The World’s Largest Facility Against the Climate Crisis Opens: What is Atmospheric Carbon Suction Technology?
The World’s Largest Facility Against the Climate Crisis Opens: What is Atmospheric Carbon Suction Technology?
The world’s largest facility, which started operations in Iceland, plans to destroy carbon using carbon dioxide extraction technology from the atmosphere. Here are the details!
The world’s largest facility designed to completely remove the carbon pollution that warms the earth from the atmosphere began operating in Iceland on Wednesday by the Swiss company Climeworks.
The facility, which Climeworks calls “Mammoth”, has managed to attract attention because it has an area and usage 10 times larger than Orca, which started operating in 2021.
The World’s Largest Facility “Mammoth”
Climeworks started building Mammoth in June 2022 and says it is the world’s largest facility. It has ample space for 72 collector containers – vacuum parts of the machine that capture carbon from the air – that can be easily moved. And more are planned to be added in the next few months.
A technology designed to extract carbon by directly capturing and sucking in air can inject the extracted carbon underground and turn it into solids for reuse.
At full capacity, Mammoth can extract 36,000 tons of carbon from the atmosphere per year, which is equivalent to taking about 7,800 gasoline-powered vehicles off the road for a year, Climeworks told Climeworks.
Climeworks did not disclose an exact cost for the carbon extracted. But it said it was close to $1,000 per ton. The company sees this as an important step in making the technology accurate and viable.
Facility Considered a Success but Still Insufficient
Also supporting the work, Stuart Haszeldine, professor of carbon capture and storage at the University of Edinburgh, said the new plant is an important step in the fight against climate change.
According to the International Energy Agency, all the carbon removal equipment in the world is insufficient to reduce existing carbon. Despite plans to increase the number of facilities to reduce carbon pollution, there is still a fraction of what is needed.
Finally, CEO Jan Wurzbacher said Mammoth is just one of the final stages of a plan to increase carbon removal by 1 million tons per year by 2030 and 1 billion tons by 2050.
