REYKJAVIK, Iceland – The world’s largest facility dedicated to removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere came online a week ago in Iceland, a major milestone for the nascent direct air capture industry.
Constructed by the Swiss company Climeworks AG with support from Microsoft Corp., Swiss Re and other prominent corporate customers, the landmark facility is expected to pull 4,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide from the air annually and store it permanently underground. The plant is named “Orca,” which means “energy” in Icelandic, and is roughly 20 miles southeast of the capital, Reykjavík.
If it works as planned, the plant would increase the world’s direct air capture capacity by more than 40 percent, to 13,000 metric tons.
That is less than 1 percent of the annual emissions of a single coal-fired power plant, according to EPA emissions data and an International Energy Agency report on the technology. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has estimated that, to avoid the worst impacts of global warming, the world needs to remove 100 billion to 1 trillion tons of carbon from the atmosphere by the end of the century.
Energy experts say Orca represents the promise of DAC, a category of technologies that include large fans and artificial trees that someday could complement efforts to reduce the release of greenhouse gases.
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