Inside the global push to vacuum CO2 out of the atmosphere

The world’s largest carbon removal plant is now open for business. This week, Swiss climate tech company Climeworks officially began operating its Mammoth plant in Iceland, which represents a stepping stone to even bigger carbon removal plans in the US.

Mammoth is the latest industrial plant built to suck carbon dioxide out of the air like a giant vacuum cleaner, a process known as direct air capture (DAC). To keep the captured CO2 from escaping, Climeworks partnered with local company Carbfix to lock the gas away deep underground, where it eventually becomes solid rock.

• Once construction is fully completed later this year, Mammoth will be able to capture ~36,000 metric tons of CO2/year – nearly 10x as much as its predecessor, which formerly held the world record.
• However, that’s a relatively small figure in the grand scheme of emissions reduction, considering Microsoft alone emitted ~13 million metric tons of CO2 in 2022.

Climeworks and similar companies are taking advice from Matthew McConaughey and looking to pump those rookie numbers up. How? By turning their attention to the US, where the federal government is distributing $3.5 billion in funds from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law for the development of at least four DAC hubs. Each of these projects has a goal to capture at least 1 million metric tons of CO2/year.

• Two such projects have received a collective $1.2 billion in government funding to date, including an initiative in southwestern Louisiana that uses Climeworks’ DAC technology.

👀 Looking ahead… If all of the 22 proposed DAC projects around the world come to fruition, they could remove 12 million metric tons of CO2 by the end of the decade, per a BloombergNEF analysis. Overall, the global carbon capture industry is projected to reach 279 million metric tons of CO2 removal/year by 2030.