The fans are spinning: Swiss start-up Climeworks unveiled the second Icelandic air CO2 capture and underground storage plant on Wednesday, thus multiplying its capacities and aiming to “eliminate” millions of tons of this gas by 2030.
Mammoth is located a few hundred meters from its little sister, Orca, a pioneering plant in operation since September 2021, amidst a field of solidified lava covered with moss, half an hour from the capital Reykjavik.
Surrounded by mountains, twelve containers have recently started ventilating air to extract CO2 through a chemical process, powered by heat from the nearby geothermal power plant, ON Power.
By the end of the year, Climeworks will install 72 units around the plant, which will then compress the gas, dissolve it in water, and inject it underground.
At a depth of 700 metres, the CO2 comes into contact with basalt, a porous volcanic rock rich in calcium and magnesium. In this environment, the Icelandic company Carbfix’s process mineralizes the CO2 over approximately two years, permanently storing it.
Until now, around 10,000 tons of CO2 were captured and stored annually worldwide, with 4,000 by Orca and the rest mainly by experimental pilot units.
Once fully operational, Mammoth will be able to absorb 36,000 tons per year.
“We have gone from capturing a few milligrams of CO2 in our laboratory 15 years ago to a few kilograms, then tons and thousands of tons,” rejoices Jan Wurzbacher, founder and co-CEO of Climeworks. By 2030, the company aims for a capacity of several million tons and envisions reaching a billion by 2050.
Climeworks and other start-ups expect to achieve 10 million tons with around twenty other projects by 2030, in comparison to the 40 billion tons emitted globally last year.
These energy-intensive plants differ from those capturing CO2, which is more concentrated, at the exit of industrial or energy infrastructures, but also from those that reuse this gas instead of storing it.
For each ton of CO2 stored, Climeworks can generate a carbon credit that allows its clients (Lego, Microsoft, H&M, Swiss Re, JP Morgan Chase, Lufthansa, etc.) to offset their greenhouse gas emissions.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recognizes these technologies as a solution for removing CO2 from the atmosphere but has not yet widely integrated them into emission reduction scenarios due to their extremely costly development, which is still in its infancy with limited public funding.