Climeworks Mammoth captured only 105 tonnes in 2024 vs. 36,000t design capacity

Climeworks' Mammoth plant in Iceland, the world's largest direct air capture facility, was designed for 36,000 tonnes of CO2 removal per year. In its first year of operation (2024), it captured just 105 tonnes total -- 0.3% of nameplate capacity. As of June 2025, only 12 of 72 planned collector containers were operational. This matters because Mammoth is the flagship project that DAC's credibility rests on. Corporate buyers like Microsoft, Stripe, and JPMorgan have pre-purchased removal credits at $600-1,000+/tonne based on the promise that DAC can scale. If the most prominent facility in the world runs at 0.3% utilization, it undermines buyer confidence in the entire DAC market, chills future investment, and hands ammunition to critics who argue DAC is a distraction from emissions reduction. The problem persists because DAC is genuinely first-of-a-kind engineering at scale -- constructing, commissioning, and tuning 72 modular collector units in subarctic Iceland involves supply chain delays, harsh weather, and iterative debugging of sorbent cycling that cannot be fully modeled in advance. But the gap between marketing claims and operational reality erodes trust faster than engineering iteration can close it.