The “largest factory in the world” designed to suck up the pollution that warms the planet emerging from the atmosphere as a giant vacuum began operating over Iceland on Wednesday.
“Mammoth” is the second commercial direct air capture plant opened by the Swiss company Climeworks in the country, and is 10 times larger than its predecessor, Orca, which began operating in 2021.
Direct air capture, or DAC, is a technology designed to suck in air and remove carbon using chemicals. The carbon can then be injected deep into the ground, reused, or turned into solid products.
Climeworks plans to transport the carbon underground, where it will be naturally turned into stone, trapping the carbon permanently. It is partnering with the Icelandic company Carbfix for this so-called kidnapping process.
The entire operation will be powered by Iceland’s abundant and clean geothermal energy.
Next-generation climate solutions like DAC are receiving more attention from governments and private industry as humans continue to burn fossil fuels. Concentrations of planet-warming carbon dioxide in the atmosphere reached a record in 2023.
As the planet continues Warm – with devastating consequences for humans It is nature — Many scientists say the world needs to find ways to remove carbon from the atmosphere in addition to rapidly reducing fossil fuels.
But carbon removal technologies like DAC are still controversial. They have been criticized for being expensive, energy-consuming and unproven at scale. Some climate advocates are also concerned that they will divert attention from policies to reduce fossil fuels.
This technology “is fraught with uncertainty and ecological risks,” said Lili Fuhr, director of the fossil economy program at the Center for International Environmental Law, speaking about carbon capture in general.
Climeworks began building Mammoth in June 2022, and the company claims it is the largest factory of its kind in the world. It has a modular design with space for 72”collection containers” – the vacuum parts of the machine that capture carbon from the air – which can be stacked on top of each other and moved easily. There are currently 12 of them in place and more will be added in the coming months.
Mammoth will be able to extract 36,000 tons of carbon from the atmosphere per year at full capacity, according to Climeworks. This is equivalent to taking about 7,800 gasoline-powered cars off the road for a year.
Climeworks did not provide an exact cost for each ton of carbon removed, but said it was closer to $1,000 per ton than $100 per ton — the latter of which is widely seen as a key threshold for making the technology affordable and accessible. viable.
As the company increases the size of its factories and reduces costs, the goal is to reach $300 to $350 per ton by 2030, before reaching $100 per ton around 2050, said Jan Wurzbacher, co-founder and co-CEO of Climeworks, on a call with reporters.
The new plant is “an important step in the fight against climate change”, said Stuart Haszeldine, professor of carbon capture and storage at the University of Edinburgh. It will increase the size of equipment to capture carbon pollution.
But, he cautioned, it’s still a small fraction of what’s needed.
All the carbon removal equipment in the world is only capable of removing about 0.01 million metric tons of carbon per year, a far cry from the 70 million tons a year needed until 2030 to meet global climate goals, according to the International Energy Agency.
There are already much larger DAC factories in the works of other companies. The Stratos, currently under construction in Texas, for example, was designed to remove 500,000 tons of carbon per yearaccording to Occidental, the oil company behind the plant.
But there may be a problem. Occidental says the captured carbon will be stored in underground rocks, but its website also refers to the use of carbon captured by the company in a process called “enhanced oil recovery”. This involves pushing carbon into wells to flush out hard-to-reach remnants of oil – allowing fossil fuel companies to extract even more from aging oilfields.
It’s this type of process that has some critics concerned that carbon removal technologies could be used to prolong the production of fossil fuels.
But for Climeworks, which is not linked to fossil fuel companies, the technology has huge potential and the company says it has big ambitions.
Jan Wurzbacher, the company’s co-founder and co-CEO, said Mammoth is just the latest stage in Climeworks’ plan to increase up to 1 million tons of carbon removal per year by 2030 and 1 billion tons by 2050.
Plans include potential DAC plants in Kenya and the U.S.
This story has been updated with additional information.
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