The remarkable cost declines in solar photovoltaic (PV) and lithium-ion batteries over the past several decades have fueled optimism in the climate policy and investment community, with many hoping direct air capture (DAC) technologies might follow a similar trajectory. Policymakers, investors, and industry proponents frequently draw analogies between DAC and these wildly successful clean-energy technologies, invoking Wright’s Law—a rule of thumb where costs fall predictably with cumulative doubling of production—to justify unjustifiably bullish projections for DAC’s future costs. Given the unrealistic scenarios requiring carbon removal to achieve net-zero emissions, the attractiveness of DAC scaling cheaply and quickly is understandable, yet such optimism demands critical scrutiny grounded in the realities of technology, markets, and physics.

I’m drawn back to this space, one I’ve been exploring for 15 years, doing technoeconomic assessments of Global Thermostat’s applicability in heavy rail, Carbon Engineering’s natural market of enhanced oil recovery and speaking to many of the leading researchers and entrepreneurs in the space. Why am I drawn back? Because I wrote about Climework’s ongoing trainwreck—105 tons total captured from a 40,000-ton annual homeopathy device and now 22% layoffs—recently, and many commenters made it clear that they thought DAC would follow solar and batteries into the nirvana of cheapness.

Solar PV and batteries achieved their cost revolutions through clear, consistent factors. Foremost was Wright’s Law itself: with each doubling of global cumulative production, solar PV saw about a 20% reduction in cost, while lithium-ion batteries experienced roughly a 19% drop per doubling. Historically, Wright’s Law saw 20% to 27% decreases, depending on the simplicity of the product. These impressive and predictable learning rates emerged for solar and batteries because both technologies quickly found mass-market applications with billions of end-users—solar panels across rooftops worldwide and lithium-ion cells powering consumer electronics and, later, electric vehicles. Such enormous, diverse markets spurred massive economies of scale, standardization of manufacturing processes, and continuous incremental innovation, driving down prices dramatically over relatively short periods.

In solar manufacturing, scale-up to gigawatt-scale factories allowed for unprecedented efficiency gains. Automation, production-line standardization, reduced material usage, and steady incremental improvements in cell efficiency combined to achieve a 99% reduction in costs since the 1970s. Batteries followed a similar pattern. Initially expensive lithium-ion cells rapidly benefited from global consumer electronics markets, then exploded in scale with the electric vehicle boom of the 2010s. Innovations in chemistry, manufacturing methods, and supply chain management drove battery costs down by over 90% since 2010 alone. Crucially, both technologies became genuinely commoditized, their costs falling sufficiently low to be attractive purely on market economics, independent of ongoing subsidies.

In stark contrast, DAC technology faces fundamental structural, thermodynamic, and market constraints that severely limit its potential to emulate these learning-curve successes. While DAC systems like those developed by Climeworks and Carbon Engineering also involve engineered modular units, their scale and replicability differ drastically from solar and batteries. Solar PV and battery units are small, identical, easily mass-produced components numbering in the billions, allowing rapid parallel production and iterative optimization. DAC, conversely, involves large, complex industrial-scale modules that process massive volumes of air. Even highly modularized DAC units like those envisioned by Climeworks represent significant, capital-intensive systems, each processing hundreds of thousands to millions of cubic meters of air per ton of CO₂ captured. Achieving large-scale global deployment would involve thousands of units—not billions—limiting opportunities for rapid learning through repetition and optimization.

Further compounding this problem, DAC relies heavily on mature, off-the-shelf technologies. Key components such as large industrial fans, chemical sorbents, heat exchangers, compressors, and pumps are already widely used across industries. Unlike emerging semiconductor processes or battery chemistries that initially featured substantial inefficiencies ripe for innovation, DAC’s hardware components are closer to their optimized cost floors, having already benefited from decades of engineering and scale in other applications. Incremental improvements in sorbent chemistry or component efficiency may yield modest savings, but the potential for radical cost reductions through fundamentally new approaches or extensive technological simplifications is inherently limited.

Perhaps the most stubborn barrier DAC faces in following a PV-like cost curve is rooted in basic physics: the energy-intensive nature of extracting CO₂ from the atmosphere. Unlike solar cells, whose primary cost drivers are fabrication efficiency and material utilization, DAC confronts unavoidable thermodynamic constraints. The fundamental minimum energy required to capture CO₂ at the dilute concentrations found in ambient air sets a hard, non-negotiable energy floor. Current DAC operations use energy at several times the theoretical minimum, but even highly optimistic scenarios still require substantial energy input, typically hundreds to thousands of kilowatt-hours per ton of CO₂. Thus, DAC will always incur significant operational energy costs that place a lower bound on achievable pricing, unlike solar panels and batteries, whose unit costs dropped rapidly with better manufacturing processes and materials science advances.

