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By Akshat Rathi and Sommer Saadi
“We are coming out of a phase of extreme growth,” co-founder Jan Wurzbacher said on the Zero podcast, as the startup focuses on cost cutting amid unfavorable market conditions.
Scientists are clear that meeting climate goals means ending carbon pollution and drawing down excess CO2 from the air. That’s why carbon-removal technologies have proliferated over the past decade. But with the US government slashing climate incentives and programs, some companies are being forced to cut costs.
This week Akshat Rathi speaks with Jan Wurzbacher, co-founder of Climeworks, a startup that pulls carbon dioxide from the air, about its first major layoff and what the future holds for the most expensive climate solution.
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Akshat Rathi
00:00:00 Welcome to Zero. I am Akshat Rathi. This week: troubles with direct air capture.
Sometimes it’s nice to remind yourself that the solution to climate change is simple. Stop adding greenhouse gases and draw down the excess sitting in the atmosphere. I’m not saying either step is easy, but those are the two steps to meet the goals set under the Paris Agreement.
I know that even trying to meet the first step of cutting carbon pollution seems hard right now with the US reversing any of the good things it’s done on climate policy. But that’s not a good reason to stop thinking about how to undo the harm already caused because these carbon removal technologies will be needed at scale later in the century, perhaps drawing down billions of tons of carbon dioxide each year. It could be as large as the oil and gas industry is today. And that means the work on carbon removal technologies must start now and scale up.
Today we are going to talk about one of those carbon removal technologies, direct air capture. It involves exposing air to some chemicals that have a special affinity to carbon dioxide. And once the gas has been captured, typically heating the chemicals to release CO2 as a pure gas, which can be buried deep underground. The chemical is then reused to capture more carbon dioxide.
It’s an energy intensive and expensive process, but the more it scales up, the cheaper it will become. There are now more than a hundred direct air capture startups. The best funded among them is Climeworks, which was founded in 2009 and has raised nearly $800 million.
But given recent policy changes in the US and the fact that many companies that buy carbon credits from direct air capture startups are rethinking how they meet their climate goals, Climeworks is facing headwinds. The company is laying off staff and has come under attack for not delivering on its bold ambitions. So this week I’ve got Jan Wurzbacher, co-founder and co-CEO of Climeworks to answer the many questions being raised about the company, its performance and its future.
Akshat Rathi
Jan, welcome to the show.
Jan Wurzbacher
00:02:42 Hi Akshat, nice speaking to you.
Akshat Rathi
00:02:43 So you and Christoph Kial founded Climeworks in 2009. Since then, the company has raised nearly $800 million and it’s grown in size to nearly 500 people. What would you class as your three biggest achievements so far?
Jan Wurzbacher
00:02:56 That’s correct. We have been scaling direct air capture since 15 years. What we have done, first and foremost, we have shown to the world that direct air capture works and can be done at scale. When we started Climeworks back in 2009, people were asking themselves and us: ‘Is direct air capture something that’s actually possible?’ Because there is so little CO2 in the air. Over the time, we have demonstrated that step by step. We are coming out of a phase of extreme growth and scale up. We’ve built our first plant in Switzerland in 2017 with the first commercial model. So that was for the very first time that CO2 captured from the air was sold to a commercial customer. So we sold the CO2 to a greenhouse and to Coca-Cola to make bubbles in the water. And we then built our first plant in 2021 and then also the second plant last year in 2024 in Iceland, taking CO2 out of the air and combined that with safe and permanent underground storage. So we put CO2 underground together with our Icelandic partners Carbfix where the CO2 mineralizes is turned into stone. And we are selling the capacity of those plans to our customers. So yeah, all in all, that’s something no one has done before and we’ve done a few big scale up steps and there are more to come.
Akshat Rathi
00:04:24 And so let’s get to the big news before we get into the scale up challenges. You’re about to announce your first major layoffs, eliminating 106 jobs. Why?
