Tag: Climeworks

Carbon Capture Comes Crashing Down (Again): A Comedy in Subsidies

If you heard a distant wailing this week, don’t worry—it was just The New York Times realizing their beloved carbon capture techno-fantasy is, once again, face-planting in the real world. In a recent Climate Forward newsletter piece titled “Carbon Capture Comes Back Down to Earth”, Times writer David Gelles practically had to mop his keyboard with tears over the news that the carbon removal market—once projected to be a trillion-dollar juggernaut—is now wheezing toward irrelevance.

From Watts Up With That?

By Charles Rotter

If you heard a distant wailing this week, don’t worry—it was just The New York Times realizing their beloved carbon capture techno-fantasy is, once again, face-planting in the real world. In a recent Climate Forward newsletter piece titled “Carbon Capture Comes Back Down to Earth”, Times writer David Gelles practically had to mop his keyboard with tears over the news that the carbon removal market—once projected to be a trillion-dollar juggernaut—is now wheezing toward irrelevance.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/10/climate/carbon-capture-comes-back-down-to-earth.html

Not that we mind. After all, here at Watts Up With That, we never bought into the carbon panic to begin with. CO2 isn’t a pollutant—it’s plant food. But watching the climate-industrial complex flop around trying to vacuum molecules out of the sky is pure entertainment.

From “The Next Big Thing” to Layoff Bingo

Just a few months ago, the hype machine was at full throttle. Bill Gates was investing. Google, Amazon, and Airbus were snapping up “carbon credits” like trendy NFTs. McKinsey—ever the oracle of bad ideas—declared carbon capture a $1.2 trillion market by 2050. One venture capitalist even called it “the single greatest opportunity I’ve seen in 20 years.” You almost have to admire the brazenness of the grift.

Fast-forward to now: 24 government grants worth $3.7 billion have been scrapped, Climeworks axed 22% of its staff, and permit applications have tanked. The “market” is imploding because—brace yourself—no one wants to fund something that doesn’t work.

Meanwhile, Climeworks’ headline-grabbing Iceland plant managed to remove only a sliver of its projected CO2. Naturally, the execs blame “ramp-up issues.” Of course they do. It’s never the technology’s fault—it’s always “early days” or “transitional challenges.” You’d think they were launching a moon mission, not running industrial shop vacs for the atmosphere.

The Laws of Physics Want a Word

Let’s be crystal clear: carbon capture is a thermodynamic clown show.

Pulling CO2 from ambient air—where it exists at a wispy 0.04%—is like trying to find a particular grain of sand on a beach… using tweezers… while blindfolded. It takes more energy to remove CO2 from the air than was released burning the fossil fuel in the first place. And even then, you still have to compress it, transport it, inject it underground, and pray it doesn’t leak back out.

This isn’t cutting-edge climate tech. It’s an energy-intensive Rube Goldberg machine designed to appease green investors, virtue-signaling corporations, and bureaucrats allergic to basic physics.

Bonus: It Boosts Oil Production!

Now here’s the kicker: the CO2 some of these companies do manage to capture is often used for enhanced oil recovery. That’s right—after spending billions to “fight climate change,” the carbon is injected into wells to squeeze out even more oil.

And yes, Occidental Petroleum—the same company running a giant DAC project in Texas—openly touts this as a feature, not a bug. The Times, ever reverent, quotes CEO Vicki Hollub promising that the project will help achieve “energy security” and “produce vital resources and fuels.” Translation: we’re going to burn more hydrocarbons and call it green.

The NYT’s Tiny Violin Section

What really makes this article sing is the melodramatic tone. The author laments layoffs, canceled subsidies, and a “retrenchment” in the industry like it’s some noble cause under siege.

And when the DOE finally did something rational—canceling $3.7 billion in vaporware grants—the Carbon Capture Coalition, which is about as unbiased as a pharma lobby, called it a “major step backward.” For whom? Rent-seeking climatepreneurs?

Even Climeworks now admits they’re going into “consolidation mode” and focusing on “efficiency.” Translation: the gravy train is slowing, so it’s time to pretend we’re tightening belts while keeping the PR spigot open.

