Swiss Review 1/2019

Swiss Review / January 2019 / No.1 14 Report JÜRG MÜLLER In the Middle Ages alchemists tried to make gold out of base metals. Today engineers from the Swiss Federal In- stitute of Technology in Zurich (ETH) are trying to make something valuable out of something damaging. The dif- ference is that back then it didn’t work, and today it does. For instance with carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) that, being a green- house gas, is a major cause of global warming. CO 2 can be filtered from the air – and recycled for carbonated bever- ages. Or it can be completely taken out of circulation and safely disposed in suitable rock formations deep in the Earth’s interior. An ETH start-up takes off The Swiss cleantech firm Climeworks in Zurich-Oerlikon is performing pioneeringworkworldwide in this field. The company was founded in 2009 as a start-up of the ETH Zu- rich by mechanical engineers Christoph Gebald and Jan Wurzbacher and has quickly grown: the number of employ- ees increased from 45 to 60 full-time positions between December 2017 andAugust 2018 alone. The company’s goals are not particularly modest. Using high-tech methods, Climeworks hopes tomake a significant contribution to the reduction of climate-damaging carbon dioxide in the at- mosphere. “The goal is very ambitious,” Louise Charles, me- dia officer at Climeworks, told “ Swiss Review ” , “but moti- vation within the company is very high. We can do it.” Development is progressing rapidly and “the efficiency of the technology is swiftly increasing”. Climeworks outpaces two similar companies in Canada and the USA, Louise Charles said, particularlywhen it comes to commercial use. Climeworks isworking togetherwith various investors and a number of consortiumpartners fromresearch and indus- try, is supported by the Swiss Federal Office of Energy and is also involved in EU research programmes, such as Hori- zon 2020. There is growing trust among investors, as the “ Neue Zürcher Zeitung ” reported inAugust 2018: in a fourth round of financing the company procured an additional 30 million Swiss francs. Simple in principle The technical principle is simple. CO 2 chemically binds to a filter. What remains is air without CO 2 . Using heat, the CO 2 can again be separated from the filter and used for other purposes. Climeworks is the leader in so-called Di- rect Air Capture (DAC) technology. Using this technology CO 2 is directly captured from the surrounding atmos- phere and filtered. The world’s first commercial project of this type has been in operation since 2017 in Hinwil, Zurich. There, 18 ventilators suck the air through a sophisticated filter system, thus removing 900 tonnes of carbon dioxide per annum. The pilot plant is operated with the waste heat energy of local refuse incinerators, and the carbon dioxide extracted from the air is then sold as a gaseous fertiliser to a neighbouring vegetable grower. The sucked-upCO 2 can then be recycled for various pur- poses. It could serve as a base chemical for industrial prod- ucts, such as plastics or even fuel, which could also reduce dependency on fossil fuel. But if CO 2 is to be removed from the atmosphere once and for all, then it should not be brought back into circulation, but disposed of permanently. Here, too, the company Climeworks is performing pioneer- ing work. Limestone from carbon dioxide At the climate conference in Bonn inNovember 2017, Clime- works presented a new type of process in which CO 2 is ex- tracted from the atmosphere and mineralised under- ground. In Iceland Climeworks together with the EU research project CarbFix is operating a special “air vacuum cleaner”. On this North Atlantic island, CO 2 is filtered from the air, mixed with water and then pumped into under- The CO 2 vacuumcleaner pioneers from Zurich-Oerlikon A Swiss company wants to vacuum the No. 1 climate killer from the air and turn it into limestone deep in the earth Climeworks pioneers Christoph Gebald and Jan Wurzbacher with their “CO 2 vacuum cleaner”. Photo: Julia Dunlop