00:04:37 Yeah, as I said, we are coming out of a phase of extreme growth. So we’ve grown the company. We’ve doubled in size two times in a row over the past very few years. There was a very intense phase. Now we are entering into a next phase where it’s important that we prepare for everything that’s coming forward. We need to consolidate a little bit. We need to look at efficiency. When we grew the company over the past couple of years, and a lot of our growth was targeted towards like growing as fast as possible, building as much capacity as we can. We’ve done a lot of that. We’ve built the Mammoth plant a 10 times larger plant compared to the Orca plant very, very quickly now going forward. In particular in today’s market environment, a second aspect that is very important is focus on profitability.
00:05:32 How can we make sure that our plans are operating at the lowest costs? That our company is operating at the lowest cost? And so this is a phase that is following. Now we are focusing on cost reduction on our technology development. We are continuing to focus on projects, but we should talk about our future projects in a minute. Some of them might move on a slightly slower timeline, which then allows us to integrate latest technology developments, latest findings. And this will require a little bit of a different or amended setup of our staffing, of the people we have. And this unfortunately requires us to separate from a certain amount of colleagues that have brought us here. Which is always a sad thing, but that’s part of the journey we are going.
Akshat Rathi
00:06:29 How exactly are the layoffs going to be structured? Like who are the people who will be affected most and how did you come to that decision?
Jan Wurzbacher
00:06:37 It’s been a very structured process over the past couple of weeks. We’ve looked at the company across the board, so it’s really across the board. We are rebalancing our workforce where it comes to project execution on the one hand, where it comes to technology improvement on the other hand. So as I said before, we’ve done a lot of technology advances. So this is an area where we are doubling down where on the project execution side, there might a bit less workforce needed going forward.
Akshat Rathi
00:07:09 And so Climaeworks has a goal of capturing 1 million tons of carbon dioxide from the air each year by 2030. As of now, according to the database CDR.fyi, you’ve only delivered some 1,100 tons out of more than 380,000 tons that people have given you orders for that companies have given you orders for. You are cutting about 20% of your stuff. How exactly is that going to help you scale up the technology, deliver these tons, reach profitability, as you are saying?
Jan Wurzbacher
00:07:41 First of all, if we compare our order book with the deliveries, that is a very normal thing that there is a large order book compared to a smaller number of deliveries because the whole business model of Climeworks goes along the ways that we are closing contracts offtake contracts with our customers, which are then used to finance future plants and then captures you two with those plans. Maybe the second question, so you asked about the connection between our number of staff with plant deliveries. So also here again our reduction staff, it is first and foremost a measure to make us ready for the time going forward to be more efficient. In particular with our current operating plans here in Iceland, there are no staff reductions connected in there. So we are continuing to produce to further ramp up the plants, in particular, the Mammoth plant. And then as we move forward, there’s always two elements that we need to focus on. There is the fast deployment of plants, but then there’s also the technology optimization and cost optimization. And as we are focusing to take out more costs as we’re going forward, this is then the key other pillar that we need for sustainable financing.
Akshat Rathi
00:09:06 Let’s take the plans that you do have in order and the growth plans you had in place before this decision was made. You completed Orca in 2021 and it has the capacity to capture 4,000 tons every year, but your own data shows that it’s never captured more than 1000 tons in any year. Why?
Jan Wurzbacher
00:09:27 Well, let’s take a closer look at the data. So first, first and foremost, we need to distinguish between, let’s say three numbers. The first is the nameplate capacity that we’ve always communicated as 4,000 tons, which is really the maximum capacity the plant could, could do compared to the top speed of a car, right? If you have a top speed of a car, that’s not the speed at which you’re driving on average, even if you’re driving on the highway. So then you have the actual captured amounts of tons of CO2, and then you have the actual CDR delivered. So carbon dioxide removal delivered to customers, which also accounts for gray emissions and other losses on the way. So these three numbers need to be looked in altogether. The numbers that you can see publicly in the database and the certification database of Puro, which is by the way in the DAC space, the only instance so far globally we have where you can really transparently see what has been produced and what has done, which is also something you asked about big achievements, something we’re quite proud of because you can really find it all there.
