If one company has set the pace for direct air capture, it’s Climeworks. The Switzerland-based business opened its — and the world’s — first commercial DAC plant in 2017, capable of capturing “several hundred tons” of carbon dioxide each year. Today, the company unveils its newest plant, the aptly named Mammoth. Located in Iceland, Mammoth is designed to take advantage of the country’s unique geology to capture and store up to 36,000 tons of carbon per year — eventually. Here’s what you need to know about the new project.
1. Mammoth is, well, huge
Mammoth is not yet operating at full capacity, with only 12 of its planned 72 capturing and filtering units installed. When the plant is fully operational — which could be late this year or next — it will pull up to 36,000 tons of CO2 out of the atmosphere annually. For scale, that’s about 1/28,000th of a gigaton. To get to net zero emissions, we’ll have to remove multiple gigatons of carbon from the atmosphere every year.
In the context of where we need to go, in other words, Mammoth is almost nothing. But in the context of our current reality, it’s nine times the size of the next largest DAC facility: another Iceland-based Climeworks plant called Orca. And it’s a major stepping stone towards the company’s ultimate goal of capturing a million tons of CO2 yearly by 2030 and a billion by 2050.
2. Construction happened quickly
Climeworks first broke ground on Mammoth in June 2022, and 18 months later the company announced that the “core pieces of the plant are built.” Now that the plant has started capturing CO2, Climeworks says the rest of 2024 will be devoted to installing the remaining CO2capture units and ramping toward full capacity.
Thus far in its history, Climeworks has largely avoided the construction delays that often plague first-of-its-kind projects. “They’re coming out with new projects every three to four years, which is a pretty wild timeline,” Erin Burns, executive director of the nonprofit Carbon180, told me.
3. It runs on 100% zero-emission power
Through Climework’s partnership with Icelandic geothermal company ON Power, Mammoth is powered in full by geothermal energy — although the company has long been reticent about how much energy, exactly, it needs.
At any rate, Climeworks has committed to powering the direct air capture process as well as its storage process with 100% renewables in the long run.
4. Climeworks has sold about a third of Mammoth’s lifetime capacity
Though the company hasn’t divulged Mammoth’s lifetime carbon removal capacity, a representative did tell me that a third has already been sold. Climeworks works with more than 160 organizations and has long-term offtake agreements with some major corporate buyers, including JPMorgan Chase, Boston Consulting Group and Microsoft. Some of these agreements span a decade or more and involve tens of thousands of tons of CO2 removal from current and future Climeworks projects. (The company also recently opened a marketplace, Climeworks Solutions, to package and sell “high quality” carbon credits from other DAC companies.)
Mammoth should help drive more investment, Dana Jacobs, chief of staff at the Carbon Removal Alliance, told me. “Having carbon removal projects that you can see and reach out and touch and understand is so critical,” she said.
5. Mammoth is small potatoes compared to what’s next
Climeworks says that the lessons from its Mammoth project will help the company scale further as it enters the U.S. market through its participation in the Department of Energy-funded direct air capture hub, Project Cypress in Louisiana.
Climeworks is working on Project Cypress alongside developer Battelle and another direct air capture company, Heirloom. The project is designed to capture a million tons of CO2annually by 2030, and recently received an initial $50 million grant from the DOE to kickstart the project’s planning, design and community engagement processes.
