Climeworks, a Swiss startup which removes carbon directly from the air, is plotting an international expansion despite a recent round of layoffs and uncertainty over funding from the US government.
Founded in 2009, the company has raised $780m since its inception, and has built a plant in Iceland to remove carbon emissions from the air — a process known as direct air capture (DAC) — with another under construction.
Climeworks, which has sold carbon removal credits to companies from TikTok to Morgan Stanley, is also at work on a plant in the US, dependent on funding from the Trump White House.
On Saturday, the Guardian reported Climeworks was looking to lay off 10% of its 498 employees. In a statement shared wtih Sifted, a Climeworks spokesperson says consultations are ongoing and the company could not comment on the number of people who will be affected.
“We’re navigating a complex environment: changing policy landscapes, volatile financial markets, and the technical challenges of doing something for the very first time,” a spokesperson told Sifted.
The Trump effect
Climeworks faces the greatest uncertainty in the US.
In 2023, the company announced it would build its next plant, its largest yet, in Louisiana. At the time, Climeworks said it had been promised $50m in funding from the US government, and said that it was eligible for “up to $600m” under a federal initiative to back DAC.
But last month a leaked memo suggested the company could lose out on that funding under the new Trump administration.
A spokesperson told Sifted that the company is continuing work on the project whilst it awaits a decision on funding. “If the future of the funding changes, we will need to re-evaluate the project at that time,” the spokesperson said.
The company is currently evaluating several other countries as deployment sites. Climeworks said it looks for countries with low-cost, low-carbon energy; ability to store CO2 once removed from the air and “a favourable political climate for deploying DAC.”
Climeworks told Sifted that Canada, Saudi Arabia, Norway and the UK fit the criteria it looks for.
UK parliamentary records show the company met with a representative for the country’s Department of Energy Security and Net Zero in May last year, to discuss “development plans.”
Running at full capacity?
Climeworks’ first plant, known as Orca, has been up-and-running in Iceland since 2021. Its second plant, Mammoth, is under construction.
The max amount of CO2 Orca could capture in a year is 4,000 tonnes. That said, last year, the plant captured just 1,500. The industry needs to scale up significantly to make a dent in global emissions, which last year were estimated to have hit 37.4 billion tonnes.
A spokesperson for Climeworks said the 4,000 capacity was like “a car’s top speed: the maximum possible,” adding that actual output was due to things like weather and planned maintenance.
The plant operated about 65% of the time in 2024, the spokesperson said, with breaks for maintenance on the geothermal power plant that supplies its energy.