Final Thoughts: Not Our Problem

Let’s be honest: the entire carbon capture craze was never about saving the planet. It was about:

  1. Making rich people feel less guilty about flying private.
  2. Giving bureaucrats a talking point.
  3. Creating a new market for companies like Microsoft to “offset” emissions without changing a single behavior.

The NYT can whimper all it wants about Trump pulling the plug, but the real villain here is reality. Physics doesn’t care about good intentions, ESG scores, or narrative arcs. It just keeps tallying the kilowatt-hours.

So while The Times continues wringing its hands over CO2 removal dreams deferred, we’ll be here pointing, laughing, and perhaps warming ourselves with the comforting glow of all that wasted taxpayer cash being vaporized in yet another doomed climate gimmick.

Coming Soon:

  • Direct Air Capture vs. a Leaf: Guess Which One Works Better
  • Climate Grifters, Part VII: Where Are They Now?
  • Bill Gates’ Carbon Unicorn: Anatomy of a Bad Idea

DAC Dying? (“corporate theater wrapped in a green ribbon”)

“Removing CO₂ from ambient air is a thermodynamic slog,” continues Barnard. “The concentration is a measly 0.04% — less than one molecule in 2,500.”

ChatGPT

From Master Resource

By Robert Bradley Jr. 

“The economics are even more dismal…. Without the 45Q credit, few if any [Direct Air Capture projects] would be viable. As a reminder, the … Republican House bill working its way through Congress cuts IRA incentives for a raft of technologies, but leaves 45Q for carbon capture alone.” (- Michael Barnard, below)

An article in CleanTechnica by Michael Barnard, “Climeworks DAC & Fiscal Collapse & The Brutal Reality Of Pulling Carbon From The Sky“, documents the failure of another anti-CO2 program. The article begins:

In 2024, Climeworks’ direct air capture (DAC) Mammoth plant in Iceland captured just 105 tonnes of carbon dioxide. That’s not per day, not per week, that’s total, across the year. For context, that’s less than the annual tailpipe emissions from a dozen long-haul trucks, or roughly one-thousandth of what the company said the plant was built to remove. In mid 2025, the company began laying off a minimum of 10% of its ~500 staff. For a firm that raised over $800 million in equity and subsidies, hailed as a pioneer of direct air capture, the numbers are sobering. But they are not surprising. They are merely the inevitable result of colliding hopeful techno-optimism with the brutal constraints of physics, economics, and scale.

Barnard then revisits the hyperbole that surrounds so many government-enabled projects.

DAC has always promised a seductive narrative: the ability to suck carbon out of the sky, store it underground, and buy ourselves a climate mulligan. It promised to clean up after fossil fuels without requiring too many lifestyle changes. It was a technology that said yes — to oil companies, to airlines, to governments slow-walking their emissions policies….

Private sector greenwashing was instrumental.

Big names like Microsoft, Stripe, and Shopify lined up to buy carbon removal credits at $600 a ton or more. Government agencies began pouring in cash. The US 45Q tax credit was sweetened to $180 per ton. Europe and Japan set aside funds. And dozens of startups bloomed. But beneath the marketing sheen, the physics was never on DAC’s side.

‘Thermodynamic Slog‘

“Removing CO₂ from ambient air is a thermodynamic slog,” continues Barnard. “The concentration is a measly 0.04% — less than one molecule in 2,500.” Enter the complications and cost:

Capturing it means moving vast volumes of air across chemically active surfaces, then applying heat, vacuum, or electric fields to regenerate the sorbents. The most mature systems, like Climeworks’ solid sorbent modules or Carbon Engineering’s hydroxide-calcination loop, require on the order of 2,000 to 3,000 kilowatt-hours of energy per ton of CO₂. Even newer concepts that promise electrochemical capture still to hover around 700 to 1,000 kWh per ton. And that’s just to capture it. Compressing, transporting, and injecting it underground adds another layer of complexity and cost.

Barnard has done the calculations.

Back in 2019, I analyzed Carbon Engineering’s system in detail and concluded that it wasn’t ready for prime time. The energy requirements were steep, the system architecture was complex, and the economic case relied heavily on theoretical scale and generous subsidies.

