Climeworks Kicks Off Operations at World’s Largest Carbon Removal Facility

The largest carbon removal facility in the world is now up and running.

Zurich, Switzerland-based Climeworks announced the opening of its Mammoth facility in Hellisheiði, Iceland Wednesday. The direct air capture and storage facility, which is Climeworks’s second, will have the ability to capture up to 36,000 tons of carbon dioxide annually once it is fully operational, making it the largest such facility in the world.

“For the very first time, the Mammoth plant has delivered carbon dioxide removal by capturing the first 200 kilograms of CO2 from the air and safely and permanently storing it underground,” Climeworks co-founder and co-CEO Jan Wurzbacher said during a press conference.

Climeworks technology works by using fans to suck air into a collector container that is outfitted with filter material that absorbs CO2. The filter, also known as sorbent, is heated with steam to remove the carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide is then separated out from the resulting mix of CO2, steam, and air, purified, dissolved in water, and then injected underground and mineralized — or essentially turned to stone for permanent storage. The facility is powered by geothermal heat and electricity that is generated at a plant nearby. Carbfix is Climeworks’ CO2 storage partner, and ON Power is its energy provider.

“This is a really unique location where we are able to have clean, renewable energy from ON Power on premises, and we can also store our CO2 just 100 meters from the site as well,” chief operating officer Douglas Chan said during the press conference.

Wurzbacher says Mammoth’s first 12 collector containers have kicked off operation, and the team aims to bring the additional 60 of the modular units online over the course of the coming year. The dozen containers have the capacity to remove 6,000 tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere per year, whereas the full 72 will be able to remove 36,000 tons annually, according Chan. By contrast, Climeworks’s existing Orca facility, which is located near Mammoth in Hellisheiði, has just eight collector containers that are capable of collecting 4,000 tons of CO2 annually. In order to achieve its ambition of removing one million tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere each year, Climeworks says it would need roughly 250 plants similar to Orca, versus about 28 plants similar to Mammoth.

Chan said Climeworks has no shortage of customers, having already sold “a third of the lifetime capacity” of the Mammoth plant. And Wurzbacher said Climeworks’s direct air capture agreements extend over a period of years, typically 10, during which time the company agrees to remove a certain quantity of tons of carbon dioxide for a customer every year. Mammoth was designed to operate for up to 25 years, although Chan said the company could evaluate and upgrade its technology in that time.

“This does tell us two things. One, the demand is in the market, and two, that we do believe that as we scale up and bring more capacity to the market, that we will be able to sell this capacity to help bring these plans to life,” he said during the press conference.

Climeworks has a headquarters in Austin and an expanding footprint across the U.S., where it plans to triple its workforce by the close of 2024. In the U.S., the company is involved in three direct air capture hubs in Louisiana, California, and South Dakota that are eligible for upwards of $600 million in funding from the Department of Energy, which announced it will put $1.2 billion toward a host of direct air capture projects across the country.

Carbon removal is becoming an increasingly attractive option for meeting climate goals, as global leaders step up efforts to combat climate change. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change wrote in a 2022 report that the deployment of carbon removal technologies is “unavoidable if net zero CO2 or [greenhouse gas] emissions are to be achieved.” Critics, however, argue the technology is costly and distracts from efforts to cut down on fossil fuel usage and greenhouse gas emissions.

Wurzbacher said the cost for Climeworks to remove a ton of carbon dioxide is currently “closer to the $1,000 per ton market,” but said the company anticipates it can cut costs to “the order of $100 per ton” by 2050 if its goals to scale move according to plan.