from Hacker News

Climeworks' capture fails to cover its own emissions

by jacobgorm on 5/17/25, 9:59 PM with 4 comments

• by floydnoel on 5/18/25, 12:32 PM

  who are the idiot investors propping this thing up for a billion USD to just create more pollution and scam the public? but of course, it's us!

  > The Swiss company says it has raised or received approval for around eight hundred million dollars, and is therefore worth at least one hundred billion Icelandic krónur. The largest part of the capital comes from the US Department of Energy

  interesting that this is widely-known as a scam, and yet the DOE still pays for it. i can't imagine how they sleep at night.

  > Al Gore gave a TED talk in 2023 where he discussed the carbon capture and disposal industry and specifically mentioned Climeworks. He made fun of the company, calling the capture industry nothing more than a cover for oil and gas companies to keep their businesses afloat.

• by metalman on 5/18/25, 9:35 AM

  It's not surprising that they have failed.When these scheams were anounced it went against everything I know about mechanical efficiency and the imense amount of energy used by the large compressors and gas seperating equipment reqired, transportation and infrastructure are also very large. Details have been scarce on exactly how the plants would work, which was troubling as the whole exercise is dependent on very specific technical details, and of course on the name plate information on the equipment, which with a pencil and paper will give a very good idea if it will work. Unfortunately there is still obfusication of just how bad the fail is.It looks like they are admitting that it consumed twice as much CO² as they captured, but I think that it's twice that, not counting infrastructure or grid losses, snd now decomishioning costs, so ball park at 10% and thats that. Still amazed it ever got started.

• by imtringued on 5/18/25, 10:41 AM

  Why are there no honest scams?

  I personally would have used part of the money to buy CO2 certificates and simply never use them. It amounts to the same thing. The machines would just be props to get investor money.