Fast forward to today, and those conclusions still hold. Carbon Engineering’s Squamish pilot captured a few hundred tons over several years. Its first commercial plant, Stratos in Texas, is still under construction. Occidental Petroleum acquired the company in 2023 not because it had a viable climate solution, but because it had a narrative that could buy time for oil and gas. Stratos, too, will run on natural gas. The captured CO₂ will be injected underground and earn 45Q credits, while Occidental continues to sell hydrocarbons. This isn’t carbon removal. It’s corporate theater wrapped in a green ribbon.

Barnard documents the energy-intensive, carbon-intensive processes involved with the leading technologies (Climeworks; Carbon Engineering).

Why the Futility?

Why is there support for a boondoggle-in-progress that few really like? It is magical thinking, a “justification tool”.

Direct air capture, like the broader class of carbon capture and storage (CCS) projects, has been used less as a mitigation tool and more as a justification tool. Capture projects at the smokestack were supposed to save coal. They didn’t. DAC was supposed to save aviation. It isn’t.

Now it’s being positioned as the backstop for net-zero oil and gas production, a way to square the carbon ledger while the meter keeps running. The problem is that the math never adds up. To remove even one gigaton of CO₂ annually — the lower end of what IPCC pathways suggest we might need by mid-century — we would need thousands of DAC plants the size of the one Climeworks can’t get to work. That would require hundreds of terawatt-hours of energy annually, roughly equivalent to doubling the electricity use of a mid-sized industrial nation.

The Futile Crusade

“Meanwhile, global CO₂ emissions are still hovering around 40 billion tons per year,” Barnard allows.

DAC, across all companies, all technologies, and all years combined, has removed less than 20,000 tons to date. That’s 0.00005% of annual global emissions. It is, for all intents and purposes, noise. And it’s not getting better fast enough to matter. Mammoth’s 105 tons aren’t just a small number — they’re a warning. The technology isn’t scaling. It isn’t stabilizing. And it isn’t getting cheaper at the pace its proponents claim. The laws of thermodynamics are not falling into line. They’re enforcing a cost floor.

The economics are even more dismal. Climeworks’ removal credits have sold for between $600 and $1,000 per ton. Carbon Engineering’s contracts are rumored to be in the $400 range. Heirloom, another promising startup using carbonate looping, hasn’t released cost data, but is operating at similarly high levels. All are subsidized. Without the 45Q credit, few if any would be viable. As a reminder, the fossil fuel and tax cuts for billionaires Republican House bill working its way through Congress cuts IRA incentives for a raft of technologies, but leaves 45Q for carbon capture alone.

Eco-Mirage

Climate activists do not like direct air capture or carbon capture and sequestration more generally. Barnard gives the reasons why.

And yet, policy continues to encourage this fantasy. Climate plans, particularly from oil and gas states, are now riddled with assumptions about large-scale engineered removals beginning in the 2030s. It’s climate budgeting with monopoly money. It postpones the hard choices. It allows emissions to continue today in exchange for a speculative cleanup later.

Even when DAC does remove carbon, permanence is no guarantee. Some companies are experimenting with CO₂ utilization — turning it into synthetic fuels or chemicals. That’s fine if your goal is to recycle carbon. But it’s not removal. It’s delay. Others are pairing DAC with enhanced oil recovery, which is neither climate-aligned nor economically transparent. Only a handful of firms, like Charm Industrial with its bio-oil injection strategy, are actually delivering meaningful volumes of removed and stored carbon. And even Charm is still in the thousands of tons per year — not remotely near what’s needed at scale.

Conclusion

So where does this leave this modern day equivalent of synthetic fuels? “At best,” Barnard concludes, DAC is “a very niche technology with specific use cases:

legacy cleanup in overshoot scenarios after 2050, support for incredibly-expensive-to-decarbonize sectors …. But as a pillar of global decarbonization strategy, it is a fantasy. It’s climate alchemy: an expensive, energy-intensive attempt to undo what never needed to be done in the first place. Every ton of carbon avoided today is worth exponentially more than one captured tomorrow. And yet policy, funding, and media narratives continue to bet on the latter.

