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One of the biggest names in direct air capture is now selling other companies’ credits.
Climeworks made a name for itself as the first company to launch a commercial-scale facility that sucks carbon out of the air and buries it deep underground. The Swiss startup is widely recognized as a global leader in direct air capture technology.
But on Wednesday, Climeworks made a surprising move away from hard tech and into carbon trading with the launch of an offshoot called Climeworks Solutions. Under the new banner, it will purchase carbon removal credits from other providers, package them into portfolios that include its own direct air capture credits, and sell the bundles to buyers looking for “high quality” carbon removal.
The credits will have “the stamp of Climeworks quality,” Adrian Siegrist, the company’s vice president of climate solutions, told reporters this week. “It is a very, very selective vetting process.”
Corporate demand for carbon removal is growing. In the past, companies primarily bought a different kind of carbon credit to support their sustainability strategies. These credits came from projects that prevented emissions by protecting forests or distributing cleaner cookstoves, and they were cheap. But they came under fire after countless investigations into the projects turned up flimsy methodologies and inflated claims.
Meanwhile, there’s been a growing consensus in the world of corporate sustainability that even if these credits were based on real emission reductions, they shouldn’t be part of a net-zero strategy. For example, the Science Based Targets Initiative, the leading arbiter of corporate net-zero plans, only allows companies to apply carbon removal credits — and not conventional carbon avoidance credits — toward their goals. The only way to zero-out the climate impact of putting carbon in the atmosphere, SBTI says, is to take out an equal amount.
These two factors, along with a view that supporting the nascent carbon removal industry is the “right thing to do,” have fueled a carbon removal credit market that grew from at least 105,000 tons sold to 50 buyers in 2021 to more than 4 million tons sold to nearly 200 buyers last year.
Siegrist said Climeworks Solutions is responding to a gap in the market. Companies face barriers to purchasing carbon removal, he said. They don’t want to put their reputations at risk and buy dubious credits, but they lack the time and expertise to do careful sourcing. They also want to sign simple one-and-done contracts, but they don’t want to purchase credits from a single supplier — especially not just from Climeworks, which sells top-shelf credits for upwards of $600 per ton.
“Companies asked us, in your opinion, can you tell us what is the best in X and the best in Y?” he said. “That made us realize there's a real need for clarity and for guidance.”
But Climeworks is entering a crowded field. There are already more than half a dozen companies — Patch, Supercritical, Ceezer, Carbon Direct, Watershed, Cur8, Lune — promising to source only the highest quality carbon removal credits for buyers. Each one has a slightly different model, with some acting more as an open marketplace, others more as a brokerage.
Climeworks is relying on its name as a trusted brand to set itself apart. But part of the reason it is a trusted brand is that it has focused on direct air capture — the form of carbon removal that is the most permanent and easy to measure and verify. Now the company will be venturing into the thornier science of other approaches like tree planting schemes and bioenergy with carbon capture. It also plans to source credits from biochar projects, which involve turning plants into a carbon-rich, durable, form of charcoal, and enhanced rock weathering, which speeds up the natural ability of rocks to absorb carbon from the environment.
“If you're saying that companies can come to you and use that trusted brand, what are the standards?” Erin Burns, the executive director of the carbon removal advocacy group Carbon 180, told me she wanted to know. “High quality doesn't mean anything. How transparent are they going to be about what those standards are?”
I asked Siegrist about how Climeworks defines high quality, especially when it comes to nature-based solutions like reforestation, and he said there were “various elements” that signaled quality, such as the use of remote sensing technologies that can more accurately track forest growth. He said they would publish their standards at some point in the future.
But he did share some general principles the company would use to tailor its portfolios for buyers: Fossil fuel emissions should be neutralized with carbon removed and stored for thousands of years, on par with how long carbon stays in the atmosphere. Meanwhile, a company’s emissions from land use could be offset using nature-based approaches that are still effective but inherently less enduring.
Climeworks Solutions’ first customer is Breitling, the Swiss luxury watchmaker, which signed a 12-year contract. It is purchasing a mix of direct air capture credits, to offset emissions from fossil fuel combustion in its factories, and enhanced rock weathering credits, to address emissions in its mineral supply chains. Breitling’s global director of sustainability Aurelia Figueroa said that focusing on high-cost direct air capture credits to compensate for direct emissions created an incentive to prioritize reducing emissions, summing up the strategy as “we do our best and remove the rest.”