00:10:37 So those numbers refer to the CDR and not to the CO2 capture. So that’s maybe the first difference. And the second thing is if you, if you look at the plant there’s two things you can compare. You have the actual ability of the plant to deliver, to show its performance, and then you have the number of tons that is actually produced throughout the whole year. If we look at the tons CO2 captured that we could achieve with the Orca plant overall over not a whole year, but over shorter timeframes say a month, then those numbers are actually much higher. So the best month of the Orca plant showed an annualized capacity of 2,500 tons captured. So that is much closer than to this nameplate capacity. If we look even at the best week, we would go up to 2,900 tons.
00:11:34 What Orca is not yet is not a plant which can consistently deliver this performance throughout the whole year. There are several reasons for it. If you look at the absorbent material for example, that is used for the plant that is one which has been installed in 2021. It’s been purchased in 2019. So the technology of that absorbent material dates back to 2017 and 2018. In the meantime, we’ve developed much more efficient absorbent materials up to five times more stable materials. So it is a material which is actually running in the plant for four years, which is even better than we ever thought. So it has, so to say, degraded over time, over four years and it is still working, but it from the start hasn’t been the best material we have today. It has been in there for several years and we have not decided to substantially invest into that plan to squeeze out the last last thousand tons, if you say.
Akshat Rathi
00:12:27 So analogies are helpful, you know that there’s a top speed to a car and a car usually doesn’t run at top speed, but you also know when you buy a car, you want to be able to run that car at the top speed when you want it. Has it ever run at the nameplate capacity of 4,000 tons?
Jan Wurzbacher
00:12:44 So it has run at a capacity of 2,900 tons per year. So that is about 75% of the top speed of the nameplate capacity. If we would equip the plant with the latest sorbent material, we would get much closer even to the 4,000 tons potentially reaching that value.
Akshat Rathi
00:13:05 So experimentation is important. This was your first multi-thousand ton plant. You’ve tried a few things, obviously technology improves. That’s a good thing. That’s one reason because of all the orderbook you started building Mammoth. That’s supposed to have a nameplate capacity again of 36,000 tons annually. You started operation on the plant, first operations in 2024. How much does it capture today and when will it capture 36,000 tons each year?
Jan Wurzbacher
00:13:37 So as you said correctly, the Mammoth plant was started last year and that means we are still fully in the ramp up phase today. If we quickly draw the comparison to Orca. So for Orca, we had a ramp up phase of around three years, which brought those numbers that we spoke about a minute ago. And for Mammoth, we are in the midst of this ramp up phase. What does that mean concretely? It concretely means that as we speak the plant itself, so all the process engineering components, also the central plant components where we get the heat from the geothermal power plant, the storage of the CO2 compression of the CO2, CO2 treatment, all of that is fully up and running. And we actually had availabilities of those parts of the plant of more than 95%. When it comes to the actual modules that captures CO2 and that contain the sorbent material, we have chosen to take a step by step approach and actually benefit from the fact that the plan contains modules.
00:14:41 So far the first 18 modules out of 72 modules are up and running. So that means we don’t have the full range of modules installed and as we move through the ramp up phase, we will install more and more of them. We would ideally have liked to be further down the road today, but then if we compare it to Orca, if we look at this three year phase, that is a similar phase that is similar period of time that we currently assume for the Mammoth plant to apply here.
Akshat Rathi
00:15:13 And so you said you wanted to be further ahead than you are, what has held you back?