Adding complexity, DAC is physically and materially intensive. Capturing millions of tons of CO₂ per year demands enormous amounts of infrastructure—steel, concrete, sorbent materials, and sophisticated capital equipment. Unlike digital technology or small-scale consumer goods, DAC units cannot shrink significantly or dramatically reduce material inputs without sacrificing performance. Indeed, the large physical dimensions of air contactors, substantial volumes of sorbent material needed, and considerable infrastructure for regeneration and compression suggest that DAC systems will remain heavy, complex installations. As DAC scales, rather than benefit from continuously cheaper materials, increased demand for specialty chemicals and industrial materials may drive prices upward, potentially offsetting some manufacturing efficiency gains. This scenario contrasts sharply with the declining per-unit material intensity that helped accelerate solar and battery cost reductions.

Critically, DAC lacks the autonomous, self-sustaining market demand that propelled solar PV and batteries. Solar power and battery storage offered direct economic benefits to millions of end-users, enabling them to become cost-competitive with conventional energy sources over time. DAC, however, provides an environmental service—carbon removal—whose value remains purely policy-dependent. Without robust carbon pricing, governmental incentives, or regulatory mandates, DAC has no inherent private market demand, severely limiting its potential cumulative production growth. Whereas solar panels and batteries rapidly scaled through consumer and business demand, DAC expansion hinges exclusively on sustained public policy support. Such policy-driven markets are vulnerable to political shifts, budget constraints, and public sentiment, making exponential growth in DAC production far less predictable or assured.

Historical analogues from other large-scale industrial and environmental technologies underscore DAC’s challenging trajectory. Technologies such as nuclear power, large-scale carbon capture on fossil plants, and industrial chemical plants have all faced similar complexities and constraints, often resulting in slow, incremental cost reductions—or even cost escalation—as they scaled. These technologies offer more instructive benchmarks for DAC than solar or batteries, highlighting the cautious reality that DAC may experience only modest learning curves of around 10% per cumulative doubling, far slower than the 20% or more seen in clean-energy consumer markets.

All of this leads to 10% or less cost take out for a lot fewer doublings for DAC fan units, the only component which will have any volumes. The chart ends at just below 10,000 units. For context, a million ton per year Carbon Engineering system might have 250 contactor units, the basic module in a wall two kilometers long and 20 meters high. They’d have to build 64 km of their system to get to 8,000 fans, and that’s exceedingly unlikely. To get another 10%, they’d have to build 128 km of walls of their system with 16,000 units. To get another 10, 256 km with 32,000 units.

Meanwhile, a single one GW solar farm has around 1.8 million solar panels. The volumes are radically different, and the rate of cost decreases per doubling are radically different.

Looking forward, expert analyses from independent institutions like the International Energy Agency, Harvard’s Belfer Center, and the National Academies broadly agree: DAC costs will likely remain in the triple-digit dollar range per ton even after decades of scaling. Starry eyed scenarios predict DAC might achieve costs around $150 to $250 per ton by mid-century under aggressive deployment assumptions. More realistic projections settle higher, acknowledging inherent thermodynamic limits, persistent energy costs, and material constraints. Industry-driven forecasts that envision DAC below $100 per ton are simply delusional, hinging on technological breakthroughs that would require changing the laws of physics and ludicrously low energy cost assumptions as a result.

Given these realities, policymakers and investors must fundamentally rethink their near-term engagement with DAC. Aggressively reducing emissions through proven, lower-cost technologies such as electrification, renewable energy, and energy efficiency should remain the clear and unambiguous priority until energy systems are fully decarbonized and surplus renewable electricity is abundant—likely not until after 2040 and probably beyond 2050. DAC, due to its inherently high energy intensity and substantial infrastructure requirements, should not divert limited resources from direct emission-reduction strategies until we reach a point where clean energy is inexpensive and plentiful.

Policymakers and investors should limit current DAC involvement strictly to research and development, aiming to improve technology performance, reduce energy requirements, and better understand realistic long-term potential. Public spending on commercial-scale DAC deployment or infrastructure is premature and risks locking in inefficient, high-cost solutions before cleaner, lower-cost alternatives are fully exploited.

Carbon removal strategies in the immediate decades should instead emphasize nature-based methods and improved soil carbon sequestration—technologies with significantly lower energy demands and clearer short-term scalability. The belief that we can vacuum enough CO2 out of the atmosphere to reach 2050 goals should be abandoned, and more aggressive decarbonization scenarios driven through.

Michael Long is not the typical neuroscience guy. He was trained as a physicist, but is primarily a writer. He coauthored the international bestseller The Molecule of More. As a speechwriter, he has written for members of Congress, cabinet secretaries, presidential candidates, and Fortune 10 CEOs. His screenplays have been performed on most New York stages. He teaches writing at Georgetown University.

What’s the big idea?

Dopamine is to blame for a lot of your misery. It compels us to endlessly chase more, better, and greater—even when our dreams have come true. Thanks to dopamine, we often feel restless and hopeless. So no, maybe it’s not quite accurate to call it the “happiness” molecule, but it has gifted humans some amazing powers. Dopamine is the source of imagination, creativity, and ingenuity. There are practical ways to harness the strengths of our dopamine drives while protecting and nurturing a life of consistent joy.

Below, Michael shares five key insights from his new book, Taming the Molecule of More: A Step-by-Step Guide to Make Dopamine Work for You. Listen to the audio version—read by Michael himself—in the Next Big Idea App.

