Swiss Air Is The First Airline To Pay For Pulling Carbon From The Air

07.03.2024 - 10:43 / forbes.com / Morgan Chase / Airlines

Climeworks, a startup that directly captures carbon dioxide from the air, is partnering with Swiss Air Lines to remove tons of CO2 on behalf of the European airline in what appears to be the first deal of its kind.

The seven-year partnership between the two Zurich-based companies runs through the end of the decade, Jan Wurzbacher, Climeworks’ cofounder and co-CEO told Forbes. He and Swiss Air CEO Dieter Vranckx said it’s the airline industry’s first direct carbon capture project, though both declined to provide details on how many tons of CO2 will be removed under the deal and how much the airline is paying for the service. Some of the captured carbon may eventually be used to make sustainable aviation fuel, rather than stored.

“We’ve had many clients from the financial industry or service industry, but this is the first time it will be an airline customer,” Wurzbacher said. “It's not like a steel mill, but it's an airline — from a generally heavy emitting industry — that came to the conclusion that (carbon dioxide removal), in particular direct capture, can be something valuable.”

Climeworks, which has raised about $800 million and is valued at $1.9 billion, began operating Orca, the world’s first large-scale carbon capture plant in Iceland in 2021. The facility uses large fans to suck in CO2 from the ambient air and then mix it with water to create a solid material that’s piped and stored underground. It’s able to remove 4,000 tons of CO2 annually, but the company is building a much larger facility near Reykjavik, called Mammoth, that’s intended to remove 36,000 tons a year.

Prior to the Swiss deal, Climeworks announced multiyear carbon removal projects with JP Morgan Chase, Microsoft, BCG, Stripe and insurer Swiss Re.

Direct removal of CO2 is a fast-emerging area of cleantech, promoted as a critical complement to efforts to wean the transportation, manufacturing and power industries off of fossil fuels. But to slow the effects of climate change, thousands of gigatons of CO2 will need to be eliminated annually.

Unlike carbon offsets, credits that airlines and other companies have purchased for many years linked to things like planting trees or building wind farms, direct carbon removal companies say they’re able to measure exactly how much CO2 they’re capturing.

“Swiss International Air Lines has set a target to reduce its CO2 by half by 2030, and to be net zero by 2050,” CEO Vranckx told Forbes. Along with upgrading its fleet to cleaner aircraft and shifting to sustainable fuels, the Climeworks project “is another component of reaching those targets.”

One reason Swiss isn’t sharing a hard target for tons of CO2 that Climeworks will remove on its behalf is that direct air capture, or DAC, is still a