Jan Wurzbacher
00:15:20 Well, that’s a very good question and there are a few points. Maybe, first and foremost, from Orca to Mammoth. We obviously incorporated some design improvements, some design upgrades and, and changes on the design. So we incorporated learnings, however, while it’s a second of its kind, it’s not a 10th of its kind. And what we learned during the first ramp up that some of these design changes that we made from Orca to Mammoth required further iterations. So I can give you one example to make it tangible. At Orca we figure out like one crucial element of the plan is a mechanical element that is actually a door that closes the chambers where we have the absorbent material in there. So we first absorb CO2, then we close the chamber, heat it up and take out the CO2.
00:16:13 So that is a mechanical element that needs to travel every other hour from chamber to chamber and seal it in ice and snow and storm in the summer in any weather whether we have. In this element, there are just, yeah, one example, there is one sensor that controls the movement of the door and that was placed at the position where it was very hard to maintain. So it created a lot of overhead to replace it, to maintain the sensor. So we changed that design from Orca to Mammoth to position it at a different place where it is much easier accessible. Now unfortunately it turned out that at this new location, and that is something we hadn’t foreseen during the design, the sensor is much more exposed to steam and then in the winter steam combined with cold means ice.
00:17:01 So we had a lot of icing there. Sounds like a trivial topic and if you listen to this you might think, okay, that sounds easy, why don’t they fix it within a week? The issue is if you have several modules, it’s not one sensor, but it’s many, many of these sensors, if you make changes, you always need to be aware that if you change something you might come up with new findings as it happened this time. So after finding this, we needed to like, we always need to go through a loop of a design upgrade, then a validation of the new design and then a rollout. So you need to combine all of these things. So you need to design it, you need to bring it in the field, make sure that now it works much better and then activate the supply chain that you can buy the new parts, install them, and so on and so on. And this is one example out of several ones where from Orca to Mammoth we made changes, but not all of those changes they didn’t only improve what they were supposed to improve but also introduced new challenges. And this is what we’re working on.
Akshat Rathi
00:18:00 We’ll be back with more of my conversation with Jan Wurzbacher after the short break. And hey, if you’re enjoying this episode, please rate and review of the show on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Your feedback really matters and helps new listeners discover the show. Thank you.
Akshat Rathi
00:18:27 And so if you are to reach your target of 1 million tons of capture every year by 2030, the plant that would’ve made it possible is the Cypress plant in Louisiana. Now, under former US president Joe Biden, the government was ready to offer billions of dollars of support to such plants, yours and a few others. Of course, you had to do a lot of your own work because you needed to make the technology work, you needed to bring in your investment, matching dollars. But right now with President Trump, it’s clear that the administration is pushing back on lots and lots of climate policies. Specifically when it comes to supporting direct air capture, the latest reporting is unclear on whether the Trump administration wants to proceed with supporting these plants or rescinded support altogether. Would it be right that because of this plant and the rapid growth that you were anticipating and now that may be delayed or canceled, you are having to make these layoffs so that you can sustain the funding that you have raised so far, for a little bit longer and ensure that a scale up, if not in Louisiana, somewhere else could happen?
Jan Wurzbacher
00:19:38 Yeah, so well, several questions to start with. It is correct that for the US project there is currently not a 100% certainty how the Department of Energy will move forward with that project. We are in close exchange, the project moves on. So we are continuing our front-end engineering design together with our EPC partner, but we have to wait how the administration decides to move on with that project. We are prepared to move forward with that project, but we also need to consider the scenario that there are changes or that the administration will not move forward with the project. That said, we haven’t been sitting and waiting in the meantime. So we do have a pipeline of further sites and further project opportunities with which we can move forward. That is, anyway, our plan. So if we need future further projects beyond the Cypress plant. And if there was a change on the Cypress project, a more fundamental change, we can switch one of the other projects in the pipeline to the first priority or to the first in the line.
