“It’s true that both plants are not yet operating at the capacity we originally targeted,” said the Climeworks spokesperson.
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“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.
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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.”
