The world's "largest" plant designed to absorb planet-warming pollution from the atmosphere began operating in Iceland on Wednesday.
“Mammoth” is the second commercial direct carbon capture plant from the air that Swiss company Climeworks has opened in the country and is 10 times larger than its predecessor, Orca, which started operating in 2021…
Climeworks plans to transport the coal underground where it will naturally turn into stone, locking the material away permanently… The entire operation will be powered by Iceland's abundant, clean geothermal energy.
Η Climeworks started building the Mammoth in June 2022 and the company says it is the largest such plant in the world.
It has a modular design with space for 72 “collectors” – the parts of the machine that capture carbon from the air – which can be stacked on top of each other and moved around easily.
There are currently 12 of them, with more to come in the coming months. Mammoth will be able to pull 36.000 tons of carbon from the atmosphere annually at full capacity, according to Climeworks. That's the equivalent of taking about 7.800 natural gas cars off the road for a year…
But all the world's carbon removal equipment is only capable of removing about 0,01 million metric tons of carbon per year, far short of the 70 million tons per year needed by 2030 to meet global climate goals, according to the International Energy Agency .
Jan Wurzbacher, the company's co-founder and co-CEO, said Mammoth is just the latest stage in Climeworks' project to pull up to 1 million tons of carbon from the atmosphere annually by 2030 and 1 billion tons by 2050.
The company's plans include new DAC units in Kenya and the United States.