Climeworks has opened the world’s largest operational direct air capture (DAC) plant to suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, with its Mammoth plant in Iceland almost ten times larger than the current record holder.
It is, of course, part of the global effort to remove CO2 from the atmosphere in order to help meet global climate goals.
DAC works by using a technical process to suck carbon dioxide out of the air and store it, usually underground. At Mammoth, the CO2 mixes with water and is injected underground - where a chemical reaction turns it to rock.
The Mammoth DAC plant has a capacity to capture 36,000 metric tons of CO2 a year and will be fully complete by the end of 2024. The removal process is energy intensive, but Climeworks' plant is perfectly located to be powered by Iceland's renewable geothermal power plants.
Climeworks says that Mammoth represents a demonstrable step in the company’s scale-up roadmap, moving Climeworks’ carbon removal capacity from thousands of tons to tens of thousands of tons per year - an important milestone on the way to megaton capacity by 2030 and gigaton by 2050.