Removing CO2 from air: Inside the world's largest carbon removal plant
Congress has authorized billions to develop carbon removal plants right here in the United States, and one of the companies involved just opened a brand new one in Iceland. That’s where we find our Diana Olek this morning with an exclusive look. Hi, Diana. Hey Becky. Yeah, this direct air capture plant is sucking carbon out of the atmosphere at a record pace. so-called Mammoth is the newest and largest DAC plant in the world from Zurich based Climbworth. It’s about 10 times the size of its previous model. The first section is now operational and it’ll totally be complete by the end of this year. It eventually removing roughly 30,000 tons of carbon per year. Or that’s the annual emissions of about 7000 gasoline powered cars. So huge fans pull air into containers where steam is used. To separate out the carbon dioxide, that CO2 is then pumped into water like a giant soda stream and piped into the ground, where it eventually becomes rock. And this is just the beginning. This will be a trillion dollar industry if we are serious about it. Just do do the math if we want to. If we want to capture billions of tons of CO2 from the atmosphere, then we’ll we’ll end up in the end with with trillions of 30 trillions of dollars of Market Volume. Climb Works just entered the US market thanks to 1/2 a billion dollars from the Department of Energy. It is one of 78 companies in the US direct air capture space and that’s from small startups. The big names like ExxonMobil and Climb Works client roster is very wide. These companies are purchasing Carbon Removal at about $1000 per ton. The expectation is that’ll drop to about $300.00 per ton eventually. Now Mammoth has already sold 1/3 of its capacity before it’s even fully finished. What we do is raise capital for these companies so they can scale up. And when they scale up, they bring down the cost. That’s what makes it affordable more broadly. Congress appropriated 3 1/2 billion dollars for regional DAC hubs in the US through the infrastructure law. Millions more are coming from funds like the X Prize, Bill Gates, Breakthrough Energy, Lower Carbon Capital, and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. So again, we’re going to start to see this guys all across the US. So Diana, the plant is removing carbon, but what’s powering the plant? Well, actually it’s being powered by geothermal. If you can see that big puff of smoke over there, that’s actually steam that’s coming from a plant that the company is called on Power, all geothermal energy, it’s being piped through these enormous pipes that come from all the way over there through and into the climb works plant and that’s how it powers itself. Wow. OK. That is something, Diana. Thank you.