00:20:51 So there are project options in other ones in North America that includes Canada, there are options in Europe, in Middle East. We have a project development ongoing currently. So there are several options that we are moving forward with. If we look at the timeline, on the other hand, that’s what you asked as well about, it is currently clear that independent of any decision made by the administration, by the Department of Energy, there will be a certain delay for sure compared to the original timeline with the Cypress plant because some parts haven’t been moved forward during the last months of unclarity. That is, well that means, there is a delay, which is not great on the one hand, but on the other hand this is also a good opportunity to move forward. And this is one of the reasons why I spoke before about a bit of an adjustment of our priorities and that relates then also to the certain restructuring we are doing within the company.
Akshat Rathi
00:21:46 And these other projects. What is the scale of these projects? How do you prioritize them if Cypress doesn’t come through?
Jan Wurzbacher
00:21:53 So those projects would look at similar sizes of a plant. So nameplate capacity in the range of 200,000 tons per year plus with certain flexibility. And it’s actually, there is not a single number one plant right now. So there is a development in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia where a lot is going on. There’s a lot of interest there, there is developments ongoing. Yeah, in Europe, in Canada. And we are really pushing all these project developments forward and that’s the nature of big infrastructure projects. So in order to make an infrastructure project materialize, there is a lot of boxes that need to be ticked and some of the boxes you can tick early on, other boxes need more time to tick on. And that’s why we always do need these portfolios. So there’s really a few runner-ups so it’s kind of a bit, yeah, about a handful of other projects and we’ll move. We are moving them forward and depending on where eventually we’ll have the best conditions, both in terms of financing, funding, energy costs and storage, this is then the one which will be prioritized.
Akshat Rathi
00:23:04 And so to continue operating, are you going to have to raise money soon and how much?
Jan Wurzbacher
00:23:11 We are raising, we are continuing to raise money. We, yeah, once that has happened we will be happy to announce that. But we will, yeah, we are continuing to raise money and at the same time our current efficiency measures also make sure that we are not like that we, that we extend our sustainable funding of the company as long as possible.
Akshat Rathi
00:23:36 How long is the current funding going to last? What is your runway?
Jan Wurzbacher
00:23:41 Yeah, yeah. We don’t publish numbers on our runway currently, but what I can say is that we are very stably financed and we continue to have very strong commitment from our existing investors also to move forward with funding.
Akshat Rathi
00:23:55 And one of the things that you have offered, which is also a pioneering move, is that anyone could go to your website and buy carbon removal credits. I can go on your website, pay £800 and get a promise from Climeworks that you will capture one ton of carbon dioxide for me. How many people have signed up to buy carbon removal?
Jan Wurzbacher
00:24:13 We have a total number between 15,000 and 20,000 roughly.
Akshat Rathi
00:24:19 And in the frequently asked questions it says that Climeworks will deliver on the promise within six years. How many tons have you delivered to individuals, not to your corporate buyers?
Jan Wurzbacher
00:24:30 To individuals? So far we have delivered a bit north of 400 tons so far. If you go to the public registry, the Puro one we spoke about before, you will find a lower number at the order of 150 tons. This is due to the fact that some of that deliveries have actually happened before we have started our collaboration with Puro and that was certified by a separate certifier that was DNV actually.
Akshat Rathi
00:24:55 So it’s cool to have a consumer product for carbon removal, but as you know, in this age people want to click and then get delivery. I know you warned that it might take six years, but that to some people is an awfully long time and clearly some people have forgotten that there was this fine print at all and are going on social media and calling Climeworks a scam. So what do you have to say to sort of individuals who want to support this idea and this technology?
Jan Wurzbacher
00:25:24 First of all, I think it’s quite clear that Climeworks is not a scam. We are building direct air capture plans. They are operating and they’re standing here, everyone can come here and look at them and we have the only worldwide transparent registry with an independent third party certifier that showed some how many tons are captured. So I think that that part is a very, very easy one. It’s operating, it’s working, and a third party is looking and counting, looking at it and counting the tons. And the other thing is if you have tens of thousands of customers, unfortunately there will always be a few ones which are unhappy or yeah, as you said, might not be happy with the fine print or haven’t read it. We are doing our best to engage with them and to answer any open questions. Also always good to get feedback, if things were not clear, we can always work and try and improve this.