Siegrist said Climeworks was already in talks with more than 50 other companies interested in working with them. But it’s unclear where all of this carbon removal is going to come from. The company’s direct air capture credits are already sold out through 2027.
“There's not a lot of high quality CDR happening, and in general, people are buying carbon removal years out,” said Burns. “Depending on how many tons they're being asked to put together for other companies to purchase, they're gonna run up against limits pretty quickly if they've got really high standards.”
Siegrist declined to name any companies or projects that Climeworks was sourcing carbon credits from. But in terms of supply, he said it was a chicken and egg scenario — that the only way to increase supply was to bring in more demand, and that the bigger constraint was limited buyer bandwidth.
I reached out to a carbon removal company called Charm Industrial to ask how developers feel about the rise of all of these brokerage services. Like Climeworks, Charm is another startup that scrupulous corporate buyers with big science teams, like Microsoft and Shopify, have deemed “high quality.” Charm’s head of sales, Harris Cohn, said the fees these services charge matter and vary widely. “There's a risk these services make the market worse if they make transactions harder or feel more expensive to buyers,” he said. But he noted that they have, indeed, already accelerated demand.
Peter Reinhardt, the CEO of Charm, agreed that there was no downside to having more players in the game. “We’ll break the supply constraint fairly soon :)” he added in an email.
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Republicans Mark Amodei of Nevada and Celeste Maloy of Utah introduced the measure late Tuesday night.
Late last week, the House Committee on Natural Resources released the draft text of its portion of the Republicans’ budget package. While the bill included mandates to open oil and gas leasing in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, increase logging by 25% over 2024’s harvest, and allow for mining activities upstream of Minnesota’s popular Boundary Waters recreation area, there was also a conspicuous absence in its 96 pages: an explicit plan to sell off public lands.
To many of the environmental groups that have been sounding the alarm about Republicans’ ambitions to privatize federal lands — which make up about 47% of the American West — the particular exclusion seemed almost too good to be true. And as it turned out in the bill’s markup on Tuesday, it was. In a late-night amendment, Republican Representatives Mark Amodei of Nevada and Celeste Maloy of Utah introduced a provision to sell off 11,000 acres in their states.
The maneuver, which came at nearly midnight, left many Democrats and environmental groups deeply frustrated by the lack of transparency. “The rushed and last-minute nature of this amendment introduction means little to no information is available,” including “maps or parcel information, amendment text, CBO Score, etc.,” the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance said in a statement Wednesday.
House lawmakers appeared still to be at odds during a Wednesday morning press conference to announce the creation of a Bipartisan Public Lands Caucus. Rather than putting on the united front suggested by the working group’s name, former Secretary of the Interior and Montana Republican Ryan Zinke argued in defense of the amendment, saying, “A lot of communities are drying up because they’re looking to public land next door and they can’t use it.” Michigan Democrat Debbie Dingell then took the mic to say, “I would urge all of us that the hearings — it’s not done in the dead of night, and that we have good, bipartisan discussions with everybody impacted at the table.”
Despite the cloak-and-dagger way Republicans introduced the amendment, there are several clues as to what exactly Amodei and Maloy are up to. Republican Senator Mike Lee of Utah has aggressively pushed for the sell-off of public lands, including introducing the Helping Open Underutilized Space to Ensure Shelter (HOUSES) Act, which would “make small tracts of [Bureau of Land Management] land available to communities to address housing shortages or affordability.” Critics of the bill have called it the “McMansion Subsidy Act” and have argued — as the Center for Western Priorities’ Kate Groetzinger, does — that it would “do little to address housing issues in major metros like Salt Lake City and the fact that the current housing shortage is due largely to a lack of home construction, not land.” The Center for Western Priorities also contends that it “contains very few restrictions on what can be built on federal public lands that are sold off under the program.” Notably, Lee and Maloy have worked closely together in the past on transferring federal land in Utah to private ownership.
The land singled out in the Tuesday amendment includes BLM and Forest Service parcels in six counties in Utah and Nevada that “had already been identified for disposal by the counties,” Outdoor Life notes. While some land would be sold with “the express purpose of alleviating housing affordability,” the publication notes that “other parcels, including those in southern Utah, don’t have a designated purpose.” As Michael Carroll, the BLM campaign director for the Wilderness Society, warned E&E News, it’s in this way that the bill appears to set “dangerous precedent that is intended to pave the way for a much larger scale transfer of public lands.”
