Direct air capture is hot right now, and Carlos Härtel is one of those leading the push to capitalize on it. Switzerland-based Climeworks in January became the first company to deliver actual emission reductions based on pulling carbon dioxide out of ambient air for a corporate customer. But the price is high — as much as $600 per ton — and capacity is low. Both the Biden administration and the private sector are pouring money in to help expand the nascent industry and combat climate change as fast as they can. Härtel, Climeworks’ chief technology officer, talked with POLITICO about how carbon removal compares with carbon offsets, the Inflation Reduction Act and whether carbon removal should be mandated for certain industries. This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity. How do you legitimize the carbon removal market compared to the offset market? How do you avoid similar reputational issues? Fundamentally it boils down to credibility. If I have a technical solution, and there is a CO2 stream coming from my capture plan that goes to the sequestration side, I can measure the amount of CO2 with high accuracy. This is one of the big advantages of technical solutions, compared to other things, which are more based on obviously, natural phenomena like biomass growing, or rocks decaying due to weathering. If I'm Microsoft, can I say I want to buy X many tons of carbon removal from Climeworks and Climeworks can deliver on that? In principle, yes. But the capacity buildup takes time. What we do recognize today is that certainly everybody who can offer high-quality carbon removal is in a sense oversubscribed. If someone asks us for 20,000 tons next year, our answer would be ‘I'm sorry, I just don't have the capacity.’ So you're talking about deliveries of removals, further towards the end of the decade, 2028, 29, and, of course, 2030. And the requests we get are very sizable indeed. We first need to put the plans in place and maybe develop [the] next generation of technology. And then the permits for operating and the energy supply. Industrial technologies become quite demanding. It's not just scaling, like software, scaling up hardware becomes harder the bigger you become. So we have a clear roadmap: we want to be at about a million ton[s of] removal capacity by 2030. That's a target, which is doable. It's very ambitious. But I think it's doable. Does Climeworks stand to benefit from the Inflation Reduction Act? I would say it depends a little bit right now on the call for the [funding opportunity announcement], this expression of interest for the DAC hub program. As of today, I can't give you an answer whether we're going to submit something specifically or not. Because this also is a conflict with or is in resource competition with a few other projects we're trying to push at the same time, and resources are limited. But I'm absolutely sure that in totality, that piece of legislation will make a huge difference. And I can only imagine Climeworks being in the U.S. as well, in a major way over the next few years, not the least because of that move that the government did. Is carbon removal always going to be basically extra credit for corporations? Or do you see it as something that will be mandated for companies to do or invest in? I think it's going to be something that will be mandatory. At the end of the day, some sort of emissions regulation around CO2 is a necessity. I'm not a policymaker, so I don't know how to do this best. The associations and academics and non-government organizations will all be involved in negotiating that. It will have to be industry-dependent… striking a balance between what we call unavoidable emissions and those [that] can well be avoided.
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