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1. Dopamine is not the brain chemical that makes you happy.

Dopamine makes you curious and imaginative. It can even make you successful, but a lot of times it just makes you miserable. That’s because dopamine motivates you to chase every new possibility, even if you already have everything you want. It turns out that brain evolution hasn’t caught up with the evolution of the world.

For early humans, dopamine ensured our survival by alerting us to anything new or unusual. In a world with danger around every corner and resources hard to acquire, we needed an early warning system to motivate us even more. Dopamine made us believe that once we got the thing we were chasing, we’d be safer, happier, or more satisfied. That served humans well, until it didn’t.

Now that we’ve tamed the world, we don’t need to explore every new thing, but dopamine is still on duty, and it works way out of proportion to the needs of the modern world. Since self-discipline has a short shelf life, I share proven techniques that don’t rely on willpower alone.

2. Dopamine often promises more than reality can deliver.

When we have problems obsessing with social media, the news, or when we’re doing excessive shopping, we feel edgy and restless. This is because dopamine floods us with anticipation and urgency. We desperately scroll for the next hit, searching for the latest story, or watching the porch for that next Amazon package. As this anticipation becomes a normal way of living, the rest of life starts to feel dull and flat. That restarts the cycle of chasing what we think will make us happy. Then we get it, and when it doesn’t make us happy, we experience a letdown, and that makes us restless all over again.

Here’s how that works for love and romance. When we go on date after date and can’t find the right person or a long-term relationship gets stale, we start to feel hopeless. The dopamine chase has so raised our expectations about reality that we no longer enjoy the ordinary. Now we’re expecting some perfect partner, and we won’t find them because they don’t exist. Fight back with three strategies:

• Rewire your habits to ditch the chase.
• Redirect your focus to the here and now.
• Rebuild meaning, so life feels more like it matters.

I describe specific ways to do this through simple planning, relying more on friendships, doing a particular kind of personal assessment, and there’s even a little technology involved that you wouldn’t expect.

3. Dopamine is the source of imagination.

The dopamine system has three circuits. The first has only a little to do with behavior and feeling, so we’ll set that one aside. The second circuit (that early warning system) is called the desire dopamine system because it plays on our desires. The third system is very different. It’s called the control system, and it gives us an ability straight out of science fiction: mental time travel. You can create in your mind any possible future in as much detail as you like and investigate the results without lifting a finger.

We do this all the time without realizing that’s what it is. Little things like figuring out where to go for lunch: we factor in traffic, how long we’ll have to wait for a table, think over the menu, and game it all out to decide where to go. But this system also lets us imagine far more consequential mental time travel, figuring out the best way to build a building, design an engine, or travel to the moon.

“Dopamine really is the source of creativity and analytical power that allows us to create the future.”

The dopamine control circuit lets us think in abstractions and play out various plans using only our minds. That means not only can we imagine a particular future, but we can also imagine entire abstract disciplines, come to understand them, and make use of them in the real world based on what we thought about. Fields like chemistry, quantum mechanics, and number theory exist because of controlled dopamine. Dopamine really is the source of creativity and analytical power that allows us to create the future. Dopamine brings a lot of dissatisfaction to the modern world, but we wouldn’t have the modern world without dopamine.

4. You’re missing out on the little things.

When my best friend died at age 39, the speaker at his funeral said, “You may not remember much of what you did with Kent, but it’s okay because it happened.”

I did not know what that could mean, but years later, while writing this book, I got it. We don’t live life just to look back on it. The here and now ought to be fun. You may not remember it all, but while it’s happening, enjoy it. That requires fighting back against dopamine because it’s always saying, Never mind what’s in front of you, think about what might be. When Warren Zevon was at the end of his life, David Letterman asked him what he’d learned. Warren said, “Enjoy every sandwich.”

5. A satisfying life requires meaning, and there’s a practical way to find it.

Even if you fix every dopamine-driven problem in your life, you may still feel like something is missing. To find a satisfying balance between working for the future and enjoying the here and now, we must choose a meaning for life and work toward it as we go.

“If you’re making life better for others with something you do well and enjoy, the days feel brighter and life acquires purpose.”

Is it possible to live in the moment, anticipate the future, and have it add up to something? The psychiatrist Viktor Frankl said we need to look beyond ourselves because that’s where a sense of purpose begins. Aristotle gave us a simple formula for taking pleasure in the present, finding a healthy anticipation for the future, and creating meaning. He said it’s found where three things intersect: what we like to do, what we’re good at, and what builds up the world beyond ourselves. Things like working for justice, making good use of knowledge, or simply living a life of kindness and grace.

What you do with your life doesn’t have to set off fireworks, and you don’t have to make history. You can be a plumber, a mail carrier, or an accountant. I’m a writer. I like what I do. I seem to be pretty good at it, and it helps people. The same can be true if you repair the highway, fix cars, or serve lunch in a school cafeteria. If you’re making life better for others with something you do well and enjoy, the days feel brighter and life acquires purpose. Life needs meaning, and that’s the last piece of the puzzle in dealing with dopamine and taming the molecule of more.

