Exploring Carbon Removal: The Climeworks Case

When exploring an emerging technology like Climeworks’ Direct Air Capture, it pays to read multiple articles.

MIT Technology Review (https://www.technologyreview.com/) has identified Climeworks as one of 2022’s Top 10 Breakthrough Technologies.

The Orca project, located in Iceland, is Climeworks’ most ambitious to date. Its technology sucks huge quantities of air through special filters which extract CO2 from the air. The CO2 is then combined with water to produce a fizzy cocktail which is then pumped into basalt formations located deep underground. The basalt gradually absorbs the CO2, and within two or three years this former gas becomes a permanent part of the rock formations.

The process requires lots of energy. The green energy is supplied by geothermal power plants, which are abundant in the region.

The MIT article is quite informative, of course. Even so, a close reading of articles from other sources provides details that can enrich your understanding of the technology.

TIP: Google® climeworks iceland

Excerpts from some of the results of this search appear below.

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Climate change
Carbon removal factory (MIT Technology Review)

A large plant that captures carbon from the air could help create an industry the world needs to avoid dangerous levels of warming this century.
Kristján Maack, February 23, 2022
Key players
Climeworks, Carbon Engineering, Carbon Collect

The facility, outside Reykjavik, Iceland, can capture 4,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide every year. Large fans suck air through a filter, where materials bind with CO2 molecules. The company’s partner, Carbfix, then mixes the carbon dioxide with water and pumps it underground, where it reacts with basalt rock and eventually turns into stone. The facility runs entirely on carbon-free electricity, mainly from a nearby geothermal power plant.

Each module at Orca is made up of a dozen carbon removal units. Air passes through grates and over a filter that traps carbon dioxide with adsorbent chemicals. When the filters are full, grates close across the front of the unit and pipes pump heat into the enclosed space, releasing CO2 from the filters. The carbon dioxide is then pumped to an area where it's prepared for storage before the gates open again to restart the process.

source: https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/02/23/1044972/carbon-removal-factory-climate-change/
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The world is banking on giant carbon-sucking fans to clean our climate mess. It's a big risk. (CNN)

By Ivana Kottasová, CNN
Wed October 20, 2021

The Orca plant — its name derived from the Icelandic word for energy — is what is known as a "direct air carbon capture facility," and its creator and operator, Swiss firm Climeworks, say it's the world's largest.

The aim of Orca is to help the world reach net zero emissions — where we remove as much greenhouse gas from the atmosphere as we emit. Scientists say that simply cutting back on our use of fossil fuels won't be enough to avert catastrophe; we need to also clean up some of the mess we've been making for hundreds of years.
"We, as humans, have disturbed the balance of the natural carbon cycle. So it's our job to restore the balance," said Edda Aradóttir, a chemical engineer and the CEO of the Icelandic company Carbfix, which carries out a process to store the captured CO2 underground.
How the 'magic' happens
The Orca machines use chemical filters to capture the heat-trapping gas. The "fans," or metal collectors, suck in the surrounding air and filter out the CO2 so it can be stored.
Carbon dioxide's concentration in Earth's atmosphere has likely not been this high at any other point in the last 3 million years, according to NASA scientists. But at levels over 410 parts per million, to actually capture a meaningful amount of CO2, a huge amount of air needs to pass through these machines.
"What is happening is that CO2 in the air is an acid molecule and inside the collectors we have alkaline. Acids and alkaline neutralize each other," Climeworks co-CEO Christoph Gebald told CNN. "That's the magic that happens."
In two to four hours, the surface of the filter is almost completely saturated with CO2 molecules — as if there are "no parking slots left," as Gebald puts it.
"Then we stop the airflow and we heat the internal structure to roughly 100 degrees Celsius, and at that temperature, the CO2 molecules are released again from the surface, they jump off back to the gas phase and we suck it out."
Because of the high temperature that is needed for the process, the Orca plant requires a lot of energy. That's a problem that's easily solved in Iceland, where green geothermal power is abundant. But it could become a challenge to scale globally.
The machines at Orca are just one way to remove CO2 from the air. Other methods involve capturing the gas at source — like the chimney of a cement factory — or removing it from the fuel before combustion. That involves exposing the fuel, such as coal or natural gas, to oxygen or steam under high temperature and pressure to convert it into a mixture of hydrogen and CO2. The hydrogen is then separated and can be burned with much lower carbon emissions. However, methane emissions could be a problem when the process is used on natural gas.
The carbon that comes out of CCS can be used for other purposes, for example to make objects out of plastic instead of using oil, or in the food industry, which uses CO2 to put the fizz in drinks. But the amount that needs to be captured vastly exceeds the world's demand for CO2 in other places, which means the majority of it will need to be "stored."
Opponents of CCS argue the technology is simply another way for the fossil fuel industry to delay its inevitable demise.
While they are not involved in the Orca plant, fossil fuel giants dominate the sector. According to a database complied by the Global CCS Institute, a pro-CCS think tank, an overwhelming majority of the world's 89 CCS projects that are currently in operation, being built or in advanced stages of development are operated by oil, gas and coal companies.
Oil companies have had and used the technology to capture carbon for decades, but they haven't exactly done it to reduce emissions — ironically, their motivation has been to extract even more oil. That's because the CO2 they remove can be re-injected into oil fields that are nearly depleted, and help squeeze out 30-60% more oil than with normal methods. The process is known as "enhanced oil recovery" and it is one of the main reasons why CCS remains controversial.
Full text source: https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/20/world/carbon-capture-storage-climate-iceland-intl-cmd/index.html
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Jon Gertner, Yale Environment 360
The dream of carbon air capture edges toward reality in Iceland (Yale Environment 360)
Science Sep 21, 2021

