Status
Operations completed
The beginning of our scale-up journey
This plant is the first of its kind: it is Climeworks' first direct air capture plant on an industrial scale. By designing, building and operating it, we proved the feasibility of our solution to help fight global warming by removing CO₂ from the air on a large scale and under real conditions.
Meanwhile, Climeworks completed the commercial operation phase of Capricorn, which led to the phase-out of this first technology generation.
Date
May 2017
Goal
Move from demonstration to industrial scale
Location
Hinwil, Switzerland
Capture capacity
Several hundred tons of CO₂ per year
Description
By designing, building and operating Capricorn, we proved the feasibility of our solution under real conditions. We were able to collect important data for the continuous development of our technology.
The facility consists of 18 CO₂ collectors that together capture several hundred tons of carbon dioxide from the air every year. We applied a modular design to them: 6 collectors fit into one standard ship container, enabling us to move into mass production more efficiently.
Leveraging an existing CO₂ market
The plant is located in Hinwil, a small town close to Zurich, Switzerland. It sits on the rooftop of a local waste incineration plant, which provided waste heat to power our capture process when the plant was still operational. In this case, the air-captured CO₂ was not permanently removed from the atmosphere, but delivered to a nearby greenhouse for the fertilization of vegetables. Greenhouses are an important buyer of CO₂ and this existing market enabled the first commercial operation of Climeworks’ DAC technology.
Further, liquified CO₂ was delivered to the beverage industry. The plant is FSSC 22000 certified, as well as certified by The Coca-Cola Company. This speaks for the high quality of our air-captured CO₂, as well as our operations.
Jan Wurzbacher, Co-founder and Co-CEO of Climeworks
With the energy and economic data from Capricorn, we can make reliable calculations for other, larger projects and draw on the practical experience we have gained.
Find out more about Capricorn
Our plants
2017
Arctic Fox Our first facility in Iceland marked the beginning of permanent and safe carbon dioxide removal via direct air capture.
2022
On 28 June 2022, we announced the groundbreaking of Climeworks’ second, newest and largest direct air capture and storage plant, Mammoth.
2024
Located in Iceland, Mammoth is Climeworks' second commercial DAC+S plant, which is about ten times bigger than its predecessor plant, Orca.
Lead the race toward net zero
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