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by Chris Lang
REDD-Monitor, June 2, 2025

Between April 2021 and October 2024, British physicist Michael de Podesta paid £40 per month to carbon capture company Climeworks. In return, the company promised to remove 50 kilograms of carbon dioxide each month. But in September 2024, de Podesta wrote that “when I checked the other day they had removed precisely no CO₂ from the atmosphere”.

De Podesta was paying £800 per ton of CO₂ removed. Climeworks had promised to remove the CO₂ within six years. By the time Climeworks actually removed any CO₂ from the atmosphere, some time in 2027, de Podesta would have handed over almost £3,000.

“Am I a gullible idiot?” de Podesta asked himself.

De Podesta wrote about his doubts on his blog and asked whether Climeworks is a scam. He was subsequently contacted by a journalist from the Icelandic newspaper, Heimildin.

On 15 May 20225, Bjartmar Oddur Þeyr Alexandersson and Valur Grettisson’s article about Climeworks was published by Heimildin under the headline, “Climework’s capture fails to cover its own emissions”.

The following day, de Podesta wrote, “I conclude that I am indeed a gullible idiot.”

Climeworks started operations in Iceland in 2021. Company officials claim that the company’s machines can capture 12,000 tons per year. But since 2021, the company has only captured 1,058 tons of CO₂.

Climeworks annual emissions in 2023 were 1,700 tons of CO₂. Alexandersson and Grettisson write that, The emissions that occur due to Climeworks’ activities are therefore more than it captures. Since the company began capturing in Iceland, it has captured a maximum of one thousand tons of CO₂ in one year.

Heimildin’s journalists sent a series of questions to Climeworks. They asked why CO₂ capture is going so poorly that Climeworks cannot even offset its own emissions. They asked when people and corporations that have bought carbon credits from the company can expect to receive them.

Climeworks did not reply to the questions.

Climeworks was founded in 2009 in Switzerland by Christoph Gebald and Jan Wurzbacher. In a 2017 interview with CarbonBrief, Gebald said, “The vision of our company is to capture 1% of global emissions by 2025.”

He added that this is “super ambitious” but that it is “something that is feasible”.

The company also hoped to reduce the cost of capturing one ton of CO₂ from the atmosphere to about US$100. The current price listed on Climeworks’ website is US$1,000 per ton of CO₂.

Carbfix planned to inject 40,000 tons of CO₂ into the ground every year. It hasn’t achieved anything like so much.

Orca has issued just 953 carbon credits, or CO₂ removal certificates (CORCs).

In May 2024, Climeworks started a new direct air capture and storage plant in Iceland. This one is called Mammoth and is designed to capture 36,000 tons of CO₂ per year.

But in its first 10 months of operation the plant only captured 105 tons of CO₂.

Climeworks sells carbon credits to individuals or companies. More than 21,000 “climate pioneers” have bought carbon credits from Climeworks, including Microsoft, UBS, Morgan Stanley, Stripe, Shopify, British Airways, Lego, Swiss Air, PwC, and TikTok.

In October 2024, Morgan Stanley signed an agreement with Climeworks for 40,000 carbon credits. At Climeworks’ current rate of CO₂ removal, Morgan Stanley will be waiting several decades before it sees its carbon credits.

Part of the problem is that Climeworks does not only sell carbon credits based on tons of CO₂ that have been captured and stored underground. That would be bad enough, since the carbon credits are used to legitimise continued extraction and burning of fossil fuels.

Climateworks’ business model involves selling carbon credits for CO₂ that it hopes to capture in the future. One-third of all the carbon credits that Climeworks hopes that its Mammoth plant will capture over the next 25 years have already been sold.

The company uses the money raised to build more carbon removal plants. Which allows Climeworks to forward sell more carbon credits. It’s all a bit like a carbon Ponzi scheme.

Climeworks has orders for 380,000 carbon credits, of which it has actually delivered only 1,058.

Bloomberg journalist Akshat Rathi recently asked Jan Wurzbacher about these numbers. Wurzbacher replied,

“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 offtake contracts with our customers, which are then used to finance future plants and then captures CO₂ with those plants.”

In 2024, Climeworks started offering “carbon removal portfolios”. In addition to direct air capture, these include afforestation/reforestation, biochar, bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, and enhanced weathering.

Alexandersson and Grettisson write that the experts that Heimildin has spoken to believe that this step by the company is a sign that Climeworks’ capture projects are not delivering the results that were expected and that this method is now being used to try to produce carbon credits that the company has already sold, but is having difficulty delivering.”

Climeworks has raised or been promised US$800 million in funding. Climeworks is one of the companies involved in Project Cypress, a proposed US$600 million direct air capture hub in Louisiana, USA. When completed, it is supposed to remove 1 million tons of CO₂ from the atmosphere every year.

But with Donald Trump as US president, it’s likely that the Louisiana plant will be delayed or cancelled. On 14 May 2025, Climeworks announced that it was laying off 106 people, or about 22% of its staff.

Michael de Podesta, the British physicist who bought Climeworks’ carbon credits told Heimildin that the company has “all the hallmarks of a scam”:

“There are undoubtedly a lot of highly paid people traveling the world to sell their services to large corporations to remove carbon credits in the future. They are using a semi-magical technology that doesn’t work as well as expected (better known as Orca) but will work perfectly in a larger version (Mammoth). I am urged to convince my friends to join the project. The answers are scarce and full of PR chatter. Climeworks’ operations look like a scam and talk like one. But is it a scam? I don’t know. I think it could work, but the company’s answers are so opaque that it’s hard to say.”

Climeworks is selling carbon credits for carbon removals, the vast majority of which have not yet taken place. The three biggest buyers of direct air capture carbon credits are Microsoft, Airbus, and Amazon. All three of these Big Polluters are increasing their greenhouse gas emissions.

In the case of Microsoft and Amazon, the increase in pollution is because of the huge energy demand of the data centres needed for AI.

This is a double whammy for the climate. First, a massive increase in energy use for data centres means increased emissions. Second, a false solution based on buying carbon credits from a technology that consumes a huge amount of energy.

In 2023, Al Gore gave a TED talk in which he talked about direct air capture. He pointed out that it uses an “awful lot of energy”.

“CO₂ makes up 0.035% of the air. So we’re going to vacuum the other 99.96% to get that little bit out. Come on! Really? Come on.”

He referred to Climeworks by name and made fun of the company’s Orca machine in Iceland. “This is state of the art,” he said. “Looks pretty impressive doesn’t it?”