Construction is due to begin on Wednesday on what could become the world’s biggest plant to capture carbon dioxide from the air and deposit it underground, the company behind the nascent green technology said.
Swiss start-up Climeworks AG said its second large-scale direct air capture (DAC) plant will be built in Iceland in 18-24 months, and have capacity to suck 36,000 tonnes of CO2 per year from the air.
That is a sliver of the 36 billion tonnes of energy-related CO2 emissions produced worldwide last year. But it is a 10-fold increase from Climeworks’ existing DAC plant, currently the world’s largest, and a leap in scale for a technology that scientists this year said is “unavoidable” if the world is to meet climate change goals. read more
The new “Mammoth” plant will contain around 80 large blocks of fans and filters that suck in air and extract its CO2, which Icelandic carbon storage firm Carbfix then mixes with water and injects underground where a chemical reaction turns it to rock. The process will be powered by a nearby geothermal energy plant.
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