A Swiss company called Climeworks has constructed a giant vacuum cleaner called Mammoth. It’s supposedly the world’s largest Direct Air Capture plant, meaning it is designed to capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere in the hope of fighting climate change.
The technology works by sucking in air that it then swirls around with chemicals to strip away its carbon. That carbon can then be injected deep underground, or it can be recycled and turned into products.
Climeworks will be injecting it underground where it will be turned into solid rock, essentially trapping the carbon in a solid state the way Han Solo was frozen in Carbonite. Climeworks will partner with an Icelandic company called Carbfix to make that happen.
This Swiss Company Built A Giant Vacuum To Suck Pollution Out Of The Air In Iceland
The technology sounds like a miracle, but before we start making any grand pronouncements, we need to find out if it’s effective at all. Critics argue that DAC tech hasn’t proven itself on a large scale, is quite expensive at the moment, and consumes an enormous amount of energy.
As the CNN article linked above explains, Mammoth is expected to remove 36,000 tons of CO2 every year. That essentially cancels out the existence of 7,800 gas-powered cars. The problem is that the cost of removing each ton is close to $1,000. That’s way higher than the $100 per ton threshold that’s seen as necessary for DAC tech to be economically viable.
Climeworks hopes to reduce the per-ton cost of $350 by 2030 and to $100 by 2050. By that point, coastlines around the world may have already consumed several cities, so let’s hope they figure out how to make it more economically viable.
Climeworks also needs to vastly improve the efficiency of DAC facilities, since the International Energy Agency says that around 70 million tons of carbon needs to be removed annually by 2030. All of the carbon removal equipment on earth at the moment is currently only capable of removing around 0.01 million metric tons of carbon every year.
Let’s hope the tech becomes much more efficient, and a lot cheaper, and there are a lot more stations built around the world as a result of those first two factors. Considering that the past 10 consecutive years have been the warmest 10 years on record, we’re going to need every idea we could possibly churn out to battle climate change.
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