashes climate funding
Climate change Donald Trump Air quality PollutionFacebookTweetLink Follow Two huge plants in Iceland operate like giant vacuum cleaners, sucking in air and stripping out planet-heating carbon pollution. This much-hyped climate technology is called direct air capture, and the company behind these plants, Switzerland-based Climeworks, is perhaps its most high-profile proponent. But a year after opening a huge new facility, Climeworks is straining against strong headwinds. The company announced this month it would lay off around 20% of its workforce, blaming economic uncertainties and shifting climate policy priorities. 'We've always known this journey would be demanding. Today, we find ourselves navigating a challenging time,' Climeworks' CEOs Christoph Gebald and Jan Wurzbacher said in a statement. This is particularly true of its US ambitions. A new direct air capture plant planned for Louisiana, which received $50 million in funding from the Biden administration, hangs in the balance as President Donald Trump slashes climate funding. Climeworks also faces mounting criticism for operating at only a fraction of its maximum capacity, and for failing to remove more climate pollution than it emits. The company says these are teething pains inherent in setting up a new industry from scratch and that it has entered a new phase of global scale up. 'The overall trajectory will be positive as we continue to define the technology,' said a Climeworks spokesperson. For critics, however, these headwinds are evidence direct air capture is an expensive, shiny distraction from effective climate action. Climeworks, which launched in 2009, is among around 140 direct air capture companies globally, but is one of the most high-profile and best funded. In 2021, it opened its Orca plant in Iceland, followed in 2024 by a second called Mammoth. These facilities suck in air and extract carbon using chemicals in a process powered by clean, geothermal energy. The carbon can then be reused or injected deep underground where it will be naturally transformed into stone, locking it up permanently. Climeworks makes its money by selling credits to companies to offset their own climate pollution. The appeal of direct air capture is clear; to keep global warming from rising to even more catastrophic levels means drastically cutting back on planet-heating fossil fuels. But many scientists say the world will also need to remove some of the carbon pollution already in the atmosphere. This can be done naturally, for example through tree planting, or with technology like direct air capture. The advantage of direct air capture is that carbon is removed from the air immediately and 'can be measured directly and accurately,' said Howard Herzog, senior research engineer at the MIT Energy Initiative. But there are big challenges, he told CNN. The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has been shooting upward, but still only makes up about 0.04%. Herzog compares removing carbon directly from the air to needing to find 10 red marbles in a jar of 25,000 marbles of which 24,990 are blue. This makes the process energy-intensive and expensive. The technology also takes time to scale. Climeworks hasn't come anywhere close to the full capacity of its plants. Orca can remove a maximum of 4,000 tons of carbon a year, but it has never captured more than 1,700 tons in a year since it opened in 2021. The company says single months have seen a capture rate much closer to the maximum. The company's Mammoth plant has a maximum capacity of 36,000 tons a year but since it opened last year it has removed a total of 805 tons, a figure which goes down to 121 tons when taking into account the carbon produced building and running the plants. 'It's true that both plants are not yet operating at the capacity we originally targeted,' said the Climeworks spokesperson. 'Like all transformative innovations, progress is iterative, and some steps may take longer than anticipated,' they said. The company's prospective third plant in Louisiana aims to remove 1 million tons of carbon a year by 2030, but it's uncertain whether construction will proceed under the Trump administration. A Department of Energy spokesperson said a department-wide review was underway 'to ensure all activities follow the law, comply with applicable court orders and align with the Trump administration's priorities.' The government has a mandate 'to unleash 'American Energy Dominance',' they added. Direct air capture's success will also depend on companies' willingness to buy carbon credits. Currently companies are pretty free to 'use the atmosphere as a waste dump,' said Holly Buck, assistant professor of environment and sustainability at the University at Buffalo. 'This lack of regulation means there is not yet a strong business case for cleaning this waste up,' she told CNN. Another criticism leveled at Climeworks is its failure to offset its own climate pollution. The carbon produced by its corporate activities, such as office space and travel, outweighs the carbon removed by its plants. The company says its plants already remove more carbon than they produce and corporate emissions 'will become irrelevant as the size of our plants scales up.' Some, however, believe the challenges Climeworks face tell a broader story about direct air capture. This should be a 'wake-up call,' said Lili Fuhr, director of the fossil economy program at the Center for International Environmental Law. Climeworks' problems are not 'outliers,' she told CNN, 'but reflect persistent technical and economic hurdles faced by the direct air capture industry worldwide.' 'The climate crisis demands real action, not speculative tech that overpromises and underdelivers.' she added. Some of the Climeworks' problems are 'related to normal first-of-a-kind scaling challenges with emerging complex engineering projects,' Buck said. But the technology has a steep path to becoming cheaper and more efficient, especially with US slashing funding for climate policies, she added. 'This kind of policy instability and backtracking on contracts will be terrible for a range of technologies and innovations, not just direct air capture.' Direct air capture is definitely feasible but its hard, said MIT's Buck. Whether it succeeds will depend on a slew of factors including technological improvements and creating markets for carbon removals, he said. 'At this point in time, no one really knows how large a role direct air capture will play in the future.'
