News & Trends

Christoph Gebald – Swiss Futuremovers

16.07.2024 2 min

Filtering CO2 from the air: that’s the innovation from Climeworks. More than 800 million US dollars have already been invested in the company’s projects worldwide.

Christoph Gebald is a mechanical engineer and holds a PhD from ETH Zurich, where he first met his best friend Jan Wurzbacher. Together they founded Climeworks in 2009 to solve the most pressing problem of our time: climate change. Climeworks removes climate-changing carbon dioxide from the air and allows partners to store it safely and permanently deep underground. This technology is called direct air capture and storage (DAC+S). Climeworks operates the two largest renewable energy DAC plants in the world in Iceland.

Christoph Gebald

Entrepreneur

Scale Up to Gigaton Capacity by 2030

It all started in Switzerland. Having achieved success in the laboratory, the first commercial plant begins operation in Hinwil. The team has now grown to around 500 professionals who conduct large-scale research and development in Zurich and Basel and build plants worldwide.

Carbon dioxide removal must be established as
an integral part of global climate action strategies.

Now in its third generation of technology, Climeworks recently made a new breakthrough, enabling it to double capacities and halve energy consumption. This generation of plants is already being planned in Louisiana, USA. Climeworks plans to realise several megaton projects by 2030. Three Climeworks projects in the United States have been selected for funding by the US Department of Energy, with the government investing up to 600 million US dollars in Louisiana alone. Climeworks is also developing projects in Norway, Kenya and Canada and checking out other locations — important building blocks for success. And this success is already impressive: over 160 businesses, including Microsoft, J. P. Morgan and SWISS, and nearly 20,000 individuals use Climeworks to offset their carbon dioxide emissions.

What Motivates Christoph Gebald?

1.63 degrees Celsius — that’s how much warmer the month of May was this year compared to pre-industrial average temperatures. That’s what motivates Christoph Gebald. If we want to have any chance of keeping global warming under control, we not only need to reduce emissions drastically but also actively remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. That’s why every single day he and his team ask the question: how can Climeworks scale up and expand capacity even faster?

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