Enjoy our full library of Book Bites—read by the authors!—in the Next Big Idea App:

In an effort to reduce the use of precious land to build renewable energy storage facilities, the Fraunhofer Institute has been cooking up a wild but plausible idea: dropping concrete storage spheres down to the depths of our oceans.

Since 2011, the StEnSea (Stored Energy in the Sea) project has been exploring the possibilities of using the pressure in deep water to store energy in the short-to-medium term, in giant hollow concrete spheres sunken into seabeds, hundreds of feet below the surface.

An empty sphere is essentially a fully charged storage unit. Opening its valve enables water to flow into the sphere, and this drives a turbine and a generator that feed electricity into the grid. To recharge the sphere, water is pumped out of it against the surrounding water pressure using energy from the grid.

Each hollow concrete sphere measures 30 ft (9 m) in diameter, weighs 400 tons, and will be anchored to the sea floor at depths of 1,970 - 2,625 ft (600 - 800 m) for optimal performance.

Fraunhofer has previously tested a smaller model in Europe's Lake Constance near the Rhine river, and is set to drop a full-size 3D-printed prototype sphere to the seabed off Long Beach near Los Angeles by the end of 2026. It's expected to generate 0.5 megawatts of power, and have a capacity of 0.4 megawatt-hours. For reference, that should be enough to power an average US household for about two weeks.

The bigger goal is to test whether this tech can be expanded to support larger spheres with a diameter of nearly 100 ft (30 m). Fraunhofer researchers estimate StEnSea has a massive global storage potential of 817,000 gigawatt-hours in total – enough to power every one of approximately 75 million homes across Germany, France, and the UK put together for a year.

The institute estimates storage costs at around US5.1¢ (EUR 4.6¢) per kilowatt-hour, and investment costs at $177 (EUR 158) per kilowatt-hour of capacity – based on a storage park with six spheres, a total power capacity of 30 megawatts, and a capacity of 120 megawatt-hours.

According to Fraunhofer, StEnSea spherical storage is best suited for stabilizing power grids with frequency regulation support or operating reserves, and for arbitrage. The latter refers to buying electricity at low prices and selling it at high market prices – which grid operators, utilities providers, and power trading companies can engage in.

Ultimately, StEnSea could rival pumped storage as a way to store surplus grid electricity, with an obvious advantage: it doesn't take up room on land. Plus, pumped storage only really works when you have two reservoirs at different elevations to drive pumps that act as turbines. While pumped storage is cheaper to run and slightly more efficient over an entire storage cycle, StEnSea can potentially be installed across several locations worldwide to support immense storage capacity.

The US Department of Energy has invested $4 million into the project, so it will be keen to see how the 2026 pilot plays out off the California coast.

If you enjoy discovering all the weird ways in which we produce and store energy, see how falling rain can generate electricity, and get a closer look at plans to turn millions of disused mines around the world into massive underground batteries.

Source: Fraunhofer IEE

Climeworks in Iceland has only captured just over 2,400 carbon units since it began operations in the country in 2021, out of the twelve thousand units that company officials have repeatedly claimed the company’s machines can capture. This is confirmed by figures from the Finnish company Puro.Earth on the one hand and from the company’s annual accounts on the other. Climeworks has made international news for capturing carbon directly from the atmosphere. For this, the company uses large machines located in Hellisheiði, in South Iceland. They are said to have the capacity to collect four thousand tons of CO2 each year directly from the atmosphere.

According to data available to Heimildin, it is clear that this goal has never been achieved and that Climeworks does not capture enough carbon units to offset its own operations, emissions amounting to 1,700 tons of CO2 in 2023. The emissions that occur due to Climeworks' activities are therefore more than it captures. Since the company began capturing in Iceland, it has captured a maximum of one thousand tons of CO2 in one year.

The company's operations in Iceland rely entirely on funding from its Swiss parent company, Climeworks AG, but the Icelandic subsidiary's equity position was negative by almost $30 million in 2023. Poor performance in direct CO2 capture has caused a depreciation of the Orca capture machine of $1.4 million in 2023 as the capture plant did not meet expectations, according to the company's annual accounts.

Last year, Climeworks partially commissioned the Mammoth capture plant, which is expected to capture nine times more than what had been done since 2021, or 36,000 tons. That plant has only managed to capture 105 tons of CO2 in its first ten months of operation, according to information from Puro.Earth. It is responsible for verifying the Swiss company's capture and is paid for that work by Climeworks.

Construction on Mammoth began in June 2022, and in a press release about a year ago for the plant's opening, it was reported that 12 of the 72 machines that are to be in the complex had been installed. According to information from Climeworks, work is currently underway to install an additional twelve machines. That work is in the final stages, according to Sara Lind Guðbergsdóttir, Climeworks' managing director in Iceland. According to her, the installation of the Mammoth plant will be completed this year. The Climeworks website had previously claimed that it would be completed last year.

Sara Lind says she cannot answer questions about why CO2 capture is going so poorly that the company is unable to offset its own carbon footprint. She also cannot say when subscribers to the company's carbon credits can expect to receive them.

