What Mammoth looks like, the world’s largest pollution “vacuum cleaner”, which turns carbon dioxide from the air into stone

The largest installation designed to capture carbon dioxide from the air, like a giant vacuum cleaner, began operating on Wednesday in Iceland, writes CNN.

“Mammoth” is the second airborne carbon capture facility operated by the Swiss company Climeworks in Iceland – it is 10 times larger than Orca, the first facility of its kind, which opened in 2021.

Capturing carbon dioxide from the air, also known as “direct air capture” or DAC, is a technology designed to suck in the air and clean it of carbon with the help of chemicals. The carbon can then be put directly underground, reused or turned into solid products.

Climeworks plans to transport the carbon underground, where it will naturally turn into rock, and the carbon will remain permanently locked in that form.

Climeworks is working in partnership with Iceland’s Carbfix to carry out this carbon sequestration process. The entire operation is powered by Iceland’s abundant supply of clean geothermal energy.

DAC and other solutions using the new wave of technologies (“next-gen”) are increasingly attracting the attention of governments and private industry as humanity continues to burn fossil fuels.

The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere reached a new record in 2023. As the planet continues to warm – with devastating consequences for people and nature – many scientists say the world must find new ways to remove carbon from atmosphere, in addition to attempts to reduce the consumption of fossil fuels as quickly as possible.

DAC technology ‘fraught with environmental uncertainties and risks’

However, carbon removal technologies such as DAC remain controversial. They are criticized for being too expensive, consuming too much energy, and their large-scale effectiveness has not been demonstrated.

This technology “is fraught with environmental uncertainties and risks,” said Lili Fuhr, director of the fossil fuel economy program at the Center for International Environmental Law.

Climeworks began building Mammoth in June 2022 and says it is the largest facility of its kind on the planet. It has a modular design with a capacity of 72 “collection containers” – the machine’s carbon vacuums – that can be stacked on top of each other and transported easily. For now, only 12 such devices are working, with more to come in the coming months.

Mammoth will be able to capture 36,000 tonnes of carbon from the atmosphere per year at full capacity, according to Climeworks – the equivalent of taking 7,800 petrol cars off the road for a year.

Climeworks did not specify the exact cost of each tonne of carbon sequestered, but said the price was closer to the $1,000 per tonne threshold than the $100 per tonne threshold, which is a crucial threshold to reach for for the technology to be viable and accessible.

As the company tries to build ever-larger facilities and drive costs down as much as possible, the goal is to reach $300-350 per ton by 2030, reaching $100 per ton around 2050, according to to Jan Wurzbacher, co-founder and CEO of Climeworks.

The hidden purpose of capturing carbon from the air: ‘enhanced oil recovery’

Experts warn, however, that while the new facility is “an important step in the fight against climate change”, it is only a small part of what humanity needs.

All air carbon capture equipment available globally is capable of removing just 0.01 million tonnes of carbon per year – far short of the 70 million tonnes that need to be removed per year by 2030 to meet targets internationally agreed climate change, the International Energy Agency warned.

Other companies have begun building DAC facilities much larger than Mammoth. Stratos, a facility being built in Texas, for example, is designed to remove 500,000 tons of carbon a year, according to Occidental, the company running the project.

Occidental says the captured carbon dioxide will be injected underground, but the company’s website mentions a process called “enhanced oil recovery” – a technique where carbon is used in oil wells to force hard-to-reach crude from oil fields old to surface.

Thus, companies that extract fossil fuels will be able to obtain even more oil from old and hard-to-access crude deposits.

It is these techniques that worry critics of DAC technology, who say they could be used to extend fossil fuel production.

Climeworks, which is not associated with any fossil fuel company, says the technology has huge potential and plans to remove 1 million tons of carbon dioxide from the air by 2030 and up to 1 billion tons by 2050. Apart from Iceland, Climeworks could also build DAC facilities in Kenya and the US.

Editor: Raul Nețoiu

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