In early September, at an industrial facility located about 25 miles southeast of Reykjavik, Iceland, the Swiss company Climeworks will mark the opening of a new project named “Orca.” At least in a conventional sense, Orca doesn’t actually make anything. It is comprised of eight elongated boxes that resemble wood-clad tanks. Each of these boxes — known as “collectors” — is roughly the size of a tractor trailer, and each is festooned with 12 whirring fans that draw a stream of air inside. Within the collectors, a chemical agent known as a sorbent will capture CO2 contained in the air wafting through. Periodically, the surface of the sorbent will fill up. And at that point the CO2 trapped within it will need to be released. At Orca, this task is accomplished with a blast of heat, which is sourced from a nearby hydrothermal vent. The extracted CO2 will then be piped from the collector boxes to a nearby processing facility, where it will be mixed with water and diverted to a deep underground well.

And there it will rest. Underground. Forever, presumably. The carbon dioxide captured from the Icelandic air will react with basalt rocks and begin a process of mineralization that takes several years, but it will never function as a heat-trapping atmospheric gas again.

Climeworks maintains that Orca, once it’s running around the clock, will remove up to 4,000 metric tons of CO2 from the atmosphere each year. And there isn’t much reason to doubt the facility can achieve this feat. For one thing, the technology for the plant, known as direct air capture, or DAC, is a variation on ideas that have been utilized over the course of half a century in submarines and spacecraft: Employ chemical agents to “scrub” the excess CO2 out of the air; dispose of it; then repeat. More to the point, perhaps, is the fact that Climeworks has already built smaller, less sophisticated plants in mainland Europe, which have in turn pulled hundreds of tons of CO2 per year from ambient air.

What seems most significant about Orca, then, is how it represents the possibility that direct air capture has moved closer to something resembling a commercial business. Climeworks now has dozens of customers — individual consumers who have purchased carbon removal services directly from the company, as well as corporations, like the insurance giant Swiss Re — who will pay for the permanent carbon offsets that will be buried underneath Icelandic soil. What’s more, the Orca facility will be the largest functioning direct air capture plant in the world to date — by the company’s estimation, it represents a “scale-up” of its carbon removal efforts by about eighty-fold over the course of four years.

And yet, Climeworks and Orca will likely soon be eclipsed. Plans for even larger DAC plants — one in the U.S. Southwest, slated for completion at the end of 2024; another in Scotland, to be finished about a year after the American project — will be built by a competitor, Carbon Engineering, of British Columbia. Employing a somewhat different technology, Carbon Engineering’s facilities, as initially planned, will be powered by renewable energy and will eventually each remove, on net, about a million metric tons of carbon dioxide a year from the atmosphere.

“In our view, this will decisively answer the question: Is direct air capture feasible at large scale and affordable cost,” Steve Oldham, the CEO of Carbon Engineering, told me recently. “As I see it, we are out of academic research and feasibility and now into engineering reality.”