“You can definitely send me the questions you have, then I can pass them on. Unfortunately, it is not up to me to answer media questions,” she says, offering to mediate in getting Heimildin’s questions to Climeworks in Switzerland. That was two weeks ago, but eleven weeks had passed since the same questions were directed to Climeworks' information representatives in Switzerland. The questions had still not been answered when Heimildin’s print edition went to press on May 8.

A professor of environmental and civil engineering at Stanford University in California says the carbon capture and disposal industry is a scam and is causing harm when it comes to climate solutions. More than 20,000 people pay Climeworks monthly for CO2 capture. A retired scientist in the UK says he feels like a gullible idiot after buying carbon credits from Climeworks, which he hopes to receive in about six years. However, the wait will be much longer unless significant progress is made in capturing carbon quickly. He can therefore expect to receive the two tonnes – which he has already paid for – in a few decades at the earliest.

Optimistic plans

The Swiss founders of Climeworks were ambitious when they started in 2009. In a 2017 interview, they said that by 2025 they planned to capture one percent of all global emissions. That amounts to 400 million tons of CO2. Those plans have not been realised, and the company has never come close to achieving that. They also planned to reduce the cost of capturing each ton of CO2 from the atmosphere to about $100. Today, a ton of CO2 costs about $1,000, according to the Climeworks website – ten times more than the target this year.

Despite not achieving those goals, the company’s executives have set new, more ambitious goals. The company now says it plans to capture 1 billion tons of CO2 by 2050. Climeworks’ operations and ambitious goals have garnered worldwide attention, and the company recently ranked second on Time Magazine’s list of the 100 top green tech companies in the world. This is the first time Climeworks has made the list, but another unrelated company, which has operated in Iceland, made the list last year, Running Tide.

Big machines, little capture

When Climeworks opened its first capture plant in Iceland in September 2021, company officials said it could capture 4,000 tons of CO2 each year it operated. The company sends the carbon dioxide captured by both plants to Carbfix, a subsidiary of Reykjavík Energy, which then pumps it into the ground. Finally, the company sells carbon credits to other companies that emit CO2 and need or want to offset their carbon emissions.

The capture plants work by using large fans to suck air through filters that capture CO2 from the atmosphere. This operation requires a lot of energy, as only a very small portion of the atmosphere contains CO2. The percentage of CO2 in the atmosphere is measured as a percentage of parts per million. According to measurements, there are about 427 parts of CO2 in every million parts of the atmosphere. It should be noted that although this is a small amount of CO2, this small amount has a major impact on the Earth's climate.

In an interview with the Japanese outlet Nikkei, Jan Wurzbacher, CEO and one of the founders of Climeworks, said that for every ton that the Mammoth capture plant captured, up to 5,000 to 6,000 kilowatt-hours of energy would be required. He also said in the same interview that the Mammoth capture plant was not designed with energy efficiency in mind, but only how much CO2 it could capture. This means that for every 1,000 tons of CO2 captured, 5 to 6 million kilowatt-hours of energy would be required. To put Climeworks' energy needs in perspective, it would take up to 72 terawatts to fully offset Iceland's carbon footprint each year, with the country's total emissions of 12.4 million tons of CO2 in 2024. This is equivalent to almost four times Iceland's electricity production, which is about 20 terawatts per year.

Future credits already sold

Climeworks has sold a significant amount of carbon credits. They are not only credits that have already been certified and captured, but also a large amount of credits that Climeworks plans to capture in the future. According to the company, one third of all the credits that the Mammoth capture plant is expected to capture from the atmosphere over the next 25 years have already been sold. About 21 thousand people have a subscription with the company, where they pay monthly for the capture and disposal of carbon credits. The waiting time to receive these carbon credits can be up to six years, according to the company's terms. If Climeworks' capture figures do not improve, the wait could extend from years to decades.

Since the company was founded, it has always focused on capturing CO2 from the atmosphere with capture plants. Now, however, the company has taken a change of direction. Recently, it began to focus on so-called enhanced weathering. This method involves crushing rocks into smaller particles, but this method is controversial within the scientific community. With this method, it is believed that CO2 can be bound to the rock much faster than it already does naturally. The experts that Heimildin has spoken to believe that this step by the company is a sign that Climeworks' capture projects are not delivering the results that were expected and that this method is now being used to try to produce carbon credits that the company has already sold, but is having difficulty delivering.

Failing to offset its own carbon footprint

Climeworks has kept a carbon accounting that the company publishes on its website. It states that it is growing rapidly and now employs 387 people. That is an increase of 45 percent between years. It also says that the company has been expanding systematically and in 2023 it entered new markets, such as the United States, Kenya, Canada, Norway and the United Kingdom. Due to the company's rapid expansion, its carbon footprint has grown in parallel and is attributed to travel and the company's activities.

Climeworks calculates that its own carbon footprint due to the company's activities is 1,079 tons of CO2 in 2022. The following year it increased by 57 percent, or up to 1,700 tons of CO2. Climeworks' total capture figures since its founding are slightly lower overall, at around 2,400 tonnes. This means that Climeworks cannot yet offset its own carbon footprint. Carbon accounting for 2024 is not available, but there have been no reports that the company is cutting back, so the carbon footprint can be expected to be the same as in 2023. Climeworks captured 876 tonnes of carbon dioxide between December 1, 2023 and October 31, 2024, and therefore a shortfall of almost 1,000 tonnes of CO2 could occur for the company’s plans to offset its own operations.

