The CO2 capture plant of the Swiss company Climeworks (left) and a coal-fired power plant in Poland (right).image: getty images
Filtering CO2 from the air and storing it deep in the ground: This technology is intended to reduce climate-damaging emissions. More and more companies are relying on CO2 capture to achieve their climate goals. But today’s capacities are vanishingly small.
June 21, 2026, 6:02 p.mJune 21, 2026, 6:02 p.m
The most important players in the industry, representatives of aviation and numerous countries emphasize it again and again: in the coming years they want to stop polluting the environment. They usually mention the year 2050. Switzerland has also promised to become climate neutral by then. To do this, it must “drastically reduce” its greenhouse gas emissions, writes the Federal Office for the Environment.
The task is enormous. To overcome them, a specific technology could play a key role: CO2 capture from the air, usually referred to as DAC (“Direct Air Capture”). Carbon dioxide is filtered directly from the atmosphere and permanently stored deep underground.
translation
This text was written by our colleagues from French-speaking Switzerland and we translated it for you.
The CO2 removed from the air can offset emissions that, according to the Federal Office for the Environment, cannot be completely avoided. That is why so-called “negative emissions” are often referred to in this context. They are intended to help compensate for unavoidable residual emissions and thus still achieve the climate goals.
However, this technology is currently far from fulfilling its promises. This is shown by a study by ETH Zurich, a German institute and Imperial College London, which was recently published in the journal “Nature Communications”. “CO2 capture is widely seen as crucial to achieving climate neutrality,” write the researchers.
In fact, more and more players from industry, business and politics are relying on CO2 capture in order to keep their climate promises. “Implicitly, we already rely heavily on this technology,” says Nicoletta Brazzola, one of the study’s authors. The reason: Emissions are not falling as quickly as hoped, and at the same time dependence on fossil fuels is increasing.
The problem behind this, however, is that the expansion of this technology is still “extremely limited,” as the researchers write. There are currently only around 30 plants in operation worldwide, most of them in Europe and North America. According to the study, in order to achieve the goals announced by the industry, current capacities would have to increase by around 100,000 times. And that in just under 25 years. Nicoletta Brazzola sums it up like this:
“In order for DAC to be able to remove several billion tons of CO2 from the atmosphere per year by 2050, an extraordinarily large and coordinated effort would be necessary.”
Nicoletta Brazzola
“Not impossible”
The good news: Shifting up a gear is “not impossible,” the study states. The researchers compared three scenarios – based on the expansion of three already established technologies: Liquefied natural gas, ammonia synthesis and wind energy. Only the latter grew quickly enough to theoretically get DAC on track.
But this can only be achieved with a “coordinated and ambitious” policy, the researchers write. It is crucial to act quickly: a short-term boost that significantly increases capacities by 2030 could increase the average capacity forecast for 2050 by more than 600 percent.
“Measures, on the other hand, that merely hold out the prospect of greater future demand without initiating the construction of new plants today have little effect.”
Nicoletta Brazzola cites lithium batteries and electric cars as comparable examples. In both cases, a combination of high start-up subsidies and massive investments in production helped to reduce costs – and get the market going.
But DAC works differently. Because there is no established market yet, one technology cannot simply be replaced by another, explains the researcher. “Rather, a market would have to be created out of nothing – for a service that no one has a natural incentive to buy.”
Yes but …
In other words: nothing has been won here yet. “This raises real doubts about whether we can realistically achieve these goals,” admits Nicoletta Brazzola. At the same time, she emphasizes: Targeted support measures that are implemented in a coordinated manner by several countries over the next ten years could bring the ramp-up described in the study from the theoretically possible to the feasible.
At this point the question arises as to whether it still makes sense to say that these goals are feasible while at the same time pointing out the huge hurdles. Nicoletta Brazzola says yes. “Personally, I don’t think that ‘yes, but…’ automatically means ‘probably not,’” she says. And gives the following example:
“Before the Covid-19 pandemic, no one would have seriously predicted that we would be able to develop, test, produce and distribute a vaccine just months after the emergence of a new virus. This was made possible through an unprecedented coordinated effort by governments, science and industry.”
Nicoletta Brazzola
The task at stake here is comparable, says the researcher. “One could even argue that the threat to humanity is even more existential. Because climate change is not a problem that can be solved in a year or two,” she emphasizes.
“Whether such a task is feasible depends on whether we take measures that we have already shown we can implement if we decide to allocate the necessary resources,” concludes Brazzola.
The coming years will show whether this actually happens. One thing is certain: the examples so far provide little encouragement. A research by Media part showed last week that Total Energies’ CO2 megaproject in Norway was able to store significantly less gas than its facility would actually allow. Also the Swiss company Climeworks so far only has a fraction the emissions it had promised to remove from the atmosphere.
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