The “world’s largest” plant designed to suck planet-heating pollution out of the atmosphere like a giant vacuum began operating in Iceland on Wednesday.
“Mammoth” is the second commercial direct air capture plant opened by Swiss company Climeworks in the country, and is 10 times bigger than its predecessor, Orca, which started running in 2021.
Direct air capture, or DAC, is a technology designed to suck in air and strip out the carbon using chemicals.
Climeworks plans to transport the carbon underground where it will be naturally transformed into stone, locking up the carbon permanently.
Climeworks started building Mammoth in June 2022, and the company says it is the world’s largest such plant.
It has a modular design with space for 72 “collector containers” — the vacuum parts of the machine that capture carbon from the air — which can be stacked on top of each other and moved around easily.
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.
On Wednesday, the “world’s largest” plant that was built to draw pollution that warms the planet from the atmosphere like a massive vacuum started up in Iceland.
The Swiss company Climeworks has opened a second commercial direct air capture plant in the nation called “Mammoth,” which is ten times larger than its predecessor Orca, which began operations in 2021.
Direct air capture, or DAC, is a technology that uses chemicals to draw in air and extract the carbon. After that, the carbon can be recycled or turned into solid products by injecting it far below the surface of the earth.
Climeworks intends to move the carbon underground, where it will naturally condense into stone, thereby locking it away for good. For this’sequestration process,’ it is collaborating with the Icelandic company Carbfix.
Iceland’s plentiful and pure geothermal energy will power the entire operation.
As long as people continue to burn fossil fuels, governments and the private sector will pay more attention to next-generation climate solutions like DAC. In 2023, atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations—which warm the planet—reached a record high.
In addition to rapidly reducing the use of fossil fuels, many scientists believe that in order to prevent the planet from warming further and have catastrophic effects on both nature and humankind, measures must be taken to remove carbon from the atmosphere.
However, carbon removal technologies like DAC remain contentious. Their high cost, high energy consumption, and lack of large-scale testing have been critiqued. Additionally, some proponents of climate change worry that they might divert attention from legislation aimed at reducing the use of fossil fuels.
Speaking generally about carbon capture, Lili Fuhr, the director of the Center for International Environmental Law’s fossil economy program, stated that this technology “is fraught with uncertainties and ecological risks.”.
Beginning construction in June 2022, Climeworks claims that Mammoth will be the largest plant of its kind in the world. With its modular design, it can easily be moved and stacked on top of one another to accommodate 72 “collector containers,” which are the vacuum parts of the machine that extract carbon from the air. There are twelve of these in operation at the moment, and more are scheduled to be added in the coming months.
At maximum capacity, Mammoth will be able to extract 36,000 tons of carbon from the atmosphere annually, according to Climeworks. That would mean about 7,800 gas-powered vehicles being removed from the road for a full year.
Climeworks did not provide an exact cost per ton of carbon removed, but they did state that it was more in the range of $1,000 and $100, respectively, which is generally considered to be the critical price point at which the technology must fall in order to be practical and affordable.
The goal, according to Jan Wurzbacher, co-founder and co-CEO of Climeworks, is to reach $300 to $350 per ton by 2030 before falling to $100 per ton by 2050 as the company scales up the size of its plants and reduces costs.
Professor Stuart Haszeldine of the University of Edinburgh’s Department of Carbon Capture and Storage called the new plant “an important step in the fight against climate change.”. To capture carbon pollution, it will enlarge the equipment size.
However, it’s still a very small portion of what’s required, he warned.
According to the International Energy Agency, all of the carbon removal machinery in the world can only remove about 0 point01 million metric tons of carbon annually, a far cry from the 70 million tons required by 2030 to meet global climate goals.
Other companies are already developing much larger DAC plants. For instance, Stratos, the oil company behind the plant, is constructing a facility in Texas that is expected to remove 500,000 tons of carbon annually.
However, there might be a catch. Although Occidental states on its website that the captured carbon will be used in “enhanced oil recovery,” the company also states that the carbon will be stored in rock far below the surface of the earth. This entails injecting carbon into wells to drive out the difficult-to-reach oil remnants, enabling fossil fuel companies to extract even more from depleting oil fields.
Critics fear that carbon removal technologies may be exploited to extend the production of fossil fuels due to this type of process.
Nevertheless, Climeworks, an independent company, believes the technology has enormous potential and has lofty goals.
Mammoth is only the most recent phase of Climeworks’ plan to scale up to 1 million tons of carbon removal annually by 2030 and 1 billion tons by 2050, according to co-founder and co-CEO Jan Wurzbacher.
Plans call for possible DAC facilities in the US and Kenya.
More details have been added to this story.
