Source: AFP
With its 72 industrial Mammoth fans, Swiss start-up Climeworks aims to extract 36,000 tonnes of CO2 from the air annually to bury underground, as it strives to prove the technology has a place in the fight against global warming.
Mammoth, the largest carbon capture and storage facility of its kind, began operations this week at a dormant volcano in Iceland.
It adds significant capacity to Climework’s first Orca project, which also absorbs the primary greenhouse gases fueling climate change from the atmosphere.
Just 50 kilometers (31 miles) from an active volcano, the seemingly dangerous site was chosen because of its proximity to the Hellisheidi geothermal power plant that is needed to power the facility’s fans and heat chemical filters to extract CO2 with water vapor.
The CO2 is then separated from the steam and compressed in a hangar where huge pipes intersect.
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Finally, the gas is dissolved in water and pumped underground with a “kind of giant SodaStream,” said Bergur Sigfusson, head of system development for Carbfix, which developed the process.
A well, drilled under a futuristic dome, injects water 700 meters (2,300 feet) down into volcanic basalt that makes up 90 percent of Iceland’s subsoil where it reacts with magnesium, calcium and iron in the rock to form crystals — solid reservoirs of CO2.
For the world to achieve “carbon neutrality” by 2050, “we would have to remove about six to 16 billion tons of CO2 from the air annually,” said Jan Wurzbacher, co-founder and co-director of Climeworks at the inauguration of the first 12 container fans in Mammoth.
“I strongly believe that a large part of this … has to be covered by technical solutions,” he said.
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From kilos to gigatons
“Not just us, not just us as a company. That’s what others should be doing,” he added, setting a goal for his 520-employee startup to surpass one million tons by 2030 and approach one billion by 2050.
Source: AFP
Three years after Orca’s opening, Climeworks will increase capacity from 4,000 to 40,000 tons of CO2 captured when Mammoth is at full capacity — but that represents mere seconds of real-world emissions.
According to the IPCC, the UN’s climate expert body, carbon removal technologies will be necessary to meet the goals of the 2015 Paris Agreement — but significantly reducing emissions is the priority.
The role of direct air capture with carbon storage (DACCS) remains small in various climate models due to its high cost and its large-scale development depends on the availability of renewable energy.
Climeworks is a pioneer with the first two plants in the world to get past the pilot stage at a cost of about $1,000 per ton of capture. Wurzbacher expects the cost to drop to just $300 in 2030.
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More than 20 new infrastructure projects, developed by various players and combining direct capture and storage, should be operational worldwide by 2030 with a capacity of around 10 million tonnes.
“We probably need about $10 billion going forward over the next decade to develop our assets” in the United States, Canada, Norway, Oman and also Kenya, said Christoph Gebald, co-founder and co-director of Climeworks, 10 times more than the company. has already increased.
Carbon credits
“When I stand in the Orca now I think, ‘Oh, that looks a bit like a Lego brick.’ It’s a small thing compared to the Mammoth,” Wurzbacher said.
Lego bought carbon credits produced by Climeworks for every ton of CO2 saved.
Source: AFP
The credits are one way to get the solution out to the general public, said Gebald, who did not rule out selling credits to “big polluters” as well.
Critics of the technology point to the risk of being given a “license to pollute” or diverting billions of dollars that could be better invested in readily available technology such as renewable energy or electric vehicles.
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Climeworks claims to aim for “uncompressed” broadcasts, after reduction.
The recipe is complex: optimize costs without competing with the growing need for renewables, more innovation, public and private funding, with storage infrastructure to follow.
“We are currently piloting using seawater for injection,” said Sandra Osk Snaebjorndottir, chief scientist at Carbfix.
This process would allow seawater to be used to mineralize CO2, near a port the Icelandic company built to receive carbon dioxide from other countries.
Source: AFP