(ENM) CLIMEWORKS LARGEST DAC FACILITY BREAKS GROUND

C arbon collectors at C limeworks’s Orca DAC facility in Iceland. (Photo by C limeworks)

The Intergovernmental Panel on C limate C hange (IPC C ) has warned that to limit global warming to 1.5°C , the world will need to remove billions of tonnes of carbon from the atmosphere – and that’s on top of the vast quantities of emissions cuts also required.

However, last month, on a grassy, far-flung stretch of the Icelandic tundra, an important step was taken towards that aspiration: Swiss company C limeworks broke ground on its newest and largest direct air capture and storage (DAC +S) facility to date, Mammoth.

Although it sounds straight out of a sci-fi novel, DAC is a technology that uses machines to react with and capture C O2 molecules from the atmosphere. Mammoth – set to become the world’s largest DAC facility – represents a demonstrable step in C limeworks’s ambitious scale-up plan: multi-megatonnes of carbon removal capacity by 2030, and gigatonne capacity by 2050.

C limeworks opened the world’s first DAC facility, Orca , in September 2021 – also in Iceland. Now, following a $650m equity raise earlier this year, the company plans to rapidly scale up the market’s capacity by introducing large, modular DAC facilities and investing vast sums in developing the technology. Mammoth has been designed with a nominal C O2 capture capacity of 36,000 tonnes (t) per year – an order of magnitude larger than Orca ’s 4,000t capacity – when fully operational in 18–24 months’ time.

However, to avoid climate catastrophe, DAC +S technologies need to reach gigatonne capacity at a pace that would make the solar and wind power industries blush. At the Direct Air C apture Summit in Zurich, Switzerland, in July 2022, the industry’s great and good gathered to discuss just how to scale up at such an unprecedented rate.

In Zurich, C limeworks founders Dr C hristoph Gebald and Dr Jan Wurzbacher said going giga would require $30–50bn of investment per year from 2030 onwards. That would represent 10% of the annual investment made into renewable energy capacity today: an ambitious target that will require the private and public sectors to work closely together.

Large-scale deployment will also be heavily influenced by the green energy requirements of powering DAC facilities. C onservative projections estimate the industry will require up to 25GW of wind and solar capacity per year from 2030 onwards, accounting for roughly 10% of the installed wind and solar capacity in 2021 and 3% of the annual capacity projected as of 2030.

“The gigatonne target is ambitious, but the numbers are clear: it is doable,” said Gebald. “To make this happen, corporate action, investments, policy-shapers and regulatory guidelines need to come together.”

The DAC industry will have to take a leaf out of the books of the wind and solar industries, which are praised for the remarkable speed of their commercial scale-ups. The global solar PV industry grew by a staggering 30% a year for 30 years. However, DAC needs to go faster still, requiring 45% growth a year to reach a billion tonnes by 2050. Nonetheless, Dr Greg Nemet of the University of Wisconsin and author of How Solar Became C heap, encouraged the industry to take inspiration from solar.

“The US created the [solar PV] technology, Germany created the market and C hina made it cheap,” said Nemet in Zurich. “The international flow of people, capital and machines was crucial to make it happen.

“DAC needs to go faster," he added. “When the Germans were thinking in megawatts, the C hinese were thinking in gigawatts. That is the thinking we need.” Energy Monitor - link - Oliver Gordon - link - more like this (carbon capture) - link - more like this (Iceland) - link