While many Republicans contend that states can better manage public lands in the West than the federal government can (in addition, of course, to helping raise the $15 billion of the desired $2 trillion in deficit reductions across the government to offset Trump’s tax cuts), such a move could also have significant consequences for the environment. Turning over public lands to states — or to private owners — could ease the way for expansive oil and gas development, especially in Utah, where there are ambitions to quadruple exports of fossil fuels from the state’s northeastern corner.
Reducing BLM land could also limit opportunities for solar, wind, and geothermal development; in Utah, the agency has identified some 5 million acres of public land, in addition to 11.8 million acres in Nevada, for solar development. While there are admittedly questions about how much renewable permitting will make it through the Trump BLM, it’s also true that solar development wouldn’t necessarily be the preference of private landowners if the land were transferred.
Tuesday’s markup ultimately saw the introduction of more than 120 amendments, including a Democratic provision that would have prohibited revenue from this bill from being used to sell off public lands, but was easily struck down by Republicans. In the end, Amodei and Maloy’s amendment was the only one the committee adopted. Shortly afterward, the lawmakers voted 26-17 to advance the legislation.
Ecolectro, a maker of electrolyzers, has a new manufacturing deal with Re:Build.
By all outward appearances, the green hydrogen industry is in a state of arrested development. The hype cycle of project announcements stemming from Biden-era policies crashed after those policies took too long to implement. A number of high profile clean hydrogen projects have fallen apart since the start of the year, and deep uncertainty remains about whether the Trump administration will go to bat for the industry or further cripple it.
The picture may not be as bleak as it seems, however. On Wednesday, the green hydrogen startup Ecolectro, which has been quietly developing its technology for more than a decade, came out with a new plan to bring the tech to market. The company announced a partnership with Re:Build Manufacturing, a sort of manufacturing incubator that helps startups optimize their products for U.S. fabrication, to build their first units, design their assembly lines, and eventually begin producing at a commercial scale in a Re:Build-owned factory.
“It is a lot for a startup to create a massive manufacturing facility that’s going to cost hundreds of millions of dollars when they’re pre-revenue,” Jon Gordon, Ecolectro’s chief commercial officer, told me. This contract manufacturing partnership with Re:Build is “massive,” he said, because it means Ecolectro doesn’t have to take on lots of debt to scale. (The companies did not disclose the size of the contract.)
The company expects to begin producing its first electrolyzer units — devices that split water into hydrogen and oxygen using electricity — at Re:Build’s industrial design and fabrication site in Rochester, New York, later this year. If all goes well, it will move production to Re:Build’s high-volume manufacturing facility in New Kensington, Pennsylvania next year.
The number one obstacle to scaling up the production and use of cleaner hydrogen, which could help cut emissions from fertilizer, aviation, steelmaking, and other heavy industries, is the high cost of producing it. Under the Biden administration, Congress passed a suite of policies designed to kick-start the industry, including an $8 billion grant program and a lucrative new tax credit. But Biden only got a small fraction of the grant money out the door, and did not finalize the rules for claiming the tax credit until January. Now, the Trump administration is considering terminating its agreements with some of the grant recipients, and Republicans in Congress might change or kill the tax credit.
Since the start of the year, a $500 million fuel plant in upstate New York, a $400 million manufacturing facility in Michigan, and a $500 million green steel factory in Mississippi, have been cancelled or indefinitely delayed.
The outlook is particularly bad for hydrogen made from water and electricity, often called “green” hydrogen, according to a recent BloombergNEF analysis. Trump’s tariffs could increase the cost of green hydrogen by 14%, or $1 per kilogram, based on tariff announcements as of April 8. More than 70% of the clean hydrogen volumes coming online between now and 2030 are what’s known as “blue” hydrogen, made using natural gas, with carbon capture to eliminate climate pollution. “Blue hydrogen has more demand than green hydrogen, not just because it’s cheaper to produce, but also because there’s a lot less uncertainty around it,” BloombergNEF analyst Payal Kaur said during a presentation at the research firm’s recent summit in New York City. Blue hydrogen companies can take advantage of a tax credit for carbon capture, which Congress is much less likely to scrap than the hydrogen tax credit.