One concern is that DAC might prove increasingly controversial if it erodes global efforts at mitigation. If carbon can effectively and affordably be removed from the air, in other words, it may slow the rush to eliminate fossil fuels. For now, at least, that remains a hypothetical risk. And Oldham and colleagues in his field told me they believe new state and government policies are moving his industry in the right direction. A U.S. tax credit for companies called 45Q, for instance, is helping to subsidize some of the high costs of carbon capture and sequestration. The possible passage of a federal infrastructure bill in the coming months may likewise allocate as much as $3.5 billion to help construct large DAC plants. Meanwhile, a push from the private sector has been a boon to fledgling DAC firms. A slew of tech companies interested in becoming carbon neutral or carbon negative — Microsoft, Stripe, and Shopify are the most prominent — have invested substantial sums in Climeworks and Carbon Engineering. Their commitments have, in turn, helped the companies move forward with planning and construction.

At the same time, investment dollars are beginning to flow into “next generation” DAC ideas. The U.S. Department of Energy recently invested more than $12 million in a slew of early-stage approaches and component technologies. A number of venture firms, notably Breakthrough Energy and LowerCarbon Capital, have placed tens of millions more into startups. One new firm, San Francisco-based Noya, utilizes existing power plant cooling towers to create a “distributed” system of direct air capture stations that the company hopes will prove cheaper than building DAC plants from scratch; another, a Detroit-based startup known as Remora, fits carbon-capturing sorbent technology on trucking rigs to vacuum up CO2 on long hauls. As a sweetener, a new $100 million X-prize, sponsored by Elon Musk, involves a four-year global competition that will reward the most promising young carbon removal firms for ideas that can be scaled up to gigatons per year.

So within the industry, there is plenty of money and plenty of enthusiasm. What is in short abundance, in light of the hottest month on record and near-term projections for future global temperatures, is plenty of time.

source: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/the-dream-of-carbon-air-capture-edges-toward-reality-in-iceland
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The Washington Post
September 8, 2021
Climate Solutions
$$The world’s biggest plant to capture CO2 from the air just opened in Iceland (Washington Post)
The Orca, an installation built by Climeworks, will capture 4,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide per year — and serve as a blueprint for similar technology.
By Michael Birnbaum

By 2050, humanity will need to pull nearly a billion metric tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere every year through direct air capture technology to achieve carbon neutral goals, according to International Energy Agency recommendations from earlier this year. The plant in Iceland will be able to capture 4,000 metric tons annually — just a tiny fraction of what will be necessary, but one that Climeworks, the company that built it, says can grow rapidly as efficiency improves and costs decrease.

source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2021/09/08/co2-capture-plan-iceland-climeworks/
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Smithsonian
$$World’s Largest Carbon Capture Plant Opens in Iceland (Smithsonian)
‘Orca’ will use geothermal energy to pull thousands of metric tons of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and pump it underground
Ben Panko
September 9, 2021

The world's largest carbon capture plant has come online in Iceland, as entrepreneurs and environmentalists seek to build momentum for technology they see as key to fighting the increasingly dire threat of climate change.

Named "Orca," the facility is located on a lava plateau in southwest Iceland, reports Michael Birnbaum for the Washington Post. Using a system of fans, filters and heaters and powered by a nearby geothermal power plant, it has the capacity to pull 4,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide out of the air each year and pump it into underground caverns where the gas, mixed with water, will slowly become stone as it cools.

Orca's method of carbon capture, called "direct air capture," is a relatively new technique, which uses chemical reactions to remove CO2 from the atmosphere, reports Audrey Carleton for Motherboard. The method contrasts with the more commonly used technologies that capture carbon emissions directly at their sources. It's also currently incredibly expensive, with a price tag of roughly $600 to $800 per metric ton of carbon dioxide, the Post reports.

Direct air capture's high costs, relative lack of track record, and energy requirements have made it a controversial proposition among environmentalists, Motherboard reports. This year, hundreds of environmental groups signed an open letter to leaders in the American and Canadian governments arguing that carbon capture is not a solution to climate change because it gives cover to fossil fuel companies, among other reasons.

Ben Panko is a staff writer for Smithsonian.com
source: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/worlds-largest-carbon-capture-plant-opens-iceland-180978620/
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The New York Times
$$Is Carbon Capture Here? (New York Times)

By Peter Wilson
Published Oct. 31, 2021Updated Nov. 4, 2021

This article is part of a special report on Climate Solutions, which looks at efforts around the world to make a difference.

Mr. Hitz and his small team of technicians are running Orca, the world’s biggest commercial direct air capture (DAC) device, which in September began pulling carbon dioxide out of the air at a site 20 miles from the capital, Reykjavik.
As the wind stirred up clouds of steam billowing from the nearby Hellisheidi geothermal power plant, a gentle hum came from Orca, which resembles four massive air-conditioners, each the size of one shipping container sitting on top of another.

