Swiss company Climework has announced the start of work on Mammoth, an innovative DAC plant that captures 36,000 tonnes of CO2 per year from the air.
The Mammoth plant, illustrative project. Credit: Climeworks
In Iceland, construction has begun on the Mammoth (mammoth), a large power plant intended to capture carbon dioxide (CO2) present in the atmosphere and fight once morest global warming. It’s true. Unlike conventional power plants which, to produce energy or not, emit greenhouse gases into the air, the main catalysts of climate change, this revolutionary infrastructure is “friendly” to the environment and makes it possible to reduce serious damage we have done with carbon emissions. Technically, it is a Direct Air Capture or DAC (direct air capture) system, which draws in air from the environment, filters it and removes harmful CO2.
The Mammoth factory, which will be operational within 18 to 24 months, at the end of construction will be the largest project of its type following the commissioning of Orca, the “sister” factory started last September and also built in Iceland. In fact, if Orca can capture up to 4,000 tonnes of CO2 per year, equivalent to the pollution produced by around 800 polluting cars, the new plant will be nine times more efficient, removing 36,000 tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere. This may seem like a large number, but in reality, to affect the stratospheric amounts of CO2 that we have introduced into the planet since the beginning of the industrial age, we should be able to extract 85 million tons of CO2 per year, as the indicates the International Energy Agency in a relationship. For the moment with these prototypes – there are regarding twenty in the world – we are stuck at 0.01 million per year.
The excavation area for the new factory in Iceland. Credit: Climeworks
Despite their low overall impact, these first DAC factories represent the basis for the construction of much more ambitious factories. Orca and Mammoth are both built by Swiss climate technology company Climeworks; in the press release in which the company announced the start of work on the new plant, it pointed out that the foundations were being laid to develop the first million-ton plants by 2030 and gigatonnes by 2050. a few decades, therefore, we might really be able to undo – at least in part – the very serious damage we have caused to the environment, to biodiversity and to ourselves as a result of profit and unlimited “growth”.
These factories rely on fans that suck in air, capture the CO2 with an acid filter, and funnel it through big pipes – along with tons of water – deep into the ground. Here, the carbon dioxide reacts with the basalt rocks giving life to carbonate minerals, in practice other rocks (which solidify in a few years). Some of this CO2 can also be used to produce soft drinks and fertilizers. Of course, DACs need power to operate, but their impact may be zero depending on where they are built. Both Orca and Mammoth are located near the Hellisheiði geothermal power plant and use energy from the Earth to operate. These are currently only conceptual projects with limited impact on climate change, but in the future, such plants might represent a real turning point for the climate.