However, the company does not use the units it captures in its own operations, but has sold them to the company's customers, either directly or through a subscription.

Unfavourable accounts

Climeworks' accounts in Iceland were unfavourable in 2023, with the company's equity position negative by 3.6 billion Icelandic krónur at the end of the year. However, its operational capacity is guaranteed as the parent company in Switzerland finances the operations entirely, while the Icelandic company owes the Swiss one almost 5 billion Icelandic krónur. The value of Climeworks' main asset in Iceland – the Orca machine that captures CO2 from the atmosphere – has also declined significantly because the machine has not met expectations in recent years, according to the annual accounts. The depreciation amounts to a total of 2.7 billion in the operating years 2022 and 2023, and will continue should the machine not have more success in the future.

The Swiss company says it has raised or received approval for around eight hundred million dollars, and is therefore worth at least one hundred billion Icelandic krónur. The largest part of the capital comes from the US Department of Energy and is related to the construction of a giant capture plant that is planned in that country in the future. The operations in Iceland are run in three different companies. The Swiss company owns the Icelandic holding company Climeworks Operational, which also submits annual accounts in Iceland, but under that company are the respective limited liability companies, one that includes the Orca machine and the other that was founded around Climeworks' larger capture machine, Mammoth. The annual accounts of the parent company in this country have been delivered to the tax authorities but are under review, as stated in a conversation with the Iceland Revenue and Customs and therefore not accessible at the moment.

Not only investors have financed the operation of Climeworks. Since the company was founded, it has received approval for over one hundred billion krónur in grants from public sources, as stated on the Climeworks website, including from Swiss and American taxpayers. The Swiss handed over $5 million to the company, while the US government has promised the company $625 million.

Gullible idiot? 

“I’m 65 years old and retired when I was 60. One of the things I wanted to do in my later years was reduce my carbon footprint,” says Michael de Podesta, who worked for the UK’s National Physical Laboratory for most of his life, where he studied cold fusion, including debunking it. Michael is one of 21,000 subscribers to Climeworks, but after paying his subscription dutifully for about two years, he began to have doubts. Finally, he wrote on his widely read blog and asked a simple question: Am I a gullible idiot?

“I paid £40 [around 7,000 ISK] a month for fifty kilograms of CO2. I was supposed to get around 600 kilograms a year. I paid them right up until October last year and by then I had paid them to dispose of almost 2.2 tonnes of CO2 and got the tonne for around £800 [135 thousand ISK],” says Michael. He says the project seemed promising at first. He saw coverage of the project in the scientific journal Nature, one of the most prestigious in the world. The science was certainly there: CO2 can be sucked out of the atmosphere and Climeworks’ plans were ambitious.

However, Michael quickly noticed that no matter how much he paid, no CO2 had been captured and disposed of in his name. The math didn’t add up when the energy requirements were examined more closely.

“Maybe I should have read the fine print more carefully,” he says, which says the company plans to deliver the carbon credits in less than six years. In addition to its commitments to subscribers, the company has committed to capturing CO2 from the atmosphere for various airlines and investment bank Morgan Stanley – which alone has been promised to capture 40,000 tons from the air. Based on today’s capture rates, which are about 860 tons per year, those credits would be delivered in about half a century. So Michael is moderately optimistic that he will one day receive the two kilograms.

Michael began asking Climeworks tough questions. He asked for better data but received few answers.

Michael says he was aware that scientists had questioned whether capturing CO2 from the atmosphere was a viable way to tackle the climate problem. The biggest concern was the energy consumption of capturing each ton. This requires a huge amount of energy if done at scale, and the capture process also requires a lot of hot water. Iceland is therefore a good option when it comes to powering machines that want to capture CO2 from the atmosphere. But there are few countries in the world with green and cheap energy like Iceland.

“The company sent out information emails every six months,” says Michael, noting that they were rather sparse in content. So he took the opportunity to send an email back asking how the carbon dioxide capture was going. “I started asking quite specific questions about it all,” explains Michael, who says he received vague answers from the company’s information representatives when he finally received an answer.

“Then the idea came to me; could this be a scam?” says Michael.

So he took to social media X where he asked directly: Is Climeworks a scam? To his surprise, the company's information officer responded much more quickly than when he sent them emails. The company responded badly, he says, and he was criticised for thinking such a thing. Subsequently, however, he found information about the real figures on how much the company has captured.

Michael did not let the criticism deter him, but wrote a blog post with the title: Am I a Gullible idiot? In it, he emphasised that the question of whether Climeworks was a scam was not unfair.

“This has all the hallmarks of a scam. There are undoubtedly a lot of highly paid people traveling the world to sell their services to large corporations to remove carbon credits in the future. They are using a semi-magical technology that doesn't work as well as expected (better known as Orca) but will work perfectly in a larger version (Mammoth). I am urged to convince my friends to join the project. The answers are scarce and full of PR chatter. Climeworks' operations look like a scam and talk like one. But is it a scam? I don't know. I think it could work, but the company's answers are so opaque that it's hard to say.”

