LONDON: 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 ten times larger than the current record holder.
Worsening climate change and inadequate efforts to cut emissions have led UN scientists to estimate billions of tons 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 metric 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 and was previously the world's largest operational site.
"Starting operations of our Mammoth plant is another proof point in Climeworks’ scale-up journey to megaton capacity by 2030 and gigaton by 2050,” Jan Wurzbacher, co-founder and co-CEO of Climeworks said.
Climeworks is part of a consortium that has been selected for award negotiations under a US programme for the technology to build a 1 million ton 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 focusing on removing CO2 could deter companies from reducing their emissions as much as possible.
Climeworks did not detail the cost per ton of removal at the Mammoth plant but said it is seeking to reduce costs of the technology to $400-600 per tonne by 2030 and $200-350 per tonne by 2040.
When Mammoth is fully operational, it will be able to remove 36,000 tonnes of CO2 from the air per year.
"We started with milligrams of CO2 captured in our lab 15 years ago and now it's kilos, tonnes, thousands of tonnes," said Climeworks founder and co-chief executive Jan Wurzbacher.
Climeworks expects to have a capacity of several million tonnes by 2030, with projects of other start-ups taking total capacity up to around 10 million tonnes per year.
Climeworks hopes it can raise capacity to a billion tonnes per year by 2050.
But that's still a drop in the bucket compared to the 40 billion tonnes of CO2 emitted around the world last year alone.
By pulling CO2 from ambient air, Climeworks' plants are different from more traditional types of CCS projects at highly-polluting industrial smokestacks or those reusing CO2 instead of stocking it. — Agencies
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