Akshat Rathi
00:26:18 Well, in the spirit of feedback, when I go to the website and I hit buy, the buy button is high up on the page, I follow the steps and I can make the payment. But to find out that the delivery will be made in six years, it does not show up on any of those steps. I have to go back to the front page, actually go into the questions underneath, in the frequently asked questions, go through all the questions and find the question that says six years to delivery. So you could be making that much easier if you had that in the flow of purchasing the carbon removal.
Jan Wurzbacher
00:26:56 Oh good, thanks. Good, good feedback. Always good to consider. Thank you.
Akshat Rathi
00:27:03 The other criticism that has been lobbed at Climeworks is that you state in your sustainability report that the company currently produces more emissions in its operations than it captures in its machines. Now that’s understandable for a startup that’s scaling up. You’ll have executives flying around the world to make these deals, whether it’s in the Middle East or in Canada or in Iceland. You’ll have emissions from the steel and the cement that will be needed to build these plants from running the chemicals. But you’ve been at it for 15 years. Do you see why some people are frustrated with the lack of progress? You know, they would think a carbon removal company should get to the point of at least being fully carbon neutral when it’s operating.
Jan Wurzbacher
00:27:44 Let’s look at other technologies and how long it takes for them to scale up. If you look at major technologies like chip technologies or solar PV, wind farms, you’ll find out that scaling up a completely new technology and industrialize it and bring it to a scale where it is deployed at, at hundreds of million or billions of of dollars volumes, that takes typically rather 20 to 30 years than five to 10 years. That’s I think the important part that we need to consider here. If you speak about our own emissions being carbon neutral, I think it’s very important to distinguish between companies’ corporate emissions, like executives lying around the world to a minimum extent. But that’s important if you want to scale and then related to our plants. Before you mentioned both in one sentence. Everything that is related to our plans that is accounted for and that is actually one reason for the difference between the nameplate capacity and the actual delivered carbon dioxide removal company.
00:28:48 Carbon dioxide emissions are small in absolute value. So we’re talking about a few thousand tons here per year. So it is not the number we should be bothered about because everything we are doing is targeted and only makes sense if we are scaling it to millions of tons and eventually billions of tons. So we need to make sure that we focus and set the right priorities once we are reaching those levels that we will be reaching by 2030, the corporate CO2 emissions will not be worth a sentence because they are in the rounding difference of the whole carbon flowing through the company if you like.
Akshat Rathi
00:29:26 When you founded the company in 2009, you were one of less than a handful of startups that was doing this. Now according to CDR.fyi, there are 140 direct air capture startups. Now, Robert Hoglund, who’s the co-founder of CDR.fyi said that he expects that many of these startups will fail perhaps this year, perhaps next year. Given the macro circumstances, given the US pulling out of the Paris Agreement, pushing back on climate policy, making companies that are taking climate action to stop taking climate action, to stop buying carbon credits, to not really focus on carbon removal, he fully expects that these companies will fail. Not all of them, but many of them. And he thinks that perhaps for the market that is coming there might be as many as five companies with the best technologies that survive. How do you ensure that Climeworks is one of them?
Jan Wurzbacher
00:30:33 Yep, that’s a very good question. Well, first and foremost, Climeworks knows the industry and the art of scaling up direct air capture best. We are around since 15 years, we are around 500 people who are working on this, and we are by far the best funded startup and scale up in the area of direct air capture. And we will continue to be and we, we will, we will continue to fund and to grow at a large scale. That’s number one. Secondly, as we move forward, that’s very important. We have never stopped at developing technology. Some people have asked us: ‘Hey, you have developed your capture technology 10 years back, is this now outdated?’ But that’s not the case at all. As we spoke before, we’ve invested a lot out of 500 people, 150 people are working in R&D.
