World’s Largest Direct Air Capture Plant Begins Operation

The world’s largest direct air capture plant has officially begun operating, bringing a new level of scale to the developing carbon capture industry.

The new Mammoth plant, operated by Swiss company Climeworks, is in Iceland, and will remove up to 36,000 metric tons of CO2 from the atmosphere annually. That is nine times the size of the company’s operating Orca plant, also in Iceland, that opened in 2021.

“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 (one billion metric tons) by 2050,” a release states.

In order to limit global warming, the International Energy Agency’s Net Zero Roadmap estimates that to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 will require removing 80 million tons of CO2 from the atmosphere annually by 2030 and more than a billion tons by 2050.

Carbon capture and storage has been a topic at the forefront of the Biden administration’s energy and climate policy, as federal legislation has provided billions for research and deployment of carbon capture technology to bring the cost down and rapidly increase the scale.

The current cost of direct air carbon capture (DAC) is estimated at $710 per metric ton, according to CDR.fyi, which measures and reports carbon removal worldwide. In order to be able to remove a gigaton of CO2 from the atmosphere each year, the cost must be reduced to $100 a metric ton over the next decade using scalable technology, and the U.S. government’s Carbon Negative Shot is trying to quickly ramp up those efforts.

Direct air capture involves using large fans that pull air into collectors made up of either solvents or sorbents that separate the CO2. It is then either pressurized and injected deep underground for permanent storage or used to make other materials, such as ammonia. CO2 can also be captured at the point of emission from large industrial emitters, like power plants or factories, which is called point-source capture. Carbon capture requires a large amount of energy, but renewable sources can be used.

The Mammoth plant sits on cooled lava, and the CO2 will be combined with water, and injected underground into basalt rock formations, which will accelerate its transformation into rock. It will be powered with geothermal energy.

An even larger DAC plant is on the horizon, as the Stratos project is under development in Texas, and expected to begin operating in 2025. The Department of Energy has also awarded $1.2 billion for the development of two regional direct air capture hubs in Louisiana and Texas.