Gordon is intimately familiar with hydrogen’s cost impediments. He came to Ecolectro after four years as co-founder of Universal Hydrogen, a startup building hydrogen-powered planes that shut down last summer after burning through its cash and failing to raise more. By the end, Gordon had become a hydrogen skeptic, he told me. The company had customers interested in its planes, but clean hydrogen fuel was too expensive at $15 to $20 per kilogram. It needed to come in under $2.50 to compete with jet fuel. “Regional aviation customers weren’t going to spend 10 times the ticket price just to fly zero emissions,” he said. “It wasn’t clear to me, and I don’t think it was clear to our prospective investors, how the cost of hydrogen was going to be reduced.” Now, he’s convinced that Ecolectro’s new chemistry is the answer.
Ecolectro started in a lab at Cornell University, where its cofounder and chief science officer Kristina Hugar was doing her PhD research. Hugar developed a new material, a polymer “anion exchange membrane,” that had potential to significantly lower the cost of electrolyzers. Many of the companies making electrolyzers use designs that require expensive and supply-constrained metals like iridium and titanium. Hugar’s membrane makes it possible to use low-cost nickel and steel instead.
The company’s “stack,” the sandwich of an anode, membrane, and cathode that makes up the core of the electrolyzer, costs at least 50% less than the “proton exchange membrane” versions on the market today, according to Gordon. In lab tests, it has achieved more than 70% efficiency, meaning that more than 70% of the electrical energy going into the system is converted into usable chemical energy stored in hydrogen. The industry average is around 61%, according to the Department of Energy.
In addition to using cheaper materials, the company is focused on building electrolyzers that customers can install on-site to eliminate the cost of transporting the fuel. Its first customer was Liberty New York Gas, a natural gas company in Massena, New York, which installed a small, 10-kilowatt electrolyzer in a shipping container directly outside its office as part of a pilot project. Like many natural gas companies, Liberty is testing blending small amounts of hydrogen into its system — in this case, directly into the heating systems it uses in the office building — to evaluate it as an option for lowering emissions across its customer base. The equipment draws electricity from the local electric grid, which, in that region, mostly comes from low-cost hydroelectric power plants.
Taking into account the expected manufacturing cost for a commercial-scale electrolyzer, Ecolectro says that a project paying the same low price for water and power as Liberty would be able to produce hydrogen for less than $2.50 per kilogram — even without subsidies. Through its partnership with Re:Build, the company will produce electrolyzers in the 250- to 500-kilowatt range, as well as in the 1- to 5-megawatt range. It will be announcing a larger 250-kilowatt pilot project later this year, Gordon said.
All of this sounded promising, but what I really wanted to know is who Ecolectro thought its customers were going to be. Demand for clean hydrogen, or the lack thereof, is perhaps the biggest challenge the industry faces to scaling, after cost. Of the roughly 13 million to 15 million tons of clean hydrogen production announced to come online between now and 2030, companies only have offtake agreements for about 2.5 million tons, according to Kaur of BNEF. Most of those agreements are also non-binding, meaning they may not even happen.
Gordon tied companies’ struggle with offtake to their business models of building big, expensive, facilities in remote areas, meaning the hydrogen has to be transported long distances to customers. He said that when he was with Universal Hydrogen, he tried negotiating offtake agreements with some of these big projects, but they were asking customers to commit to 20-year contracts — and to figure out the delivery on their own.
“Right now, where we see the industry is that people want less hydrogen than that,” he said. “So we make it much easier for the customer to adopt by leasing them this unit. They don’t have to pay some enormous capex, and then it’s on site and it’s producing a fair amount of hydrogen for them to engage in pilot studies of blending, or refining, or whatever they’re going to use it for.”
He expects most of the demand to come from industrial customers that already use hydrogen, like fertilizer companies and refineries, that want to switch to a cleaner version of the fuel, or hydrogen-curious companies that want to experiment with blending it into their natural gas burners to reduce their emissions. Demand will also be geographically-limited to places like New York, Washington State, and Texas, that have low-cost electricity available, he said. “I think the opportunity is big, and it’s here, but only if you’re using a product like ours.”
On coal mines, Energy Star, and the EV tax credit
Current conditions: Storms continue to roll through North Texas today, where a home caught fire from a lightning strike earlier this week • Warm, dry days ahead may hinder hotshot crews’ attempts to contain the 1,500-acre Sawlog fire, burning about 40 miles west of Butte, Montana• Severe thunderstorms could move through Rome today on the first day of the papal conclave.
