Climeworks, which launched in 2009, is among around 140 direct air capture companies globally, but is one of the most high-profile and best funded.
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In 2021, it opened its Orca plant in Iceland, followed in 2024 by a second called Mammoth. These facilities suck in air and extract carbon using chemicals in a process powered by clean, geothermal energy.
The carbon can then be reused or injected deep underground where it will be naturally transformed into stone, locking it up permanently. Climeworks makes its money by selling credits to companies to offset their own climate pollution.
The appeal of direct air capture is clear; to keep global warming from rising to even more catastrophic levels means drastically cutting back on planet-heating fossil fuels. But many scientists say the world will also need to remove some of the carbon pollution already in the atmosphere. This can be done naturally, for example through tree planting, or with technology like direct air capture.
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The advantage of direct air capture is that carbon is removed from the air immediately and “can be measured directly and accurately,” said Howard Herzog, senior research engineer at the MIT Energy Initiative.
But there are big challenges, he told CNN. The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has been shooting upward, but still only makes up about 0.04%. Herzog compares removing carbon directly from the air to needing to find 10 red marbles in a jar of 25,000 marbles of which 24,990 are blue.
This makes the process energy-intensive and expensive. The technology also takes time to scale.
Climeworks hasn’t come anywhere close to the full capacity of its plants. Orca can remove a maximum of 4,000 tons of carbon a year, but it has never captured more than 1,700 tons in a year since it opened in 2021. The company says single months have seen a capture rate much closer to the maximum.
The company’s Mammoth plant has a maximum capacity of 36,000 tons a year but since it opened last year it has removed a total of 805 tons, a figure which goes down to 121 tons when taking into account the carbon produced building and running the plants.
