CLEANING THE AIR
A plant in Iceland has a long road to reach its carbon capture target.
In Iceland’s barren landscape, a new containerlike structure has risen alongside plumes of steam near the Hellisheidi geothermal power plant. Its job is to undo some of the damage carbon dioxide emissions are wrecking on the planet.
The facility, called Orca and built by Swiss startup Clime works, will suck CO2 out of the air. Icelandic startup Carbfix will then pump it deep into the ground, turning it into stone forever. Of the 16 installations Clime works has built across Europe, Orca is the only one that permanently disposes of the CO2 rather than recycling it.
The plant will capture 4,000 tons of CO2 a year, making it the largest direct air capture facility in the world. But that only makes up for the annual emissions of about 250 U.S. residents. It’s also a long way from the company’s original goal of capturing 1 percent of annual global CO2 emissions — more than 300 million tons — by 2025. The company is now targeting 500,000 tons by the end of the decade.
The company still hopes to one day reach its target of 300 million tons, “but the timeline has changed as it takes longer than we originally anticipated to build up an entire industry,” said Jan Wurzbacher, one of Clime works’ co-founders. “Already the demand for carbon removal at Orca is so high that we have decided to scale up this plant and build a roughly 10 times larger plant in about three years.”
Investment is pouring into carbon capture as companies and governments search for ways to tame global warming, which already is causing devastating weather events. Still, activists argue that focusing too much on carbon removal technologies could become a distraction from the work of immediately reducing emissions.
The main challenge for Clime works is lowering the cost of its service. Individuals wanting to purchase carbon offsets can pay the company up to $1,200 per ton of CO2.
For bulk purchases, such as those made by Bill Gates, the cost is closer to $600 per ton.
Clime works aims to get that cost down to $200 to $300 a ton by 2030 and to $100 to $200 by the middle of next decade, when its operations are at full scale, Wurzbacher said. With European carbon prices at $73 a ton and many betting it will go above $100 soon, the lower end of Clime works’s target price would make it cheaper for polluters to use Clime works than pay the penalty.
Clime works’ targets are reasonable when compared with the billions of dollars paid annually in subsidies for electric vehicles, which price a ton of avoided CO2 at about $500, said Christoph Gebald, the other co-founder at Clime works. “If this existed for what we are doing, we would scale up much faster,” he said.
Orca cost $10 million to $15 million to build, including construction, site development and storage, according to Wurzbacher. “The cost per ton of Orca is perhaps less important than what we will learn, to get quicker to the large scale and ultimately lower prices,” he said.
Clime works is backed by a group of private investors, as well as Swiss bank Zuercher Kantonalbank. It also has debt financing commitments from Microsoft Corp.’s climate innovation fund. While still unprofitable, the bulk of Clime works’ revenue comes from corporate customers including Microsoft, Stripe Inc., Shopify Inc. and Swiss Re AG. In addition, 8,000 private customers have signed up. Wurzbacher predicts that subscribers will eventually provide half of Clime works’ revenue.
Carbon capture and storage, or CCS, falls in two categories of technologies. Capturing emissions from the smokestacks of factories or power plants before they escape into the atmosphere is a lot cheaper. With current technology, the cost can be as low as $40 a ton, according to Bloomberg NEF. That’s because the concentration of CO2 in those gases can be as high as 10 percent, rather than 0.04 percent in the air.
Clime works takes the harder route by filtering air itself, meaning there’s a limit to how cheap its technology can get because the process is very energy intensive.
The Orca plant draws in large amounts of air with huge fans, bringing the air in contact with chemicals that can remove CO2 while releasing nitrogen, oxygen and other gases back into the atmosphere. The carbon-rich chemicals are then heated to release CO2 as a pure gas.
Carbfix mixes the gas with water and injects it deep into basaltic rock. The dissolved CO2 crystallizes into a mineral in about two years, permanently storing it away. The energy for all those steps comes from the Hellisheidi geothermal plant.
Replicating that combination of factors — basaltic rock and cheap zero-carbon energy — at another location won’t be easy. It’s possible to store CO2 in other geological formations where it doesn’t turn into rock, akin to what happens to oil and gas. But using zero-carbon energy is key, otherwise the process could generate more CO2 than it stores.
Wurzbacher said the location of the next, bigger plant will be confirmed in a few months. Iceland remains “a very attractive location,” he said, alongside Oman and Norway.
Carbfix sees opportunity in continuing to expand its collaboration with Clime works. “We will not reach our climate goals without large-scale carbon capture and storage,” said Edda Sif Pind Aradottir, CEO of Carbfix. Iceland alone could store more than 100 times what’s needed globally to meet the Paris Agreement, she said.