Costs in direct air carbon capture technology have been cut in half.
The Swiss startup Climeworks had begun capturing carbon dioxide (CO2) from the air. The company has taken a major step towards making this technology more commercially viable.
The Swiss startup Climeworks recently launched the world’s largest carbon capture facility in Iceland a few weeks ago. However, the company is working to reduce the costs of this already expensive process to scale up further. In this context, the company introduced its 3rd Generation Direct Air Capture (DAC) technology. The new technology indicates a significant cost reduction.
For those unfamiliar, Direct Air Capture is a technology that filters carbon from the air using chemicals. With its third-generation technology, Climeworks is doubling the carbon capture capacity per module, halving energy consumption, extending material lifespan, and reducing costs by 50%.
Significant Step in Carbon Capture by Climeworks
If Climeworks fulfills this promise, it will have made a substantial advancement in Direct Air Capture (DAC) technology, which aims to reduce accumulated carbon pollution in the atmosphere. Currently, this technology is very new and expensive to make a meaningful impact on emissions. However, Climeworks and other companies in this field are receiving significant investments to bring capture facilities to life.
According to Climeworks, the third-generation technology uses newly structured sorbent materials instead of the packed filter beds used in previous generations. The new structures increase surface contact with CO₂, reducing the capture and release time of CO₂ by at least half. As a result, more than twice the amount of CO₂ can be captured compared to previous filters. The new filter materials reportedly consume half the energy and are designed to last three times longer than the previous materials.
Climeworks claims that the 3rd Generation DAC facilities could reduce the cost of CO2 capture to $250-350 per ton by 2030. Currently, DAC is said to cost over $600 per ton, with a significant portion of this cost attributed to the energy used in the facilities. However, worldwide, there are only a few dozen direct air capture facilities that collectively capture approximately 0.01 million metric tons of CO2 annually. This amount seems minuscule compared to the over 15 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emitted by Microsoft alone last year, indicating a significant gap in achieving climate goals, which requires DAC facilities to capture 85 million metric tons of CO2 annually.
The major obstacle to achieving these goals is cost. Climeworks’ promise of a fifty percent cost reduction offers a glimmer of hope. However, the industry is aiming for costs to be reduced to around $100 per ton. Climeworks emphasizes that its new technology and equipment have undergone 15,000 hours of testing and 5,000 CO₂ capture and release cycles. While Climeworks previously used container-sized structures for its modules, the company has now transformed its modules into cube shapes (26m x 26m x 22.5m).
The first facility to use this new technology generation, including the new cube design, will be built in Louisiana as part of the megaton-scale “Cypress DAC Hub Projesi” financed by the US Department of Energy. Construction is scheduled to begin in 2026, with Climeworks planning to build at least four facilities in the US.
Sources:
https://climeworks.com/press-release/next-gen-tech-powers-climeworks-megaton-leap