Michael says his biggest question is simple. “Why are they scaling up so slowly? There’s nothing special about the factories themselves. They’re not even that complicated,” adds Michael, who has dedicated his life to science. The answer is probably that the energy demand is enormous.

He says he can’t answer yet whether he’s a gullible man. Climeworks has until 2027 to deliver the product he paid for, which is to capture and dispose of 2.2 tons of CO2. “But I definitely feel that way, like I’m a gullible idiot,” he concludes.

Carbon capture “the Theranos of the energy industry”

A professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University in the United States, Mark Z. Jacobson, says the capture and disposal industry – abbreviated CCS in English – is nothing more than a scam. “This is the Theranos of the energy industry,” he says in an interview with Heimildin, referring to the notorious fraud company of Elisabeth Holmes, who claimed to be able to diagnose diseases from a single drop of blood with a machine that never worked. The analogy is clear, even if it is presented here symbolically. Mark intends to say that the carbon capture industry is nothing but a scam.

“Direct capture is a scam, carbon capture is a scam, blue hydrogen is a scam, and electrofuel is a scam. These are all scam technologies that do nothing for the climate or air pollution,” Mark says bluntly.

Mark is well known in his field in the United States and was, among other things, an expert witness in the first climate trial in the United States, where the plaintiffs are sixteen children. They demand that their right to access clean air and a healthy environment be recognised. Mark himself has been repeatedly called upon as an expert on environmental protection issues in the American media. In 2009, he published a scientific article in which he said that the most successful path for the world was to switch entirely to renewable energy, such as solar, wind and electricity. As a result, he has been criticised, including by his colleagues.

Mark is adamant that carbon capture and storage are designed to delay the energy transition. “This technology perpetuates the business model of oil and gas companies,” he says, adding: “This is what this technology is designed to do. None of this is doing any good for the climate. On the contrary, this kind of technology is making things worse.”

Mark conducted a study on the impact of CCS technology and published it in 2019. “We looked at what would happen if 149 countries adopted CCS technology and compared it to renewable energy. If we used only renewable energy, we would eliminate about 90 percent of global air pollution, with the added benefit that 7.5 million people would not die from air pollution. Carbon capture would not prevent any of these deaths; on the contrary, the technology would add a million lives to the problem per year if the energy used to power industry were not renewable. If it were renewable, nothing would change, seven and a half million would still die annually, and green energy would be wasted on this technology,” Mark explains, asking: “Why would you waste green energy on this instead of replacing fossil fuels?”

He says the conclusion is simple. “By powering this technology with green energy, the CCS industry is adding to the number of deaths each year from pollution, by preventing renewable energy from replacing fossil fuels.”

No benefits

Mark also points out that the energy requirements of this technology, especially direct capture, are enormous. This has its effects. “If this technology is used, the demand for green energy increases, which in turn increases its price. So pollution increases, as does demand and thus the price of renewable energy. That cost is ultimately passed on to consumers, who are also left with the same air pollution, if not higher in the future,” says Mark, adding: “There are no benefits to this technology. It is just harmful.”

He says Climeworks uses traditional methods to embellish its numbers.

“This is a typical embellishment of the real numbers that these types of systems manage to capture. The big picture is rarely considered when carbon dioxide is captured in this way,” says Mark.

“The energy production to power this increases emissions, and no matter how you look at it, they are increasing emissions by not using it to replace fossil fuels,” he adds.

He says he understands that projects of this nature may look like a solution to the climate problem. However, that is not the case. “I’ve been working on this and researching it for decades and I understand it incredibly well for those reasons. But 99 percent of people don’t get this complex interaction and instead grab what they hear on the news or read online. And most of what’s out there is positive. It was initially pushed on the public and the government by oil and gas companies. Then it took on a life of its own. People want to make a difference, they want to do good, and they want to tackle the climate problem. Without understanding the context, these ideas might seem like real solutions. But they aren’t,” says Mark, adding that once people get involved in an industry like this, it’s not easy to turn their backs on it. “Because that’s where the paycheck comes from,” he concludes.

Last week the UK government effectively nationalised the blast furnaces at Scunthorpe on the north-east coast of England. These furnaces are the last sites in the UK that can manufacture iron from ore as a precursor to the production of virgin steel. The emergency legislation will help to keep open this important source of local employment and industrial activity.

Nevertheless, I argue that it was an expensive and unnecessary move. Instead of making new virgin steel, the UK should concentrate on recycling the large amounts of old scrap steel that are exported from this country for reprocessing around the world. The owners of Scunthorpe already have plans to switch to using steel using electricity and scrap. Of critical importance to any plan, the price of electricity used for electric arc furnaces needs to be roughly the same as in competitor countries, necessitating a substantial subsidy. Without it, UK steel-making cannot hope to be financially self-reliant. Other countries do this and without financial support, the UK cannot hope to be competitive.

Basic numbers 

The most recent data from industry body UK Steel gives the following figures for the UK’s consumption and production of steel. These figures relate to 2023. In 1970, the peak year for the country’s steel production, the number was five times higher.

