Climeworks, which launched in 2009, is among around 140 direct air
capture companies globally, but is one of the most high-profile and
best funded.
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In 2021, it opened
its Orca plant in Iceland, followed in 2024 by a second called
Mammoth. These facilities suck in air and extract carbon using
chemicals in a process powered by clean, geothermal energy.
The
carbon can then be reused or injected deep underground where it will
be naturally transformed into stone, locking it up permanently.
Climeworks makes its money by selling credits to companies to offset
their own climate pollution.
The appeal of direct air capture is
clear; to keep global warming from rising to even more catastrophic
levels means drastically cutting back on planet-heating fossil fuels.
But many scientists say the world will also need to remove some of the
carbon pollution already in the atmosphere. This can be done
naturally, for example through tree planting, or with technology like
direct air capture.
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The advantage of
direct air capture is that carbon is removed from the air immediately
and can be measured directly and accurately, said Howard Herzog,
senior research engineer at the MIT Energy Initiative.
But there
are big challenges, he told CNN. The concentration of carbon dioxide
in the atmosphere has been shooting upward, but still only makes up
about 0.04%. Herzog compares removing carbon directly from the air to
needing to find 10 red marbles in a jar of 25,000 marbles of which
24,990 are blue.
This makes the process energy-intensive and
expensive. The technology also takes time to scale.
Climeworks
hasnt come anywhere close to the full capacity of its plants. Orca
can remove a maximum of 4,000 tons of carbon a year, but it has never
captured more than 1,700 tons in a year since it opened in 2021. The
company says single months have seen a capture rate much closer to the
maximum.
The companys Mammoth plant has a maximum capacity of
36,000 tons a year but since it opened last year it has removed a
total of 805 tons, a figure which goes down to 121 tons when taking
into account the carbon produced building and running the plants.
