“Air capture companies emit more carbon than they remove”

I n 2017, Zurich became the meeting place for the climate jet set. Journalists, activists, and investors flocked there, not to admire the peaceful lakeside or the city's opulent homes, but to gaze at the enormous fans installed by the startup Climeworks on the roof of a garbage incinerator. Even Greta Thunberg made the trip. At the time, the company billed itself as the technological showcase of carbon capture . Its founders, Christoph Gebald and Jan Wurzbacher, welcomed visitors, demonstrating a device where powerful fans sucked in ambient air and forced it through an absorbent substance of secret composition, designed to trap CO₂.

The captured gas was then redirected to a greenhouse where cucumbers were grown. The two engineers claimed they could capture and store 1% of global emissions by 2025, or about 400 million tons of CO₂ per year. The announcement caused a sensation. Articles flourished, capital poured in. In 2021, Climeworks inaugurated a larger facility in Iceland, powered by geothermal energy. This time, the CO₂ was no longer used to grow vegetables, but injected into the subsoil to be mineralized, thus generating "negative emissions." By 2022, the startup had reached a valuation of over $1 billion (around €890 million).

The vein opened by Climeworks was followed by many other start-ups – Carbon Engineering, Global Thermostat, Rewind, Terraformation, Living Carbon, Charm Industrial, Brilliant Planet, Planetary Technologies, Infinitree… to name just a few. There are now more than 150 of them, decked out with grandiloquent names for companies that emit more carbon than they eliminate.

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