Climeworks appoints three new Executive Team members

Key take-aways:

• Building on his international experience across the U.S. and China, Australian native Douglas Chan oversees the Operations of Climeworks.
• With more than 20 years of experience in marketing and sales at leading global companies like Procter & Gamble, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo and Motorola, Jan Huckfeldt is leading Climeworks’ corporate partnerships side to cater to the growing demand of Climeworks’ CDR service. 
• Under Christoph Beuttler's leadership, the Climate Policy team will continue to deepen and nurture productive dialogues with stakeholders, with an emphasis on the development of standards and their implementation around the world to scale high-quality CDR solutions. 

Climeworks, one of the global leaders in direct air capture (DAC) technology, is proud to share that its Executive Team has gained three new members. Douglas Chan joined Climeworks as Chief Operations Officer and Jan Huckfeldt as Chief Commercial Officer. Christoph Beuttler, who joined Climeworks over four years ago, has been appointed Chief Climate Policy Officer.  

Douglas oversees Climeworks’ plant operations and is looking after the structuring of the supply chain, project execution and production teams that are needed to enable direct air capture and storage (DAC+S) to reach gigaton capacity by 2050. Before Climeworks, Douglas was latest with Tesla where he contributed to scaling the operations internationally. For Climeworks’ commercial team that is led by Jan, engaging with pioneering companies to sustain the long-term demand for CDR is key to assist in the growth planning and scale up of operations. Among Christoph’s priorities will be nurturing open dialogues with all stakeholders of the developing DAC industry value chain, contributing to the creation and continuous development of stringent standards for high-quality CDR solutions. 

Since Climeworks was founded in 2009, the team has grown to 250 people who stand behind the company’s vision to inspire 1 billion people to remove CO₂ from the air. In the emerging CDR industry, this represents one of the strongest groups of DAC experts to date.  

To drive the scale up of the company further, assembling a seasoned leadership team has been key focus for Climeworks’ day-to-day business. The Climeworks Executive Team now comprises 13 members, including co-founders and co-CEOs Christoph Gebald and Jan Wurzbacher.

“Since 2021, the number of Climeworkers has grown significantly as we witnessed an exciting increase in interest for careers in CDR. For Climeworks’ scale-up roadmap, this development is keyand has been reflected in the growth of the People team as well. Achieving our target to scale DAC+S to gigaton capacity by 2050 goes hand in hand with assembling a strong, multidisciplinary team that is ready to tackle the challenges of building a new industry”, says Dominique Kronenberg, Chief of Staff at Climeworks.

Ready to join a team of visionaries too?