THE world’s largest plant designed to suck planet-heating pollution out of the atmosphere like a giant vacuum began operating in Iceland on Wednesday. “Mammoth” is the second commercial direct air capture plant opened by Swiss company Climeworks in the country, and is 10 times bigger than its predecessor, Orca, which started running in 2021. Direct air capture, or DAC, is a technology designed to suck in air and strip out the carbon using chemicals. The carbon can then be injected deep beneath the ground, reused or transformed into solid products. Climeworks plans to transport the carbon underground where it will be naturally transformed into stone, locking up the carbon permanently. It is partnering with Icelandic company Carbfix for this so-called sequestration process. The whole operation will be powered by Iceland’s abundant, clean geothermal energy. Next-gen climate solutions like DAC are gaining more attention from governments and private industry as humans continue to burn fossil fuels. Concentrations of planet-warming carbon dioxide in the atmosphere reached a record high in 2023. As the planet continues to heat up — with devastating consequences for humans and nature — many scientists say the world needs to find ways to remove carbon from the atmosphere in addition to rapidly cutting fossil fuels. But carbon removal technologies such as DAC are still controversial. They have been criticized as expensive, energy-hungry and unproven at scale. Some climate advocates are also concerned they could distract from policies to cut fossil fuels. This technology “is fraught with uncertainties and ecological risks,” said Lili Fuhr, director of the fossil economy program at the Center for International Environmental Law, speaking about carbon capture generally. Climeworks started building Mammoth in June 2022, and the company says it is the world’s largest such plant. It has a modular design with space for 72 “collector containers” — the vacuum parts of the machine that capture carbon from the air — which can be stacked on top of each other and moved around easily. There are currently 12 of these in place with more to be added over the next few months. Mammoth will be able to pull 36,000 tons of carbon from the atmosphere a year at full capacity, according to Climeworks. That’s equivalent to taking around 7,800 gas-powered cars off the road for a year. Climeworks did not give an exact cost for each ton of carbon removed, but said it was closer to US$1,000 a ton than US$100 a ton — the latter of which is widely seen as a key threshold for making the technology affordable and viable. As the company scales up the size of its plants and bring costs down, the aim is to reach US$300 to US$350 a ton by 2030 before hitting US$100 a ton around 2050, said Jan Wurzbacher, co-founder and co-CEO of Climeworks. (SD-Agencies) | 