Germany’s largest direct air capture (DAC) plant went live in Berlin at the beginning of July — and the number that grabs the headlines is not the one that matters.
On 2 July 2026, Berlin start-up Ucaneo inaugurated a first-of-a-kind plant in the district of Marzahn that filters around 150 tonnes of CO₂ per year directly out of the ambient air. Set against the millions of tonnes the Power-to-X economy will eventually need, that is a rounding error. But the plant is not built to move tonnage. It is built to prove a process — and the process might be precisely the one many Power-to-X stakeholders have been waiting for.
Capture that runs on electricity, not heat
Most established DAC processes need high-temperature heat to release the captured CO₂ from their sorbents, which ties them to burners, heat pumps or industrial waste heat. Ucaneo’s approach is different: the plant uses a fully electrified, electrochemical process that works at ambient temperature and requires no thermal energy at all. The company compares the principle to a lung — an artificial membrane through which the air’s CO₂ is continuously absorbed and released again in concentrated form.
Full electrification has two consequences that matter well beyond Berlin. First, the process can flex with the grid: capture loops can be run harder when renewable electricity is abundant and cheap, and throttled when it is not — the same load-following logic that governs electrolysers in Power-to-X plants. Second, the output is remarkably clean: the plant delivers CO₂ at a chemical purity above 99.9 per cent, ready for downstream use without extensive conditioning.
Germany’s first verified capture-plus-storage project
Part of the captured CO₂ will be permanently stored in geological formations, making the Marzahn facility Germany’s first verified direct air capture project combined with geological storage and allowing Ucaneo to generate certified carbon removal credits. The remainder is destined for exactly the markets this blog covers: as a feedstock for sustainable aviation fuel, methanol and other CO₂-based products.
The scaling path is already sketched out. Together with industrial partners — including Siemens, which is supplying automation and electrification technology — Ucaneo plans to begin construction of a commercial plant roughly ten times the size in 2027, with the long-term goal of capturing half a gigatonne of CO₂ per year by 2035. Ambitions of that order should always be read with caution; the point is the direction of travel, not the press-release arithmetic.
Why this matters for Power-to-X
Every synthetic hydrocarbon — e-methanol, e-kerosene, e-naphtha, CO₂-based chemicals — needs a carbon source. And as we have argued repeatedly, where that carbon comes from decides whether a Power-to-X product genuinely defossilises anything. Fossil point sources will disappear as defossilisation progresses; biogenic sources are limited and unevenly distributed. Air is the one carbon reservoir that is available everywhere, indefinitely.
That is why the run of recent progress in air capture — from MIT’s electrochemical capture chemistry to new salt-based absorbents and Swiss start-ups such as fortyfour with its on-site capture units — deserves close attention. Ucaneo adds the piece that laboratory chemistry cannot: an integrated, operating plant that produces high-purity recycled CO₂ from air using renewable electricity alone, and does so flexibly enough to live with the variable power supply that defines the Power-to-X world.
For Switzerland, the lesson is concrete. Swiss Power-to-X projects face the same carbon question as everyone else, and a technology that turns air into a local, defossilised carbon feedstock — with no pipeline, no import terminal and no fossil supplier attached — is a strategic asset. Renewable energy with recycled CO₂ is the formula; plants like Ucaneo’s are what the CO₂ half of that formula looks like when it leaves the lab.
The tonnage is small. The direction of travel is not.
Power-to-X Congress Switzerland 2026
How Power-to-X moves from pilot plants to industrial reality is the theme of the Power-to-X Congress Switzerland 2026 — «Reality Check with Net Zero» — on 22 September 2026, 10:00–18:00, at the Kursaal in Bern. The congress is co-organised by energie-cluster.ch and the Swiss Power-to-X Collaborative Innovation Network (SPIN), with Réseau H2 Suisse Romande as partner. Programme and registration.
