Climeworks, a carbon-capture startup, has opened the world’s largest direct air carbon dioxide capture and storage system in Iceland. The plant will take carbon dioxide from the air and permanently turn it into stone underground.
The $15 million facility, named Orca, is the size of two shipping containers and will take carbon dioxide directly from the air and bury it as rocks deep underground, using technology from Climeworks’ Icelandic partner Carbfix. Orca has the capacity to remove 4,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere this way each year. The number equates roughly to the emissions from 870 cars or 9,281 consumed barrels of oil.
”With this success, we are prepared to rapidly ramp up our capacity in the next few years,” Jan Wurzbacher, co-CEO and co-founder of Climeworks, said. “Achieving global net-zero emissions is still a long way to go, but with Orca, we believe that Climeworks has taken one significant step closer to achieving that goal.’’
