This gas, the main cause of global warming, is then separated from the steam and compressed in a hangar where huge pipes intersect. It is finally dissolved in water, pumped into the basement and reused as much as possible, thanks to a “sort of giant soda machine”, smiles Bergur Sigfusson, head of the Carbfix company which developed this process.
Other companies must participate
A well, drilled under a small futuristic dome, allows this water to be injected at a depth of 700 meters which, in contact with the volcanic basalt constituting approximately 90% of the Icelandic subsoil, will react with the magnesium, calcium and iron contained therein. in the rock to create crystals, real solid reservoirs of CO2.
To achieve “carbon neutrality” by 2050, “it will be necessary to remove 6 to 16 billion tonnes of CO2 from the air per year, a large part of which thanks to technological solutions”, declared Wednesday Jan Wurzbacher, co-founder and co-director of Climeworks at the inauguration of Mammoth’s first 12 fan containers.
“Not just us, other companies must participate,” he added, setting his start-up of 520 employees the goal of exceeding millions of tonnes in 2030 and approaching a billion in 2050.
From kilo to gigaton
After the opening of Orca in September 2021, Climeworks plans to increase from 4,000 to 40,000 tons of CO2 captured per year during 2025 when Mammoth reaches full capacity, even if this still represents only a few seconds of current global emissions.
For the IPCC, the climate experts mandated by the UN, CO2 elimination techniques will be necessary to respect the Paris agreement, but the priority remains first to massively reduce emissions.
The role of direct air capture with storage (DACCS) remains minor in the different scenarios as its cost is high and its large-scale deployment depends on the availability of renewable energy.
Climeworks is a pioneer with the first two factories in the world to have passed the pilot stage at a cost of around $1,000 per ton captured, which Jan Wurzbacher hopes to reduce to $300 in 2030.
Around twenty new infrastructures, developed by different players and combining direct capture and storage, should be operational by 2030 worldwide with a capacity of around ten million tonnes, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA). ).
“We will need 10 billion dollars over the next decade to deploy in the United States, Canada, Norway, Oman but also Kenya,” Christoph Gebald, founder and co-director of Climeworks, told AFP, i.e. 10 times what the company has already raised.
Carbon credits
“Our first Orca factory almost looks like a Lego building compared to Mammoth,” Jan Wurzbacher half-jokes, since Lego purchased carbon credits generated by Climeworks for each ton of CO2 stored.
A way to make these solutions known to the general public, according to Christoph Gebald, who does not exclude also selling these credits to “big polluters”.
Critics of technology underline the risk of thus giving them a “license to pollute” or of diverting billions which would be better invested in technologies at hand (renewables, electrification of transport, insulation of housing, etc.).
Climeworks ensures that it targets “incompressible” emissions after reduction. The recipe is complex: optimization of costs without competing with the growing needs for renewable energy, more innovation, private and public financing, with storage infrastructures that follow.
“We are testing the injection by dissolving the CO2 in sea water,” Sandra Osk Snaebjörnsdottir, scientific manager of Carbfix, explains to AFP.
This process will make it possible to use sea water for mineralization near a port built by the Icelandic company to accommodate CO2 from other countries, with Switzerland as a guinea pig.
Read more: Capturing our CO2 emissions is as attractive as it is controversial