He continues as a climate activist who does not realize that false solutions and waste are the flip side of the anti-CO2 coin.

We’ve been here before. Carbon capture was supposed to save coal. It didn’t. DAC is supposed to save oil. It won’t. What will save us is electrification, efficiency, and prevention…. Every watt of clean electricity deployed today reduces the need for exotic techno-fixes tomorrow. Every avoided ton of CO₂ is one we don’t have to chase through the sky with a billion-dollar machine and a bag of subsidies.

To his credit, he is ready to pull the plug on a politically correct, economically/environmentally incorrect technology.

Climeworks’ 105-ton year should be a turning point. Not just for one company, but for an entire class of false solutions. If DAC ever works at scale, it will be as a backup — not as a plan. Until then, we need to stop pretending we can suck our way out of this problem. We need to stop lighting carbon on fire. Because that’s the only removal that truly works.

Better yet, with CO2 mitigation policies and technologies failing, it is time to reverse course on the whole climate crusade, redirecting resources toward adaptation to extreme weather (from any cause). Thirty-five years of misdirection and waste is enough.

Carbon Capture Scam Does Not Even Offset Its Own Emissions

This is a remarkable story coming out of Iceland, and a warning for Net Zero zealots wanting us to go down the same route

From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

h/t Paul Weldon

This is a remarkable story coming out of Iceland, and a warning for Net Zero zealots wanting us to go down the same route:

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.

Read the full story here.

Let’s be clear – we are not talking about conventional carbon capture, the sort that Miliband wants to waste £22 billion on – capturing carbon dioxide from power stations and factories which emit the stuff.

Climeworks are into Direct Air Capture, DAC, which the CCC say we will need to offset CO2 emissions that we cannot totally eliminate.

DAC is an unproven process at scale, but will almost certainly be unimaginably expensive. In particular, DAC needs phenomenal amounts of energy, which itself produces CO2 emissions one way or another.

You might wonder why or how Climeworks are even doing this. The answer is carbon credits, as the article explains:

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.

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.

In short, the whole thing is a crooked scam. And those who have fallen for it through their wish to virtue signal deserve no sympathy.

A Bit Of Perspective Goes A Long Way

The world’s largest CO2-capture plant just went into operation in Iceland, built by a company called “Climeworks”. You can read about it at their site.

FILE PHOTO: A facility for capturing CO2 from air of Swiss Climeworks AG is placed on the roof of a waste incinerating plant in Hinwil, Switzerland July 18, 2017. REUTERS/Arnd Wiegmann/File Photo

From Watts Up With That?

Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach (@WEschenbach on eX-Twitter)

Perspective is everything.

The world’s largest CO2-capture plant just went into operation in Iceland, built by a company called “Climeworks”. You can read about it at their site.

Here’s a description:

“According to Climeworks’ estimates, Mammoth boasts an impressive annual capacity of capturing 36,000 tons of CO2. To put this into perspective, this is equivalent to neutralizing the emissions from approximately 7,800 gasoline-powered vehicles.”

Sounds impressive, huh? Same as taking 7,800 cars off the road? WOW!

However, to return to the question of perspective, how many giant plants of this size would we need to neutralize the annual global CO2 emissions, which are currently about 38 gigatonnes of CO2?

Why , a mere ONE MILLION EQUALLY LARGE PLANTS would do it … should be no problem, right?

I mean, if we could build one of these suckers per week, that would only take us … hang on, let’s see … carry over what sums to greater than 9, divide by pi, take the square root, allow for Cook’s Factor, this math stuff is tough … that would only take us 19,231 years to complete the project.

And how much energy does it require? The builders are VERY tight-lipped about this, but typically such plants require about 2 MWh of electricity per tonne of CO2 captured. Let’s call it 1.5 MWh per tonne to be conservative.

So to capture all of our emissions would require about 50 petawatt-hours of electricity per year …
… and to close the circle and return to the question of perspective, that’s about twice the current total annual global electricity consumption.

This CO2-capture project is nothing but pathetic climate virtue signaling.

w.

PS—As usual, I ask that when you comment you quote the exact words you are discussing. I’m happy to defend my own words … but I can’t defend your interpretation of my words. Thanks.