SWISS and Climeworks set a shared course for a more sustainable future

SWISS and Lufthansa Group became first members of the airline sector to embark on a long-term strategic partnership with the Swiss-based Climeworks company. The partners intend to work together to promote the scaling up of Climeworks’ innovative technology for removing carbon dioxide from the air via a process known as direct air capture or DAC. As Climeworks’s first airline partners, SWISS and the Lufthansa Group have signed a carbon dioxide removal agreement that will take them a further major step forward towards their ambitious sustainability objectives. The new partnership will initially extend to 2030, but also contains options for procuring further carbon removal volumes.

SWISS and Lufthansa Group: pioneers in scaling up key sustainability technologies

 SWISS Chief Executive Officer Dieter Vranckx, commented: “We are very proud to be the first airline in the world to collaborate with Climeworks and make this substantial contribution to the scaling up of a technology that should help take the airline sector a long way towards achieving its net-zero objective. Sustainability is both a growing issue among our customers and a cornerstone of our corporate strategy. And alongside our other extensive actions to reduce our CO2 emissions, we are now demonstrating our further commitment to the sustainability cause by becoming the first airline to team up with Climeworks and thereby highlight the key importance of its direct air capture technology to the air transport sector. At the same time, we are once again promoting and supporting Swiss innovation through our new Climeworks collaboration.”

Jan Huckfeldt, Climeworks’s Chief Commercial Officer, said: “We are delighted to have secured SWISS and the Lufthansa Group as our first partners from the aviation sector for our direct air capture technology.Their interest and involvement confirm the demand within the airline industry for quality long-term solutions to eliminate CO2. And their commitment is vital to our endeavours to scale up our technology. Through their involvement on the carbon removal front, SWISS and the Lufthansa Group are playing a pioneering role, and are underlining their firm commitment to achieving net-zero emissions within the airline sector.” 

Climeworks: a global leader in DAC technology 

With its direct air capture technology, Climeworks is a global leader within the carbon removal field. DAC is a vitally important method of removing CO2 directly from the atmosphere and storing it permanently underground. The airline sector will need to take advantage of both DAC and further negative-emission technologies if it is to achieve its ambitious carbon emissions goals. Climeworks already operates the world’s biggest DAC and carbon storage facility, which is located in Iceland, and has extensive further growth plans. 

DAC technologies also offer a scalable means of procuring atmospheric CO2 for use as a raw material in manufacturing the next generation of synthetic fuels, which are also known as sustainable aviation fuels. The use of such synthetic fuels is vital to the decarbonization of the airline sector. SWISS and the Lufthansa Group have long been industry pioneers in this field, driving the scaling up of these key fuel technologies.

Offers to customers constantly further refined 

SWISS and its sister airlines within the Lufthansa Group continue to develop and refine ways and means for their customers to bring greater sustainability to their air travel activities, by helping substantially increase the use of SAF and by supporting relevant climate technologies. SWISS offers its customers a range of options through which they can make their travel more sustainable, by purchasing SAF and/or by offsetting their flight’s carbon emissions via investments in climate protection projects. SWISS customers will soon also have the further option here of supporting the scaling up of Climeworks’s direct air capture technology