Each container holds 12 large round fans powered by renewable electricity from the geothermal plant, which suck air into steel catchment boxes where carbon dioxide or CO2, the main greenhouse gas behind global warming, chemically bonds with a sandlike filtering substance.

When heat is applied to that filtering substance it releases the CO2, which is then mixed with water by an Icelandic company called Carbfix to create a drinkable fizzy water.

Several other firms are striving to pull carbon from the air in the United States and elsewhere, but only here in the volcanic plateaus of Iceland is the CO2 being turned into that sparkling cocktail and injected several hundred meters down into basalt bedrock.

Carbfix has discovered that its CO2 mix will chemically react with basalt and turn to rock in just two or three years instead of the centuries that the mineralization process was believed to take, so it takes the CO2 that Climeworks’ DAC captures and pumps it into the ground through wells protected from the harsh environment by steel igloos that could easily serve as props in a space movie.

It is a permanent solution, unlike the planting of forests which can release their carbon by rotting, being cut down or burning in a warming planet. Even the CO2 that other firms are planning to inject into empty oil and gas fields could eventually leak out, some experts fear, but once carbon turns to rock it is not going anywhere.

Orca is billed as the world’s first commercial DAC unit because the 4,000 metric tons of CO2 it can extract each year have been paid for by 8,000 people who have subscribed online to remove some carbon, and by firms including Stripe, Swiss Re, Audi and Microsoft.

Dr. Gebald, a soft-spoken 38-year-old, began working on DAC with a fellow German, Jan Wurzbacher, while they were studying mechanical engineering in Switzerland. They formed their company in 2009 but Dr. Gebald says their big breakthrough was the release of the U.N.-led Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report in 2018, setting out the need for reaching net zero emissions by 2050 if global warming was to be kept to 1.5 degrees. Crucially, it also produced the first scientific consensus that some emissions would be too hard to eradicate so all viable paths to “net zero” would rely on removing some previous emissions.

Dr. Gebald believes that machine-based solutions may have to carry half that workload because the potential for most nature-based options are limited by a shortage of arable land.

A fundamental difference from wind and solar power is that they were ultimately driven by the profit motive because once subsidies had helped to make them competitive they were producing a valuable asset: cheap electricity.

DAC’s main “output” — helping to save the planet — must instead rely on government supports such as emission credits and taxes on carbon emitters, hence the importance of meetings such as the Glasgow COP.

source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/31/climate/is-carbon-capture-here.html
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$$World’s biggest machine capturing carbon from air turned on in Iceland (Agence France-Presse)
Operators say the Orca plant can suck 4,000 tonnes of CO2 out of the air every year and inject it deep into the ground to be mineralised
Agence France-Presse
Wed 8 Sep 2021

The world’s largest plant designed to suck carbon dioxide out of the air and turn it into rock has started running in Iceland, the companies behind the project – Switzerland’s Climeworks and Iceland’s Carbfix – said on Wednesday.

The plant, named Orca after the Icelandic word “orka” meaning “energy”, consists of four units, each made up of two metal boxes that look like shipping containers.

Constructed by Climeworks, when operating at capacity the plant will draw 4,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide out of the air every year, the companies say.

According to the US Environmental Protection Agency, that equates to the emissions from about 870 cars. The plant cost between US$10 and 15m to build, Bloomberg reported.

To collect the carbon dioxide, the plant uses fans to draw air into a collector, which has a filter material inside. Once the filter material is filled with CO2, the collector is closed and the temperature is raised to release the CO2 from the material, after which the highly concentrated gas can be collected.

Then, Carbfix’s process mixes the CO2 with water and injects it at a depth of 1,000 metres into the nearby basalt rock where it is mineralised. Carbfix says the CO2-water mixture turns to stone in about two years, and hydride of sulphur (HS2), within four months.

Proponents of so-called carbon capture and storage believe these technologies can become a major tool in the fight against climate change.

