The World’s Biggest Carbon Removal Plant Just Turned 2

The International Energy Agency published a roadmap in 2021 for getting energy-related emissions down to net zero by 2050. Existing technologies could get us part way there, but after that, much of the remaining work would have to come from solution that, do not exist yet.

What will it take to quickly develop new solutions do not yet exist? It’s challenging because most proposed solutions involve costly physical infrastructure with essentially little or no commercial value.

The Swiss company, Climeworks, is meeting this challenge to remove carbon dioxide directly from the air. In September 2021, a few months after IEA’s report came out, Climeworks switched on its first commercial-scale “direct air capture” facility, a feat of engineering came to be known as “Orca” in Iceland.

The technology behind Orca is one of the leading candidates for cleaning up the carbon already covering the planet. If we manage to scale up technologies like Orca to the point where we remove more carbon than we release, we could even begin to cool the planet.

The plant is designed to captue 4,000 metric tons of carbon from the air per year. This may sound like a lot, but it is not. But what is learned from Orca could be far more valuable than its current end results. How well do these “direct air capture” machines work in the real world? How does much does it cost to run them and can they get better? Can they scale up?

Two years after powering up, Climeworks has yet to reveal how effective the technology will be. The Chief marketing officer, Julie Gosalvez says the company is small and climatically insignificant on purpose. The goal is not to make a dent in climate change–yet–but to maximize learning at minimal cost. “You want to learn when you’re small, right?” Gosalvez said. “It’s really de-risking the technology.”

From the ground, Orco looks like a warehouse or a server farm with a massive air conditioning system out back. The plant consists of eight shipping container-sized boxes arrange in a U-shape around a central building, each one equipped with many fans. When the plant is running, the fans suck air into the containers where it makes contact with a porous filter known as a “sorbent” which attracts the CO2 molecules.

Once the filers are saturated with CO2, the vents snap shut, and the containers are heated to more than 212 degrees Fahrenheit, releasing the CO2 through pipes to a secondary process called “liquefacation”, where it is compressed into a liquid. The liquid CO2 is then piped into basalt rock formations underground, where it slowly mineralizes into stone. The process requires some electricity and a lot of heat, all of which come from a carbon free source, a geothermal power plant nearby.

In January, Climeworks announced that Orca had officially fulfilled an order from Microsoft, Stripe, and Shopify. Those companies have collectively asked Climeworks to remove more than 16,000 tons of carbon.

Critics point out that this carbon removal technology is unlikely to make a meaningful difference in climate change for decades to come. Carbon removal won’t make much of a difference if the world doesn’t deploy the tools already available to reduce emissions as rapidly as possible.

We will never have the option to reverse climate change if we don’t develop solutions like Orca. In September, the International Energy Agency released an update to its net-zero report. The new report said that in the last two years, the world had made significant progress on innovation. Now, some 65% of emission reductions after 2030 could be accounted for with technologies that reach market. It cautioned that “direct-air-capture” needs to be scaled up dramatically to play the role envisaged,” in the net zero plan. Climeworks’ experience with Orca offers a glimpse of how much work is yet to be done.