On Wednesday, Clayworks unveiled Iceland's second plant for capturing carbon dioxide from the air and storing it underground, which will later increase the Swiss startup's capacity to "eliminate" millions of tons of the gas by 2030.
The Mammoth plant is located hundreds of meters away from its younger brother, Orca. It is a pioneering factory that has been operating since September 2021, in the middle of a field of hardened lava covered in algae, half an hour from the capital Reykjavik.
Twelve containers in an area surrounded by mountains have begun pumping air in recent days to extract carbon dioxide through a chemical process powered by heat from the nearby ON Power geothermal power plant.
By the end of the year, 72 units will be installed around the plant to compress the gas and dissolve 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, it takes about two years to mineralize the carbon dioxide and store it in a sustainable manner, according to a process developed by the Icelandic company Carpfix.
To date, approximately ten thousand tons of carbon dioxide are captured and stored annually around the world, including four thousand tons by Orca and the remainder mainly by experimental units. Once fully operational, the Mammoth plant will capture 36,000 tons annually.
"We've gone from a few milligrams of carbon dioxide captured in our lab 15 years ago, to a few kilograms, to tons, to thousands of tons," says Jan Wurtzbacher, founder and co-director of Clayworks. By 2030, the company aims to have a production capacity of millions of tons, and expects to increase capacity to one billion tons by 2050.
About twenty other projects being developed by Clayworks and other startups are expected to reach 10 million tons by 2030. By comparison, global carbon dioxide emissions reached 40 billion tons last year.
These energy-intensive facilities are different from those that capture more concentrated carbon dioxide at the exit of industrial or energy infrastructure, but they are also different from those that reuse this gas rather than store it.
For every ton of carbon dioxide stored, Clayworks can generate a carbon credit that allows its customers (which include major corporations such as Lego, Microsoft, H&M, JPMorgan Chase, Lufthansa, and Swiss Re) to offset their greenhouse gas emissions.
These technologies have been recognized by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as a solution to removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, but they have not yet been widely incorporated into emission reduction scenarios because they are very expensive to develop and are still in the early stages with limited public funding sources
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