Critics however argue that the technology is still prohibitively expensive and might take decades to operate at scale.

source: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/sep/09/worlds-biggest-plant-to-turn-carbon-dioxide-into-rock-opens-in-iceland-orca
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Bloomberg Green
$$World’s Largest Carbon-Sucking Plant Starts Making Tiny Dent in Emissions (Bloomberg Green)
Startups Climeworks and Carbfix are working together to store carbon dioxide removed from the air deep underground.
By Ragnhildur Sigurdardottir and Akshat Rathi
September 8, 2021
In Iceland’s barren landscape, a new container-like structure has risen alongside plumes of steam near the Hellisheidi geothermal power plant. Its job is to reverse some of the damage carbon-dioxide emissions are doing to the planet.

The facility, called Orca and built by Swiss startup Climeworks AG, will suck CO₂ out of the air. Icelandic startup Carbfix will then pump it deep into the ground, turning it into stone forever. Of the 16 installations Climeworks has built across Europe, Orca is the only one that permanently disposes of the CO₂ rather than recycling it.
source: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-09-08/inside-the-world-s-largest-direct-carbon-capture-plant
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$$Giant fans made by this Swiss startup are sucking planet-warming CO2 right out of the sky (Fortune)
By Bernhard Warner
March 1, 2022
After spending a good chunk of his university years backcountry skiing on the glaciers around the French-Swiss border town of Chamonix, Christoph Gebald figured he knew a thing or two about extreme weather. But then came this winter—in Iceland.

When he spoke to Fortune in mid-February, the engineer-turned-entrepreneur went straight into the weather report: Gale-force winds. Blizzards. Repeat. “Operating under those conditions is a bit challenging,” said Gebald, cofounder and co-CEO of the Swiss green-tech startup Climeworks AG.

In September, Climeworks, with the help of its Icelandic partners Carbfix and ON Power, made climate-science history when they flipped the switch on Orca, the world’s first and largest direct air capture (DAC) and carbon storage installation.

The basic idea around DAC is that giant fans can be engineered to suck planet-warming CO2 out of the sky; on a very basic level, think of how an air purifier hoovers up dust and funky odors in your living room. What sets DAC apart is that it collects all that bad air, and returns it deep below the earth, usually storing it in geological formations.

Which brings us to Iceland.
Climeworks chose the volcanic island nation in the North Atlantic for a few reasons. Iceland has an abundant supply of clean geothermal energy to power the lungs of Orca—its massive fans. It also has plenty of basalt rock. The big by-product of DAC is usually a liquefied carbon dioxide mixture, which needs to be carefully disposed of. In the case of Orca, that CO2 soup gets pumped into the layer of basalt below ground. There, the basalt acts as a sturdy cap. Within a few years, the CO2 mixture will turn to stone, Climeworks says, with little to no risk that it will return to the atmosphere, where it would foul the air and warm up the planet.

Still, a growing list of corporations looking to reduce their carbon footprint are teaming with Climeworks. Last year, the insurance giant Swiss Re signed a 10-year carbon removal purchase agreement, in essence paying Climeworks to suck carbon out of the sky to help it meet its net-zero goals. Microsoft, Square, Ocado, and Boston Consulting Group are also paying Climeworks to sequester carbon over the next decade. Individuals who feel guilty about their carbon footprint can buy carbon-reduction subscriptions from the company. Want to remove a monthly 30 kilograms of CO2 from the atmosphere as you begin to fly around the world again? That subscription package will cost you €30 (or about $34) per month.

That business line started innocently enough, Gebald says. When he and his business partner and former university roommate, Jan Wurzbacher, would share what they were working on, they’d get enthusiastic responses from friends and family. That’s when the light bulb went off. “Hey, we can democratize climate action,” he recalls thinking. “We take the CO2 back out of the air, full stop, and they can pay us for that. That’s sort of how the invention of the carbon-dioxide-removal-as-a-service model was born.” [Editor’s note: like paying a company for garbage removal]

How DAC works
Orca’s fans are designed to suck the ambient air into a special chamber. There, filters isolate and strip out the CO2 pollutants. The final stage: The pristine air is blown out the other end into the wild. A crucial middle step in the process: The carbon particles that get collected are neutralized at a high temperature, and, with the help of Carbfix’s technology, this unwanted by-product is mixed with water and pumped underground where it slowly turns to rock.

Not surprisingly, there’s suddenly a lot of competition coming from this corner of climate science. Carbon Engineering, a Canadian company, has plans this year to build an even bigger DAC facility in the middle of fracking country, Texas’s Permian Basin, with Occidental Petroleum, and another in Scotland. For the Scottish project, Carbon Engineering will team with Storegga, another startup trying to crack the DAC market. Not to be outdone, Exxon Mobil is working with climate-tech specialists Global Thermostat to jointly develop DAC technology, seeing it as key “to decarbonizing the energy sector in the long term.”