CNN
30-05-2025
- Business
- CNN
This company says its technology can help save the world. It's now cutting 20% of its staff as Trump slashes climate funding
Climate change Donald Trump Air quality PollutionFacebookTweetLink Follow Two huge plants in Iceland operate like giant vacuum cleaners, sucking in air and stripping out planet-heating carbon pollution. This much-hyped climate technology is called direct air capture, and the company behind these plants, Switzerland-based Climeworks, is perhaps its most high-profile proponent. But a year after opening a huge new facility, Climeworks is straining against strong headwinds. The company announced this month it would lay off around 20% of its workforce, blaming economic uncertainties and shifting climate policy priorities. 'We've always known this journey would be demanding. Today, we find ourselves navigating a challenging time,' Climeworks' CEOs Christoph Gebald and Jan Wurzbacher said in a statement. This is particularly true of its US ambitions. A new direct air capture plant planned for Louisiana, which received $50 million in funding from the Biden administration, hangs in the balance as President Donald Trump slashes climate funding. Climeworks also faces mounting criticism for operating at only a fraction of its maximum capacity, and for failing to remove more climate pollution than it emits. The company says these are teething pains inherent in setting up a new industry from scratch and that it has entered a new phase of global scale up. 'The overall trajectory will be positive as we continue to define the technology,' said a Climeworks spokesperson. For critics, however, these headwinds are evidence direct air capture is an expensive, shiny distraction from effective climate action. Climeworks, which launched in 2009, is among around 140 direct air capture companies globally, but is one of the most high-profile and best funded. In 2021, it opened its Orca plant in Iceland, followed in 2024 by a second called Mammoth. These facilities suck in air and extract carbon using chemicals in a process powered by clean, geothermal energy. The carbon can then be reused or injected deep underground where it will be naturally transformed into stone, locking it up permanently. Climeworks makes its money by selling credits to companies to offset their own climate pollution. The appeal of direct air capture is clear; to keep global warming from rising to even more catastrophic levels means drastically cutting back on planet-heating fossil fuels. But many scientists say the world will also need to remove some of the carbon pollution already in the atmosphere. This can be done naturally, for example through tree planting, or with technology like direct air capture. The advantage of direct air capture is that carbon is removed from the air immediately and 'can be measured directly and accurately,' said Howard Herzog, senior research engineer at the MIT Energy Initiative. But there are big challenges, he told CNN. The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has been shooting upward, but still only makes up about 0.04%. Herzog compares removing carbon directly from the air to needing to find 10 red marbles in a jar of 25,000 marbles of which 24,990 are blue. This makes the process energy-intensive and expensive. The technology also takes time to scale. Climeworks hasn't come anywhere close to the full capacity of its plants. Orca can remove a maximum of 4,000 tons of carbon a year, but it has never captured more than 1,700 tons in a year since it opened in 2021. The company says single months have seen a capture rate much closer to the maximum. The company's Mammoth plant has a maximum capacity of 36,000 tons a year but since it opened last year it has removed a total of 805 tons, a figure which goes down to 121 tons when taking into account the carbon produced building and running the plants. 'It's true that both plants are not yet operating at the capacity we originally targeted,' said the Climeworks spokesperson. 'Like all transformative innovations, progress is iterative, and some steps may take longer than anticipated,' they said. The company's prospective third plant in Louisiana aims to remove 1 million tons of carbon a year by 2030, but it's uncertain whether construction will proceed under the Trump administration. A Department of Energy spokesperson said a department-wide review was underway 'to ensure all activities follow the law, comply with applicable court orders and align with the Trump administration's priorities.' The government has a mandate 'to unleash 'American Energy Dominance',' they added. Direct air capture's success will also depend on companies' willingness to buy carbon credits. Currently companies are pretty free to 'use the atmosphere as a waste dump,' said Holly Buck, assistant professor of environment and sustainability at the University at Buffalo. 'This lack of regulation means there is not yet a strong business case for cleaning this waste up,' she told CNN. Another criticism leveled at Climeworks is its failure to offset its own climate pollution. The carbon produced by its corporate activities, such as office space and travel, outweighs the carbon removed by its plants. The company says its plants already remove more carbon than they produce and corporate emissions 'will become irrelevant as the size of our plants scales up.' Some, however, believe the challenges Climeworks face tell a broader story about direct air capture. This should be a 'wake-up call,' said Lili Fuhr, director of the fossil economy program at the Center for International Environmental Law. Climeworks' problems are not 'outliers,' she told CNN, 'but reflect persistent technical and economic hurdles faced by the direct air capture industry worldwide.' 'The climate crisis demands real action, not speculative tech that overpromises and underdelivers.' she added. Some of the Climeworks' problems are 'related to normal first-of-a-kind scaling challenges with emerging complex engineering projects,' Buck said. But the technology has a steep path to becoming cheaper and more efficient, especially with US slashing funding for climate policies, she added. 'This kind of policy instability and backtracking on contracts will be terrible for a range of technologies and innovations, not just direct air capture.' Direct air capture is definitely feasible but its hard, said MIT's Buck. Whether it succeeds will depend on a slew of factors including technological improvements and creating markets for carbon removals, he said. 'At this point in time, no one really knows how large a role direct air capture will play in the future.'
