DAC Market Update

Issue 74 l Eka’s Weekly Roundup (10 May 2024)

May 10, 2024

This week, we’re flagging Climework’s latest developments in DAC. At Eka, we’ve previously published on DAC and remain excited on the market (callback to a great article that Hamish wrote a few years ago here).

An update on Climeworks & why this matters

This week, Climeworks announced that it had switched on the world’s largest DAC plant to date. To recap, Climeworks is a Swiss DAC company and has raised >$650m to date to develop its plants. The company was founded in 2009 by Christoph Gebald and Jan Wurzbacher.

Climeworks has turned on Mammoth, the world's largest direct air capture and storage (DAC+S) plant located in Iceland. Surpassing its predecessor, Orca, by tenfold, Mammoth is poised to revolutionize carbon removal with an initial capture capacity of up to 36,000 tons of CO₂ per year. This is still very small in the context of 50GT of emissions globally, each year*.*

Looking out, Climeworks aims to achieve megaton carbon removal capacity by 2030 and ultimately gigaton scale by 2050.

Mammoth uses renewable energy sources such as geothermal energy, and uses low-temperature heat to drive its direct air capture process. Once captured, CO₂ is securely stored underground through a partnership with Carbfix, where it undergoes a natural transformation into stone, effectively removing it from the atmosphere for good.

How this fits into our thesis

Eka’s portfolio company Sourceful is collaborating with some of these DAC players today including Heirloom and Charm. For example, Heirloom employs natural carbonate minerals in a looping process to remove CO2 from the air. Charm Industrial converts plant-captured carbon into bio-oil for underground storage. greenSand utilizes olivine mineral in roads and railways to naturally weather CO2 into limestone on the seafloor. Running Tide grows and sinks kelp in the ocean to sequester carbon. Together, these technologies provide a balanced portfolio for scalable and sustainable carbon removal.

Hamish wrote a great post on Eka’s broader views a little while back - feel free to take a dive!