Brian McDonald
Hellisheidi, Iceland — With Mammoth’s 72 industrial fans, Swiss start-up Climeworks aims to suck almost 40,000 tons of CO2 from the air annually and bury it underground, competing to prove that technology has a place in the fight against global warming. Mammoth, the largest carbon dioxide capture and storage Such a facility launched operations this week situated on a dormant volcano in Iceland.
The installation adds significant capacity to Climework’s first project, Orca, which also sucks the main greenhouse gas that is fueling climate change from the atmosphere.
How does Climeworks capture CO2?
Just 50 kilometers from an active volcano, the seemingly risky location was chosen for its proximity to the Hellisheidi geothermal power plant, needed to power the facility’s fans and heat chemical filters to extract CO2 with water vapor.
HALLDOR KOLBEINS/AFP/Getty
The CO2 is then separated from the vapor and compressed in a hangar where huge pipes intersect.
Finally, the gas is dissolved in water and pumped underground with a “sort of giant SodaStream,” said Bergur Sigfusson, director of systems development at Carbfix, which developed the process.
A well, drilled under a futuristic-looking dome, injects water 700 meters deep into the volcanic basalt that makes up 90% of Iceland’s subsoil, where it reacts with the rock’s magnesium, calcium and iron to form crystals – solid reservoirs. of CO2.
There are several other CO2 capture technologies being used around the world, including in the US, where the Biden administration has committed almost $4 billion to boost the industry.
Methods range from warehouses full of stacked limestone blocks that absorb CO2 like sponges to burying compressed industrial and agricultural waste to trap the gas for centuries.
Big carbon capture ambitions
For the world to achieve “carbon neutrality” by 2050, “we should be removing something like six to 16 billion tons [17.6 U.S. tons] of CO2 in the air per year,” said Jan Wurzbacher, co-founder and co-director of Climeworks, at the opening of the first 12 container fans in Mammoth.
“I firmly believe that a large portion of these…need to be covered by technical solutions,” he said.
“Not us alone, not as a single company. Others should do this too,” he added, setting his 520-employee start-up a goal of exceeding million tonnes by 2030 – and approaching a billion by 2050.
Speaking last year with CBS’ 60 minutes, Climeworks chief technology officer Carolos Haertel said that technically the expansion process can be done on a global scale – but he also said that a single company cannot do it and suggested that political will must also be behind the initiatives.
60 minutes
“Whether we are heading in the right direction will depend more on social issues than on technical issues,” he said. Haertel told 60 Minutes’ Bill Whitaker at the Orca facilities. “Am I optimistic as an engineer? I definitely am. Am I optimistic as a citizen? Maybe kind of half. I haven’t made up my mind yet.”
Three years after Orca opens, Climeworks will increase its capacity from about 4,409 to 44,000 tons of CO2 captured annually when Mammoth is at full capacity – but that represents just a few seconds of the world’s actual emissions.
One of the companies interviewed by CBS News in 2023 about its plans to ramp up carbon capture operations said it hopes to eventually lock up 50,000 tons of CO2 per year.
Just part of the solution to tackling emissions
According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the United Nations’ climate body, carbon removal technologies will be needed to meet the goals of the 2015 Paris Agreement, but major emissions reductions are the priority.
The role of direct air capture with carbon storage (DACCS) remains minor in various climate models due to its high price, and its large-scale deployment depends on the availability of renewable energy to power it.
Climeworks is a pioneer, with the first two plants in the world moving beyond the pilot phase at a cost of around $1,000 per ton captured. Wurzbacher expects that cost to drop to just $300 by 2030.
More than 20 new infrastructure projects, developed by various actors and combining direct capture and storage, are expected to be operational worldwide by 2030, with a combined capacity of around 11 million tonnes.
“We probably need about $10 billion moving forward over the next decade to deploy our assets” in the United States, Canada, Norway, Oman and Kenya, said Christoph Gebald, co-founder and co-director of Climeworks. That’s 10 times what the company has already raised.
“When I’m on Orca, I think, ‘Oh, that looks a little like Lego bricks.’ It’s a tiny thing compared to Mammoth,” Wurzbacher said.
Lego purchased carbon credits generated by Climeworks for each ton of CO2 stored. The credits are a way of making the solution known to the general public, said Gebald, who did not rule out the sale of credits to “major polluters” as well.
Critics of the technology point to the risk of giving them a “license to pollute” or diverting billions of dollars that could be better invested in readily available technologies such as renewable energy or electric vehicles.