Bloomberg
22-05-2025
- Business
- Bloomberg
Carbon Removal Pioneer Climeworks Tackles Its First Major Layoff
By and Sommer Saadi Save Scientists are clear that meeting climate goals means ending carbon pollution and drawing down excess CO2 from the air. That's why carbon-removal technologies have proliferated over the past decade. But with the US government slashing climate incentives and programs, some companies are being forced to cut costs. This week Akshat Rathi speaks with Jan Wurzbacher, co-founder of Climeworks, a startup that pulls carbon dioxide from the air, about its first major layoff and what the future holds for the most expensive climate solution.
The Guardian
17-05-2025
- Business
- The Guardian
Swiss firm that captures carbon from air to cut workforce by more than 10%
A Swiss startup that has led the way in sucking carbon out of the air has announced plans to cut its workforce by more than 10% amid economic uncertainty and 'reduced momentum' for climate tech. The downsizing at Climeworks, the company that built the world's first direct air capture facilities, comes one week after journalists in Iceland revealed its two flagship plants have captured far less carbon than their advertised capacity. A spokesperson said the timing of the redundancies was unrelated. 'We've always known this journey would be demanding,' said CEOs Christoph Gebald and Jan Wurzbacher in a joint statement about the job losses on Thursday. 'Today, we find ourselves navigating a challenging time.' Climeworks attributed its decision to economic issues hitting the whole industry. The company, which is now in a consultation process required by Swiss law when more than 10% of a workforce is at risk, said it was also influenced by uncertainty about a third facility planned for the US, where President Donald Trump has repeatedly attacked policies to cut pollution and pushed to scrap incentives for clean energy projects. Direct air capture is one of the most expensive forms of cutting carbon concentrations but has increasingly gained traction among companies seeking more credible ways to compensate their emissions than traditional offsets – which analyses have repeatedly found to be riddled with junk projects. In recent months, Climeworks has signed deals to permanently remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere with Morgan Stanley, TikTok and British Airways. But the technology is still struggling to grow out of the pilot phase. The Icelandic investigation found that both plants had drastically underperformed on their promises. The company's flagship Mammoth plant in Iceland, which has a nameplate capacity of 36,000 tons of carbon dioxide a year, captured 750 tons in the first 10 months since opening, according to Climeworks, with net removals after accounting for emissions in the supply chain coming to just 105 tons. The carbon savings amount to as much as eight average Americans will have emitted over the same period. The smaller and longer-running Orca plant, which is designed for net removals of 3,000 tons per year, has failed to reach 1,000 tons of net removals in any year since it began operations in 2021. While pilot projects should be expected to struggle and even fail in some ways, the scale of the undercapturing is surprising, said Mark Preston Aragonès, a carbon accounting analyst at environmental group Bellona, who visited the facilities for the launch of the Mammoth plant. 'The mistakes I would link to hype and not managing expectations,' he said. 'They have themselves to blame, but also the market actors that were kind of egging them on.' Climeworks initially said it could get the high costs of direct air capture down to $100 per ton of carbon by 2030 – the 'holy grail' for carbon removal companies – but the company has since scaled that ambition back to $250-350 per ton. The cost of the energy-intensive process today is roughly triple that. A spokesperson for Climeworks said both of its plants in Iceland had delivered valuable progress, with Orca having steadily improved over years while the newer Mammoth was still in a 'ramp-up phase' that doesn't reflect its full potential. 'As it often goes with any new infrastructure, we've encountered early mechanical issues that we're actively addressing with upgrades already under way,' the spokesperson said. Carbon dioxide removal is considered a key tool in scientific roadmaps to keep the planet from heating 1.5C (2.7F) by the end of the century, both to compensate for residual emissions and to bring temperatures down after a likely period of overshoot, but critics have argued that direct air capture will increase emissions if it is powered by fossil fuels and strain limited renewable resources if run on clean energy. Some scientists have also grown alarmed by companies touting carbon removal as an alternative to getting rid of fossil fuels, rather than an add-on that makes sense once cheaper levers have been pulled. Sign up to Down to Earth The planet's most important stories. Get all the week's environment news - the good, the bad and the essential after newsletter promotion 'The fortunes of carbon dioxide removal startups will go up and down over time, but this is a sharp reminder that the only show in town for the next decades is to reduce emissions,' said Glen Peters, a climate scientist at Cicero research institute in Norway. To reduce the risk that the promise of future removals will deter companies and governments from cutting pollution today, green groups have called on the EU to separate out its net zero targets into categories for reductions and removals. 'The only way in which direct air capture can really make sense … is if the rules are so tight that it's the only option you have left,' said Aragonès. He compared efforts to reduce carbon pollution in the atmosphere to a person trying to stop a bathtub from filling up. 'We're not creating the right framework to close the tap, nor to open up the valve,' he said. 'And opening up the valve is much more expensive than closing the tap, so it's obvious that those who work on removals are having more challenges than those who work on reductions.'
