According to the company behind the green technology, construction will begin Wednesday on what could be the largest plant in the world to capture carbon dioxide and deposit it underground.
Climeworks AG, a Swiss start-up, announced that its second large-scale direct-air capture (DAC) plant in Iceland will be constructed in the next 18-24 months. It has the capacity to absorb 36,000 tonnes CO2 per annum from the air.
This is only a fraction of the 36 million tonnes of energy-related CO2 emissions that were produced last year. It is still a 10 fold increase over Climeworks’ current DAC plant and a leap of scale for a technology scientists have said is “impossible” if the world wants to achieve its climate change goals.
The new Mammoth plant will have around 80 large blocks with fans and filters. These fans and filters sucking in air extract CO2. Icelandic carbon storage company Carbfix then mixes it with water and injects it underground. A chemical reaction transforms it into rock. A nearby geothermal power plant will power the process.
Christoph Gebald, Climeworks’ co-CEO, stated that once the plant is operational, Climeworks plans to build a larger facility capable of capturing approximately half a million tonnes CO2 per annum. Then, Climeworks will replicate several plants with project financing towards the end.
Mammoth was partially funded by the 600 million Swiss Franc ($627million) financing round Climeworks, announced in April. The firm also offers the most expensive carbon removal credit in the world, at up to 1,000 euro per tonne to buyers such as Audi, Microsoft and Boston Consulting Group.
Gebald explained to Reuters that scaling up is expensive. This is the amount of investment that we must make as a company in order to progress.
According to the International Energy Agency, there are currently 18 air capture facilities around the world. Occidental, a U.S. oil company, plans to open a large-scale DAC facility in late 2024 to capture 1 million tonnes of CO2 per year.
According to the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, expensive and energy-intensive technologies such as DAC are needed to reduce CO2 on a largescale in the next decades. This will allow global warming to be limited to 1.5C and prevent more severe climate impacts.
Heleen de Coninck, an IPCC author, is a professor at Eindhoven University of Technology. She stated that DAC should be powered by non-CO2-related energy in order to be effective and not replace urgent reductions of greenhouse gas emissions.
