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The year in review: Climeworks' highlights of 2022

Key take-aways:

  • The momentum for direct air capture (DAC) and carbon dioxide removal (CDR) has grown remarkably.

  • From a technology, market and people perspective, Climeworks made significant progress on its scale-up journey.

  • The main highlights of 2022 include Climeworks' equity fundraising of USD 650 million in April, the groundbreaking of Mammoth, Climeworks' third annual Direct Air Capture Summit, the launch of the world's first methodology for CDR produced via direct air capture and storage (DAC+S), and assembling a team of 300 Climeworkers.

Before 2023 begins, we want to look back at where these past 12 months have taken us. Read through our highlights of the year or head directly to our visual recap of Climeworks' biggest milestones.

Climeworks' visual recap of 2022

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We sharpened our focus on gigaton DAC+S capacity while Mammoth began taking shape in Iceland

Only nine months after the launch of Orca, we broke ground in Iceland for the construction of our second and largest DAC+S facility, Mammoth. Mammoth is designed to further expand supply and provide engineering experience for Climeworks’ next scale-up steps, and we were proud to recently share the construction progress that has been made by the team in Iceland. The completion of the commercial operations of our DAC facility in Hinwil enabled us to sharpen our focus on gigaton DAC+S capacity even further, marking a turning point in our journey that we were grateful to celebrate with our partners.

As more DAC projects will hopefully come to life around the world, empowered by policy programs across the U.S. and EU, the monitoring, reporting and verification (MRV) of the CDR that is produced by these solutions is critical. Throughout 2022, we saw the topic of MRV gaining attention and were proud to contribute to the standardization of high-quality CDR. Together with Carbfix, Climeworks developed the world’s first full-chain methodology dedicated to CDR via DAC+S, which was validated by DNV.

Unprecedented levels of investment and market demand will unlock the next phase of growth

Complementing evolving policy frameworks, investor and market demand are crucial to further deploy DAC around the world. Climeworks secured a landmark equity raise of USD 650 million in April, which represents the largest funding round ever closed by a CDR company to date. In the weeks following Climeworks’ third annual Direct Air Capture Summit, we took our collaboration with Microsoft to the next level by becoming the first long-term, tech-based CDR supplier in their portfolio. This second and forward-looking commitment is one of the largest DAC agreements ever signed and proof of Microsoft’s conviction of both Climeworks’ technology and ability to scale.

Celebrating the achievements of 2022 would not have been possible without the dedicated team that stands behind Climeworks’ vision to inspire 1 billion people to remove CO₂ from the air. Finding the right talents to inspire climate action and realize the potential of CDR in the fight against global warming is a crucial component of Climeworks’ journey and the entire industry’s development. We were excited to reach the milestone of 300 Climeworkers in our growing team at the end of this year, including the newest members of our Executive Team.

Editor's note: the content of this page was updated on May 8, 2023.

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