Work starts on world's biggest direct air capture plant
The company behind the nascent green technology said that construction on what could become the world's biggest plant to capture carbon dioxide from the air and deposit it underground is due to begin on Wednesday.
Swiss start-up Climeworks AG said in Iceland its second large-scale direct air capture DAC plant will be built in 18 to 24 months, and it will have capacity to suck 36,000 tons of CO 2 per year from the air.
It's a sliver of the 36 billion tons of CO2 emissions produced last year in the world. It is a 10 fold increase from Climeworks' existing DAC plant, currently the world's largest, and a leap in scale for a technology that scientists said is unavoidable if the world is to meet climate change goals.
The new Mammoth plant will contain around 80 large fans and filters that suck in air and extract its CO 2, which Icelandic carbon storage firm Carbfix mixes with water and injects underground where a chemical reaction turns it to rock. The process will be powered by a nearby geothermal energy plant.
Co-CEO Christoph Gebald said once this plant is operational, Climeworks intends to build a far larger facility containing roughly half a million tons of CO 2 per year and then replicate several plants of that size, backed by project financing, towards the end of the decade.
Mammoth was partially financed by a 600 million Swiss Franc US $627 million funding round announced in April.
The firm sells among the world's most expensive carbon removal credit - costing up to €1,000 per tonne - to buyers including Microsoft, Audi and Boston Consulting Group.
It's the cost of scaling up, Gebald told Reuters. This is the investment we have to do as a company to move forward. The International Energy Agency says there are 18 direct air capture facilities in the world.
US oil firm Occidental plans to launch a large-scale DAC facility in late 2024 to collect 1 million tons of CO2 per year.
In the coming decades, the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has said energy-intensive and costly technologies like DAC will be needed to remove CO 2 on a large scale, to limit global warming to 1.5 degree Celsius and to avoid severe climate impacts.
Heleen De Coninck, a IPCC author and professor at the Eindhoven University of Technology, said DAC must be powered by CO 2 free energy to be useful, and should not replace urgent reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.
It can backfire if it leads to avoiding doing what is necessary right now, she said.