Hellisheidi: With 72 industrial fans in Mammoth, Switzerland-based Climeworks aims to remove 36,000 tons of CO2 from the air every year to prove the place of technology in the fight against global warming.
Mammoth, the world’s largest reservoir and reservoir of carbon dioxide, began erupting this week at a dry volcano in Iceland.
Climework’s first project adds significant power to Orca, which also captures key greenhouse gases that cause climate change.
The seemingly risky site, just 50km from an active volcano, was chosen because of its proximity to the Hellisheidi geothermal power plant, which is needed to power the facility’s fans and hot chemical filters to extract CO2 using steam.
The CO2 is then separated from the steam and compressed in a hangar where large pipes are cut.
Finally, the gas dissolves in the water and is pumped underground by a “giant SodaStream,” he said.
A well drilled under the futuristic-looking dome injects water 700 meters (2,300 feet) into the volcanic basalt, which makes up 90 percent of Iceland’s underground resources, where it forms crystals with magnesium, calcium and iron in the rock – a solid reservoir of CO2.
For the world to become “carbon neutral” by 2050, “we need to remove something like 6 to 16 billion tons of CO2 from the air per year,” said Van Wurzbacher, founder and chairman of Climeworks. The world’s first 12 container fans.
“I strongly believe that this important part must be provided by a technical solution.”
“We are not alone, we are not one company. Others must also do it,” he said, adding that the startup of 520 employees aims to exceed millions of tons by 2030 and reach a billion by 2050.
Three years after launching the Orca, Climeworks will increase the 4,000 to 40,000 tons of CO2 it captures when the mammoth is at full power, but that only represents a fraction of real-world emissions.
According to the IPCC, UN climate experts, carbon sequestration technology will be necessary to meet the goals of the 2015 Paris Agreement, but reducing emissions is a top priority.
The role of direct air capture with carbon capture (DACCS) remains limited in various climate models due to its high cost, and large-scale deployment depends on the availability of renewable energy.
Climeworks is on the way with a trial at $1,000 per ton with the first two plants in the world. Wurzbacher expects the cost to drop to $300 in 2030.
More than 20 new infrastructure projects, developed by various players and directly integrating capture and storage, with a capacity of approximately 10 million tons will be distributed worldwide by 2030.
“We need about $10 billion over the next 10 years to spread our assets” in the United States, Canada, Norway, Oman and Kenya, said Climeworks founder and chairman Christoph Gebald, who said the company has grown 10 times. grown up
“Now when I stand in the Orca, I’m like, ‘Oh, it’s like a Lego brick,'” Wamzbacher said.
Lego buys carbon credits for every ton of CO2 produced by Climeworks.
Gebald said the credits are a way for the public, and he doesn’t rule out selling credits to “big polluters.”
Critics of the technology point to the risk of issuing a “license to pollute,” or wasting billions of dollars that could be better invested in simpler technologies like renewable energy or electric vehicles.
Climeworks targets “incompressible” emissions after reduction.
The recipe is complex: optimize costs without competing with renewable energy, more innovation, and the need for public and private funding.
“We are currently conducting a pilot study on the use of seawater for injection,” says Sandra Osk Snaebjorndott, Chief Scientist at CarbFix.
The move will allow Icelandic companies to use seawater for CO2 mineralization near ports built to receive CO2 from other countries.