The International Energy Agency published its annual Global Methane Tracker report on Wednesday morning, finding that over 120 million tons of the potent greenhouse gas were emitted by oil, gas, and coal in 2024, close to the record high in 2019. In particular, the research found that coal mines were the second-largest energy sector methane emitter after oil, at 40 million tons — about equivalent to India’s annual carbon dioxide emissions. Abandoned coal mines alone emitted nearly 5 million tons of methane, more than abandoned oil and gas wells at 3 million tons.
“Coal, one of the biggest methane culprits, is still being ignored,” Sabina Assan, the methane analyst at the energy think tank Ember, said in a statement. “There are cost-effective technologies available today, so this is a low-hanging fruit of tackling methane.” Per the IEA report, about 70% of all annual methane emissions from the energy sector “could be avoided with existing technologies,” and “a significant share of abatement measures could pay for themselves within a year.” Around 35 million tons of total methane emissions from fossil fuels “could be avoided at no net cost, based on average energy prices in 2024,” the report goes on. Read the full findings here.
Opportunities to reduce methane emissions in the energy sector, 2024
IEA
The Environmental Protection Agency told staff this week that the division that oversees the Energy Star efficiency certification program for home appliances will be eliminated as part of the Trump administration’s ongoing cuts and reorganization, The Washington Post reports. The Energy Star program, which was created under President George H.W. Bush, has, in the past three decades, helped Americans save more than $500 billion in energy costs by directing them to more efficient appliances, as well as prevented an estimated 4 billion metric tons of greenhouse gas from entering the atmosphere since 1992, according to the government’s numbers. Almost 90% of Americans recognize its blue logo on sight, per The New York Times.
President Trump, however, has taken a personal interest in what he believes are poorly performing shower heads, dishwashers, and other appliances (although, as we’ve fact-checked here at Heatmap, many of his opinions on the issue are outdated or misplaced). In a letter on Tuesday, a large coalition of industry groups including the Air-Conditioning, Heating, and Refrigeration Institute, the Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce wrote to EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin in defense of Energy Star, arguing it is “an example of an effective non-regulatory program and partnership between the government and the private sector. Eliminating it will not serve the American people.”
House Speaker Mike Johnson suggested that the electric vehicle tax credit may be on its last legs, according to an interview he gave Bloomberg on Tuesday. “I think there is a better chance we kill it than save it,” Johnson said. “But we’ll see how it comes out.” He estimated that House Republicans would reveal their plan for the tax credits later this week. Still, as Bloomberg notes, a potential hangup may be that “many EV factories have been built or are under construction in GOP districts.”
As we’ve covered at Heatmap, President Trump flirted with ending the $7,500 tax credit for EVs throughout his campaign, a move that would mark “a significant setback to the American auto industry’s attempts to make the transition to electric vehicles,” my colleague Robinson Meyer writes. That holds true for all EV makers, including Tesla, the world’s most valuable auto company. However, its CEO, Elon Musk — who holds an influential position within the government — has said he supports the end of the tax credit “because Tesla has more experience building EVs than any other company, [and] it would suffer least from the subsidy’s disappearance.”
Constellation Energy Corp. held its quarterly earnings call on Tuesday, announcing that its operating revenue rose more than 10% in the first three months of the year compared to 2024, beating expectations. Shares climbed 12% after the call, with Chief Executive Officer Joe Dominguez confirming that Constellation’s pending purchase of natural gas and geothermal energy firm Calpine is on track to be completed by the end of the year, and that the nuclear power utility is “working hard to meet the power needs of customers nationwide, including powering the new AI products that Americans increasingly are using in their daily lives and that businesses and government are using to provide better products and services.”
But as my colleague Matthew Zeitlin reported, Dominguez also threw some “lukewarm water on the most aggressive load growth projections,” telling investors that “it’s not hard to conclude that the headlines are inflated.” As Matthew points out, Dominguez also has some reason to downplay expectations, including that “there needs to be massive investment in new power plants,” which could affect the value of Constellation’s existing generation fleet.
The Rockefeller Foundation aims to phase out 60 coal-fired power plants by 2030 by using revenue from carbon credits to cover the costs of closures, the Financial Times reports. The team working on the initiative has identified 1,000 plants in developing countries that would be eligible for the program under its methodology.