First carbon removal plant in world comes online in Iceland

Carbon removal startup Climeworks. Dubbed Mammoth, the project is now the world’s biggest plant to suck carbon dioxide from the air.

The plant is a critical step in the race to remove billions of tons of carbon a year by mid-century, a move that will likely be needed to keep global warming to relatively safe levels. It also illustrates the increasingly competitive landscape for companies trying to suck carbon from the sky.

Once fully operational, Mammoth will be capable of capturing up to 36,000 tons of carbon dioxide a year using a technique known as direct air capture (DAC). That’s less than a minute of humanity’s emissions, though nine times more CO2 than Climeworks’ Orca plant, which also sits among Hellisheioi’s rocky, moss-covered landscape and began operating in 2021.

Both plants are sited in Iceland in part because of the country’s plentiful clean geothermal resources to power what are essentially energy-intensive CO2 vacuums. In addition, the geology offers a unique way of sequestering the captured CO2. In cooperation with Icelandic partner Carbfix, the CO2 is dissolved in water and injected into the basaltic bedrock where it crystallizes, creating a permanent and safe storing solution.

Still, the plant has the capacity to capture less CO2 than 8,000 average US cars emit in a year. Although current DAC technologies are far from industrial maturity, there is an increasing consensus among the scientific community that carbon removal will be crucial to limiting the impacts of climate change.

Switzerland-based Climeworks is the current leader in developing DAC technology, but a number of startups are utilizing other techniques, including relying on materials like limestone as well as electricity and even water in the air. If all of the 22 proposed DAC projects come to fruition, they could remove 12 million tons of CO2 by the end of the decade, according to BloombergNEF analysis.

Most companies are focused solely on removing and storing CO2. One notable exception is oil company Oxy, which is building a direct air capture plant it says will capture dramatically more CO2 than Mammoth. The company wants to use at least some of it to extract more oil, though.