Climate Advocate | Policy @ Carbonfuture | Founder @ CDRjobs | Chair @ DVNE | Ex-Merkel, World Bank, Tech Entrepreneur | UCL-Cambridge-Harvard 🇩🇪🇪🇺🇮🇹
🚀Takeaways from the 2023 Direct Air Capture (#DAC) Summit in Zurich🚀 Want to know where DAC, the most spoken about carbon dioxide removal (#CDR) technology, is at? No better place than the DAC Summit to find out! Every year, Climeworks gathers the who´s who of DAC and CDR more broadly in Zurich. This year, I attended for the first time alongside 450 attendees in Zurich and 3,000 online. The DAC Community came out bold and strong. Ambitious visions to achieve gigaton scale and a clear conviction that DAC is, as Bill Gates put it in his address, “the gold standard in carbon removal”. Let’s look under the hood at some of the nuances around DAC: 📈 Moving fast, but at what cost: to get to gigaton scale by #2050, we need to scale DAC at a rate of 40%+ YoY. The general feeling is we need to move from the lab to steel in the ground ASAP. Some worry that the DAC industry is not ready for scale-up, that the $3.5b US #DACHubs program is a few years too early, and that failure in a high visibility program could hurt the industry for the long-term. 🐘 Elephant in the room: DAC needs a ton of #energy. The arguments dealing with this are shaky: from small modular nuclear reactors to simply capturing 1% of the sun’s energy hitting the earth. Boston Consulting Group (BCG) put it clearly: to reach gigaton scale, energy cost needs to come down by as much as 90%. On top of that, it has to be renewable, ideally excess energy. 🌎Supply chains will be a challenge too: DAC requires a ton of parts procured from all over the world. Shortcuts can lead to delays further down the line. Even if DAC wanted to scale today, it simply wouldn't be able to procure the parts it needs in the timeframes it requires. As the DAC industry grows, so will its leverage in #procurement. Until then, delays might occur. 💸Reaching a competitive price: DAC will need to reach a price of $100 - $200 to be competitive at gigaton scale. There are two options: reducing energy usage and cost (see above) and/or reducing #CAPEX. It is interesting to see different companies taking different bets on how to optimise these two variables. So where do we go from here? DAC is enjoying tremendous momentum. I am blown away by the sheer talent, capital, and pace of innovation in the space. Some major challenges remain, just like for any other CDR approach or early stage technology. My take: the fastest way to learn and grow is to do something! Let’s get DAC implemented now and scale it to climate relevance. Shout out to the organisers Climeworks for hosting an amazing event. The speakers were fantastic. A special thanks to all the wonderful people I got to share insights with, such as Piera, Eve, Cornelius, Christoph, Chris, Glenn, Aaron, Giana, Nora, Stephanie, Patrícia, Philip, Quincy, Silvan, Liam, Jason, Peter, Alexis, Anu, Julie, Patricia, Helen, Paolo, Ted, Simone, Hannes, Leila, Dominic and many more. What are your thoughts on these takeaways and DAC's future? #carbonremoval #dacsummit
Sebastian Manhart because of the elephant in the room and the price point I don‘t see DAC scaling before 2040 … after first countries managed their energy transition to >100% and store and export all of their temprory excess energy successfully … additional temporary excess energy can be used for (almost) zero costs for DAC. Of course we need more and more developments, bigger and bigger projects to be ready when it makes sense to scale to gigaton scale and beyond. In the meantime, especially the next 15 years I bet that biochar production will do the job.
Very interesting recap. The energy consumption elephant in the room is a very big and challenging elephant indeed.
DAC is one tool of many, and we need to make use of every tool we can. As you said, let’s scale to climate relevance 🙌
And finally we got to meet in person. Thanks for the summary.
Excellent summary Sebastian Manhart and as always, great exchanging insight with you. I was blown away by a fact the BCG report. The difference between 13 and 15% learning rates could see a 2x reduction in cost. Deployment IS the fastest way to cost reduction!
DAC or something derivative will be absolutely crucial to our climate future. We can't lower-emissions our way to lower total CO2 levels, at some point we have to remove it. Where we're land and nature limited we need technology help. To hell with the whole carbon-capture-gives-oil-a-license-to-continue mentality, that's elitist and misplaced morality. The goal is to lower CO2 levels as quickly as possible, however we get there. Net-zero as a concept requires carbon removal, so it's needed.
Thanks for the recap!. I believe that energy companies as well as deep tech Venture Capital will play a key rol both helping DAC startups to scale up through projects and investing in this early stage technologies that can’t be profitable in the medium term.
Thanks for the excellent summary and food for thought.
Thank you for the summary Sebastian Manhart
Founder @ Carbonlogical and 'Study with a Tree' co-founder
1yHi Sebastian, are we in the global north placing so much hope on, and investing so much in DAC because our opportunities with nature based solutions are so limited? Why is DAC so much spoken about? What benefits does it deliver over the completion of the great green wall, creation of huge African forests and the bio-charring of crop harvest residues so they don’t emit CO2. DAC is an entirely linear economy that does not deliver one iota of added-value other than a corporate can tell their shareholders - our scope 3 difficulties are over. Nature-based CRD is not only circular, but perpetually helical, the more you put in the more value it gives. It also plays a major role in bio economic development as the fossil economy declines. It is also a set of technologies anyone can contribute to. I am by no means against DAC but I think investors have to take stock of what is available now and instead of playing to the ‘forever’ storage narrative, consider appropriate, medium and long term storage as well which seamlessly binds into all SDGs and holistically responds to ESG goals.