UK Production of steel -         5.6 million tonnes, of which 4.5 million tonnes came from blast furnaces

UK Demand for steel -            7.6 million tonnes 

So about 2m tonnes of steel had to be imported in 2023. This number probably rose in 2024 after the closure of the blast furnaces at Port Talbot but the figures are not publicly available yet. 

But at the same time as importing 2m tonnes of finished metal, the UK collected about 10.5 million tonnes of scrap steel, almost three million tonnes more than total steel demand in the country. Some scrap was used in the existing electric arc furnaces here but most was exported; about 8.5m tonnes of scrap was sent abroad for reprocessing elsewhere back into new steel. (Some of this new steel will have eventually come back to the UK).  This makes the UK the world’s second largest exporter of scrap steel for recycling. Expressed in per capita terms, the country is the top source of used steel.  

Put another way, the country’s exports of scrap, which can be easily recycled in electric arc furnaces, alone exceeded its total demand for the metal. There is no need for blast furnaces, such as the ones in Scunthorpe, for the UK to build self-sufficiency in steel production. This has been a consistent worry expressed over recent weeks with many expressing a view that the UK needed to retain the capability to make steel from iron ore in blast furnaces. But simply keeping used steel available for recycling in the UK would provide enough of the metal for the country’s needs.

It may be worth noting that many other countries restrict or block the export of steel scrap in order to ensure adequate supplies for recycling in local electric arc furnaces.

What is stopping the UK switching from blast furnaces to make the metal, rather than using scrap steel? 

·      Large electric arc furnaces (EAFs) for recycling steel are expensive to construct. The EAFs to be constructed by Tata Steel at Port Talbot in South Wales are projected to cost around £1.25bn for a projected capacity of 3m tonnes a year (or potentially around 40% of the UK’s total steel needs). The government has committed £500m to assist the transition there from blast furnaces to EAFs.

British Steel (owned by Jingye of China) has stated that the cost of creating two new EAFs on the north east coast will also be about £1.25 billion. The projected total capacity doesn’t appear to have been published but based on the Tata numbers we can perhaps assume a similar figure of about 3m tonnes a year.

·      UK electricity costs are higher than nearby countries. Even after the government intervention to reduce the costs of electricity transmission to steelworks, one recent study suggests that the British steel industry pays £66 a megawatt hour (MWh) compared to £50 in Germany and £43 in France.[1] Because electric arc furnaces use about 0.5 MWh per tonne of steel output, these higher costs can mean a handicap of £11.50 a tonne of steel from an EAF. At current finished steel prices of around £500 a tonne ($660), this imposes a burden of over 2%. In a low margin industry such as steelmaking, this difference is significant.

·      Falling UK demand for steel has imposed an additional weight on investment enthusiasm. Investing £1.25bn in a shrinking market looks a dangerous decision to take. On the other hand, some demand increases are likely in future; wind turbine columns alone might add 1m tonnes a year to UK needs. 

·      EAFs need far fewer employees per tonne of output, making it politically difficult to allow the closure of a major source of local employment in Scunthorpe. And any new EAFs in that part of the UK will take several years before they begin to hire permanent staff.

The advantages of using EAFs rather than keeping the Scunthorpe blast furnaces open 

·      EAFs use local scrap metal, reducing the amount exported.

·      The UK scrap also contains other metals, such as copper, increasing its value and reducing the need to import materials.

·      EAFs produce much less local air pollution than the older steel-making method.

·      The carbon footprint of EAFs is about one sixth of steel originating in blast furnaces. The figures will depend on the fossil fuel intensity of the electricity used but most sources estimate a footprint of about 0.35 tonnes of CO2 per tonne of steel, compared to about 2 tonnes from the blast furnace route. Replacing the 2023 4.5 million tonnes of steel with EAF output would save about 7.4 million tonnes of CO2 or just under 2% of UK emissions.

·      Potentially the economics of using scrap could be better. The open market scrap price is around $350 per tonne, equivalent to £263 today, or just over half the value of a tonne of steel in the UK. The price of raw materials is likely to be more stable, avoiding the need to have to buy much coking coal and iron ore on international markets.[2]

·      EAFs can help stabilise the electricity market, using power mostly at times when the wind is blowing and not at times of scarcity. Unlike blast furnaces, EAFs can decide when to operate. While not a trivial exercise, steel-making can adjust its demand to match national supplies of electricity.

In summary, both industrial strategy and carbon reduction aims should push us towards EAFs rather than keeping open the Scunthorpe blast furnaces. It makes very little sense to spend large sums keeping the furnaces open rather than sponsoring the building of new EAFs when the UK has such abundant supplies of metal for recycling and the carbon footprint benefits may be equal to at least one per cent of the UK emissions. This is not to dismiss the profound social consequences of the reduced employment prospects for steelworkers in the Scunthorpe area.

[1] <a href="https://www.uksteel.org/electricity-prices" rel="nofollow">https://www.uksteel.org/electricity-prices</a>

[2] EAFs use some iron ore and some coal but in much smaller quantities than blast furnaces.