A direct air capture plant designed to “vacuum” up climate pollution from the atmosphere opened on Wednesday in Iceland. Dubbed “Mammoth,” it’s the world’s largest of its type, measuring 10 times bigger than “Orca,” also designed by the Swiss company Climeworks.
Using direct air capture technology, the plant sucks in air and uses chemicals to eliminate the carbon, which is then reused, turned into solid products or injected deep into the ground. Climeworks plans to do the latter, moving the carbon underground when it naturally transformed into stones and permanently locks in the carbon.
Mammoth has space for 72 “collector containers,” which are the vacuum parts of the machine that pull in carbon, with 12 already in place. They can be moved around easily, as well as stacked on top of each other. The company said, at full capacity, it has the ability to suck 36,000 tons of carbon from the atmosphere—equal to taking approximately 7,800 gas-fueled cars off the road for a year.
With concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere reaching record highs, innovative climate solutions such as direct air capture are becoming more appealing to both governments and private industry. However, it’s still considered controversial, with critics claiming it to be expensive, energy-hungry and unproven at scale. Some also say it could pull attention from enacting policies that would cut fossil fuel use.