00:31:23 About 30 people are material scientists and chemists working on new materials, improving our materials. So there is a lot of R&D happening. There is no comparable workforce force on direct air capture technology development in the universe. So nowhere else is that amount of funds and resources invested into further advancing technology. So we are doing this, we are moving forward and we are also screening the market. So as we move forward, we have purchased a different technology, a different company in the past. We are looking out for new developments. We have a very clear picture about everything that is happening out there. We have a lot of good contacts to many players in the industry and we might see going forward also some consolidation in this area. Some mergers, some M&A activities and we are ready for this market.
00:32:14 That will certainly happen a consolidation. It is impossible to move forward with 150 different companies. That’s a very natural thing to happen in the new industry. Going forward with something like a handful of players is something that I see very realistic. If you think of what it takes to scale up direct air capture technology or any similar technology, it will require at least a billion if not several billion to scale that up. And not 150 players will not be able to fund that. But we are in a position to first develop everything at the forefront in house, but then also make sure that if there are any new developments — let this be new materials. To just give one example — to have our hands on this, enter the right partnerships, which we are doing as we are speaking. We have several, several partnerships in the areas of sorbent materials to make sure that Climeworks is always staying at the forefront where we are today.
Akshat Rathi
00:33:11 One of the decisions you’ve made in these 15 years is you have not taken on money from the oil and gas industry, which some other competitors in the direct air capture space have done. You continue to raise money and we do know that climate tech investing in general has become more difficult. It’s not just because of Trump. There was a peak in 2021-22 and then it’s been declining. Funding going specifically to direct air capture companies is also falling globally and more so in the US than other places. Do you anticipate changing your policy and taking money from oil and gas companies that continue to be very profitable and one of your competitors’ — Carbon Engineering — was sold to an oil company Oxy and is now building a large scale plant as a result of having the balance sheet of a large oil company?
Jan Wurzbacher
00:34:01 Look, the very simple answer here is the energy industry and in particular the oil and gas industry does definitely have an important role to play in this domain. We are speaking about taking billions of tons of CO2 out of the atmosphere and putting them safely and permanently underground. And there is one industry who has done this for the past a hundred years and more so drilling holes in the ground and taking stuff out and drilling holes in the ground and putting stuff down is very similar to this. So that industry will have a role to play. So far we’ve been always looking very generally independent of, in particular, oil and gas majors. We’ve been carefully evaluating whether a strategic in investment into Climeworks makes sense because by taking in the strategic investor on board, you are creating great opportunities, but you’re also closing other doors.
00:34:52 And this is an evaluation that we will continue to do going forward. So there is no reason to exclude anything. There is no reason to go simply in one direction going forward. There will certainly be links with that industry, but there is no strict yes or no decision in any direction. We need to make sure to figure out what is, what is needed to scale this industry, which resources do we have, which partners and players do we have, and where does it make sense to enter into alliances and where does it make sense to stay independent? We’ve answered that in the past, in the way that staying independent is the more successful path. That doesn’t mean that will always be the case in the future.
Akshat Rathi
00:35:39 Thank you, Jan.
Jan Wurzbacher
Thank you, Akshat.
Akshat Rathi
Thank you for listening to Zero and now for the sound of the week. [gurgling sounds] That’s the sound of carbon dioxide leaving soda water. If you like this episode, please take a moment to rate and review the show on Apple Podcast or Spotify. Share this episode with a friend or with someone who likes science fiction. This episode was produced by Sommer Saadi, Mohsis Andam and Robert Williams. Bloomberg’s head of podcast is Sage Bauman and head of talk is Brendan Newnan. Our theme music is composed by Wonderly. Special thanks to Coco Liu, Michelle Ma, Brian Kahn and Siobhan Wagner. I am Akshat Rathi. Back soon.
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