Climeworks' co-founder and co-CEO Jan Wurzbacher was invited to the 2022 session of TED Countdown London. Drawing on more than 15 years of experience with direct air capture technology, Jan shared his insights on the challenges to permanently remove CO₂ from the air and what role Climeworks' Orca plant plays in the scale up of the carbon removal industry at large.
"Direct air capture is not a silver bullet, but a must-have"
To date, Orca is the only commercial direct air capture and storage facility in the world. With its launch in September 2021, permanent carbon removal became a tangible reality. But we know that Orca is only the first step of many more to come: to complement drastic emissions reductions in the fight against global warming, carbon removal solutions like direct air capture and storage need to remove billions of tons of CO₂ from the air by 2050.
Watch Jan's TED talk for his expert take on what it really means to operate a first-of-its-kind facility like Orca and how we can fulfil the potential of carbon removal for a net zero future.
About Climeworks
Climeworks empowers people and companies to fight global warming by offering carbon dioxide removal as a service via direct air capture (DAC) technology. At Orca, Climeworks’ DAC facility in Iceland, the CO2 is permanently removed from the air by capturing and geologically storing it for thousands of years with Climeworks’ storage partner Carbfix. Climeworks’ DAC facilities run exclusively on clean energy, and our modular CO2 collectors can be stacked to build machines of any capacity.
Founded by engineers Christoph Gebald and Jan Wurzbacher in 2009, Climeworks is on a journey to climate impact at scale. To do so, we strive to inspire 1 billion people to act and remove CO2 from the air. Climeworks is spear-heading the DAC industry globally, with the world’s largest DAC facility and storage installation in operation and a team of 300 Climeworkers determined to contribute to a net-zero future. Our growing customer base includes over 160 companies, including multinationals such as Microsoft, BCG, UBS or Swiss Re, as well as more than 18,000 individual Climate Pioneers.
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