Climeworks

Climeworks is a Swiss company specializing in carbon dioxide air capture technology. The company filters the CO2 directly from the ambient air through an adsorption-desorption process. 
Projects.
In May 2017 the company opened the world's first commercial project to filter CO2 from the ambient air in Hinwil. It consists of 18 direct air capture modules that filter 900 tons of CO2 each year, which are then sold to a greenhouse operator for use as fertilizer.
In October 2017, a demo project followed, in which a module on CO2 filter is used at the Hellisheiði Power Station in Iceland. As part of the Horizon 2020 research project, CarbFix2 CO2 will be filtered from the air and then stored underground as a mineral. Climeworks refers to the filtering of CO2 from the ambient air for underground storage also as carbon dioxide removal.
History.
In November 2009 Climeworks AG was founded by Christoph Gebald and Jan Wurzbacher as a spin-off from ETH Zurich. The two German founders were fellow students in mechanical engineering and had worked with technologies for chemical and physical CO2 in the context of their studies and subsequent doctorates. In 2011, Climeworks received capital from investors for the first time to develop a prototype with a modular structure. Since then, rapid scaling has led to their present module technology, which has been available since 2014. In the course of the enterprise's development, a partnership with the automaker Audi succeeded. Further support was provided by the Swiss Federal Office of Energy, which enabled the accelerated commercialization and scaling of the technology. Climeworks is part of several European research and development projects. This includes the production of synthetic fuels from CO2. Since 2018 a Swiss mineral water bottler in Vals has been producing beverages with carbon dioxide from the air.
The company's goal by 2025 is to filter one percent of annual global CO2 emissions from the air. This requires the construction of 250,000 systems comparable to the one in Hinwil.
A German subsidiary "Climeworks Deutschland GmbH" has also opened in Cologne.
Commercialization.
Climeworks has the only existing commercial direct air capture machine. Although several other companies aim to commercialize direct air capture systems (e.g., Carbon Engineering, Global Thermostat), Climeworks is the furthest along in the market process, selling to a comparatively small market in high-cost CO2 (i.e., CO2 used in greenhouses to enhance productivity may cost more than $1,000/t if the greenhouse is located far from a source). This market is too small to support a robust ecosystem of small innovators necessary to explore the large number of chemical recipes and physical machinery that might decrease direct air capture prices. Thus, like photovoltaics or hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling, the development of direct air capture will likely require long-term government investment in incentives.