DAC is an oddball in the polarizing world of climate science in that it seems to be bringing together competing interests—and not just Big Oil and climate-tech startups. For example, Democrats and Republicans in Congress see in DAC a promising technology that can reduce America’s roughly 5 billion metric ton carbon footprint. To wit, in the $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill signed by President Biden in November, $3.5 billion is earmarked for the construction of direct air capture hubs around the country. “There is definitely bipartisan support in Congress for direct air capture right now,” Erin Burns, executive director of the climate-focused NGO Carbon180, tells Fortune.

Even as investor interest and political will coalesces around DAC, the science is still a long way from perfection. The big challenge all DAC operators contend with is bringing down the costs of this emerging technology. Arizona State University professor Klaus Lackner, a pioneer in the field, doesn’t see the DAC market taking off until the commercial players can get costs of removing a ton of carbon dioxide to below $100. Climeworks hasn’t hit that number yet: It has shaved down costs over the years, but it’s still “somewhere in the range of $200 to $300 per ton,” says Gebald.

source: https://fortune.com/2022/03/01/climeworks-orca-co2-climate-change-musk-gates-breakthrough/
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Institute for Carbon Removal Law & Policy
An American University Research Center
Posted on September 10, 2021 by Institute for Carbon Removal Law and Policy
$$Why Orca matters: long-term climate policy and Climeworks’ new direct air capture facility in Iceland (Institute for Carbon Removal Law & Policy)

Authored by David Morrow & Michael Thompson
Prepared for the Institute for Carbon Removal Law and Policy

Earlier this week, the Swiss company Climeworks fired up its new Orca direct air capture facility in Iceland, which will remove 4,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) per year and turn it into stone.

Obviously, 4,000 metric tons is a tiny drop in the bucket compared to today’s emissions. Each year, Orca will clean up about three seconds’ worth of global CO2 emissions at today’s rates.

But that’s not the point. Orca is a baby step toward a larger carbon removal industry that could one day clean up emissions from the hardest-to-abate sectors or, even better, start cleaning up “legacy carbon” that remains in the atmosphere from our past emissions. Without baby steps like Orca, though, we would never get there. In that respect, Orca is a bit like the tiny, 3.5 kilowatt solar power station that NASA’s Lewis Research Center installed on the Papago Indian Reservation in 1978; it’s only the beginning. Global solar power capacity now stands at more than 200 million times the capacity of that little installation. While direct air capture isn’t likely to grow at such a pace, the point is that we shouldn’t judge the potential of an industry by its output in its earliest days.

One reason that direct air capture won’t grow at the same pace as solar power is because solar panels provide energy, whereas direct air capture consumes it. So, at least for the next couple of decades, it will almost always make more sense, from the perspective of climate change mitigation  and energy justice, to spend money on installing more clean energy and replacing old fossil fuel infrastructure than on building more direct air capture facilities. The reason to spend some money on direct air capture now, though, is to help the technology grow so that once we’ve drastically reduced our emissions, we can use direct air capture and other approaches to carbon removal to get to net-zero and maybe even net-negative emissions. By analogy, four decades ago, the reason to spend money on solar panels was not because they offered a cost-effective way of reducing emissions or supplying energy, but because those investments helped the technology grow. If everyone had dismissed solar at the time as too small and too expensive, we wouldn’t have the solar industry that we do today.

At any rate, one of the compelling things about Orca is that it’s running on renewable geothermal energy that was basically stranded in Iceland. Because Iceland already runs almost entirely on renewables, the clean energy that Orca uses couldn’t easily have been used to displace dirty energy instead. (Arguably, one could have instead built a facility to produce green hydrogen to ship to Europe or North America, but again, the point of Orca isn’t to reduce emissions today but to help build a technology that will be useful in the future. Besides, there’s plenty of renewable energy to go around in Iceland, so why not both? Build a hydrogen plant there, too!)

Another compelling thing about Orca is that it sits atop the perfect geology for mineralizing CO2. Orca can inject its captured CO2 directly into basalt, where it will turn to stone in a matter of years.

The combination of abundant, stranded clean energy and good geology for sequestration makes Iceland an ideal place to build early direct air capture facilities—which raises an interesting question: where else in the world can we find that combination?
source: https://research.american.edu/carbonremoval/2021/09/10/why-orca-matters-the-point-of-climeworks-new-direct-air-capture-facility-in-iceland/
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