Removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere—legacy emissions and future unavoidable emissions—has by now become a must to meet climate goals, as pointed out by the latest IPCC reports,^[1] and is set to become common practice within the next decades.

Climeworks was founded in 2009 by two PhD students from ETH and has since grown to be the leader in technological carbon removal through direct air capture (DAC). Much of Climeworks’ focus has been on building plants and advancing engineering and sorbent technologies. Here, we present Climeworks’ synergies between engineering, materials science and chemistry to advance CO2 capture from air and its safe storage. This effort is built on a platform for material development with many of the tools that modern chemistry can provide us.

[1] https://www.ipcc.ch/reports/; accessed on August 05 2022