– Swiss start-up Climeworks inaugurates its second factory in Iceland
With the Mammoth project, Climeworks is increasing its ambitions to capture CO₂ in the air. Its CEO Jan Wurzbacher has been celebrating the process’s rise in power over the past 15 years.
The Mammoth factory of Swiss start-up Climeworks, in Iceland.
@Climeworks
The fans are whirring: the second Icelandic plant for capturing CO₂ in the air and storing it underground was unveiled on Wednesday by the Swiss start-up Climeworks, which is thus increasing its capacities tenfold and hopes to “eliminate” millions of tonnes of this gas. by 2030.
Mammoth is located a few hundred meters from its little sister, Orca, a pioneering factory in operation since September 2021, in the middle of a field of solidified lava covered in moss, half an hour from the capital Reykjavik.
Surrounded by mountains, twelve containers have begun in recent days to ventilate air to extract CO₂ using a chemical process, powered by heat from the neighboring ON Power geothermal plant. By the end of the year, 72 units will be installed around the plant which then compresses the gas and dissolves it in water before injecting it underground.
At a depth of 700 meters, in contact with basalt, a porous volcanic rock rich in calcium and magnesium, CO₂ takes around two years to mineralize and is thus stored sustainably, according to a process developed by the Icelandic company Carbfix.
Some 10,000 tonnes of CO₂ have so far been captured and then stored per year worldwide, including 4,000 by Orca and the rest mainly by experimental pilot units. Once fully operational, Mammoth will absorb 36,000 tons per year.
“We went from a few milligrams of CO₂ captured in our laboratory 15 years ago to a few kilos, then tons and thousands of tons,” rejoices Jan Wurzbacher, founder and co-director of Climeworks. By 2030, the company is targeting a capacity of several million tonnes and foresees a billion for 2050.
Around twenty other projects developed by Climeworks and other start-ups should make it possible to reach 10 million tonnes by 2030. Compare to the 40 billion tonnes emitted last year worldwide.
These energy-intensive factories are distinguished from those which capture the more concentrated CO2 at the outlet of industrial or energy infrastructures but also from those which reuse this gas instead of storing it.
For each tonne of CO₂ stored, Climeworks can thus generate a carbon credit which allows its customers (Lego, Microsoft, H&M, Swiss Re, JP Morgan Chase, Lufthansa, etc.) to offset their greenhouse gas emissions.
These technologies are recognized by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as a solution for eliminating CO₂ from the atmosphere but are not yet widely integrated into emission reduction scenarios as their development is extremely expensive. , is still in the embryonic stage with limited public funding.
AFP
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