A startup battles Big Oil for the $1 trillion future of carbon cleanup |

Gebald grew up in the Bavarian region of Germany, and he’s spent two decades in Switzerland, a country synonymous with jagged peaks cloaked in snow and ice stretching to the horizon. The shadow of climate change hovers over the Alps, though. The glaciers clinging to the slopes are receding at an alarming rate. Even the most optimistic scenarios show two-thirds of the Alps’ ice could disappear by the end of the century.

“I came here to study, and the original motivation was really being outdoors,” Gebald says. “I was all about mountain biking, climbing, ski touring and studies were, well, ‘Somehow I’ll get it done.’ ”

In between mountain ascents, he pursued research that’s now the basis for Climeworks’ mission: removing 1 billion tons of carbon pollution from the atmosphere every year by midcentury using, essentially, vacuum cleaners for the sky. That ambition is in part why Gebald was named to the TIME100 Next list last year.

Climeworks raised $650 million in an equity round last year and has sold millions of dollars in CO2 removal services. But those big numbers belie the massive challenge. If 1 billion tons is the summit, the company has barely taken its first steps out of base camp: It’s at 4,000 tons a year, and experts estimate that the world will need to remove up to 10 billion tons of carbon from the atmosphere annually by midcentury to limit global warming to 1.5C. In mountaineering terms, the route ahead is a Class 5 ascent: There’s exposure on both sides and little room for error. Plus, nobody has ever attempted it before.

Gebald is taking to heart the lessons he’s learned in the mountains. “If you only focus on the summit, you’ll be frustrated five weeks straight until you are on the summit,” he tells me on a warm Zurich afternoon as we sit cross-legged under a tree around the corner from his office. “What you focus on is the next step, and you only focus on the next step to not be killed.”

As chief executive officer and co-founder of Climeworks, the next step in front of Gebald is building a scaled-up version of its technology in Iceland; the step after that will be opening its first plant in the U.S. That project, which will anchor a test hub in southwest Louisiana for pulling CO2 from the air, was awarded hundreds of millions of dollars this summer as part of U.S. President Joe Biden’s climate strategy. The Biden administration expects that hub to capture 1 million tons of carbon a year by 2030, with Climeworks doing most of the heavy lifting.

More and more corporations are purchasing or have announced plans to voluntarily buy hundreds of millions of dollars in removal services this decade as part of their decarbonization plans. BloombergNEF estimates that if the global carbon market were to rely on CO2 removal rather than reducing deforestation or funding clean energy projects — both common sources of carbon credits currently being sold — the industry could be worth up to $1 trillion by 2037. Focusing too intently on growing that market can’t come at the expense of cutting emissions, though. “What we don’t want these plants to do is to deter the rapid mitigation and the reductions that have to happen right now,” says Angela Anderson, the director of industrial innovation and carbon removal at the World Resources Institute (WRI).

Climeworks’ main competition is offering a very different vision. Warren Buffett-backed Occidental Petroleum Corp. has plans to build more than 100 carbon-sucking plants by 2035, and it wants to use some of that captured carbon to dredge up more oil, which is at odds with reducing emissions. That’s in contrast to Climeworks, which is only interested in “permanent underground storage, period,” Gebald says.

Oxy also won federal funding to construct a test plant. The two hubs will be fewer than 400 miles apart on the Gulf Coast, setting up a race between dueling techno fixes and visions where the very future of an industry that barely exists will be at stake. That is, assuming it can even scale in the first place.

Direct air capture (DAC) is among the technologies the world will likely need to avert the worst consequences of climate change. While wind turbines, electric vehicles and solar panels can reduce reliance on fossil fuels, some sectors of the economy — think flying, shipping or making cement — could remain…