World’s largest plant to extract CO2 from the air built in Iceland
Climeworks has opened the world’s largest operational direct air capture (DAC) plant to suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, with its Mammoth plant in Iceland almost 10 times larger than the current record holder.
Worsening climate change and inadequate efforts to cut emissions have led UN scientists to estimate that billions of tonnes of carbon must be removed from the atmosphere annually to meet global climate goals.
DAC works by using a technical process to suck carbon dioxide (CO2) out of the air and store it, usually underground.
The Mammoth DAC plant has a capacity to capture 36,000 tonnes of CO2 a year and will be fully complete by the end of 2024.
It is Climeworks’ second commercial project, after the Orca plant, also in Iceland, which has a capacity of 4,000 tonnes a year.
“Starting operations of our Mammoth plant is another proof point in Climeworks’ scale-up journey to megatonne capacity by 2030 and gigatonne by 2050,” said Jan Wurzbacher, cofounder and co-chief executive of Climeworks.
Climeworks is part of a consortium that has been selected for award negotiations under a US programme for the technology to build a one million tonne plant.
The removal process is energy intensive, but Climeworks’ plants in Iceland are powered by the country’s renewable geothermal power plants.
Critics of the technology say it is expensive and warn that focusing on removing CO2 could deter companies from reducing their emissions. Climeworks did not detail the cost per tonne of removal at the Mammoth plant, but said it is seeking to reduce costs of the technology to between $400 and $600 per tonne by 2030 and between $200 and $350 per tonne by 2040. –