Climeworks, again, launches world’s largest DAC plant — this time with improvements

On a lonely stretch of land outside Reykjavík, Climeworks today unveiled what is now the world’s largest direct air capture and carbon storage plant. The project is within sight of its predecessor Orca, which until today claimed the status of largest DAC project.

• The top line: Its impressive scale notwithstanding, Mammoth embodies the steep learning curve — and price curve — that the carbon removal industry must climb to reach global removal goals in the next few decades. The project demonstrates major efficiency improvements over other DAC plants constructed in recent years, though Climeworks and its competitors are still several hundred dollars away from the Department of Energy’s price goal of  $100 per ton.
• The nuts and bolts: The facility relies on geothermal energy from Icelandic power company On Power, and stores carbon dioxide underground via Carbfix. To date, just 12 of a total 72 collector containers have been installed at the site, but by the end of this year, Mammoth plans to be removing 36,000 tons of carbon dioxide annually —nearly ten times more than Orca. 
• The market grounding: To mitigate the impacts of climate change, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change outlined a goal of up to 10 gigatons of carbon dioxide removal by 2050. But despite major movement and investment globally, getting there remains a major challenge. Mammoth’s removal potential far surpasses that of other Climeworks plants, as well as of facilities built by competitors like Heirloom. However, both plants are soon to be outpaced by significantly larger projects set to come online in the next few years, including Project Cypress in Louisiana, which is being built by a coalition that includes both Climeworks and Heirloom, and which is set to remove 1 million metric tons of carbon dioxide.

DAC has long faced criticism over issues like its high prices, immense energy needs, storage challenges, and relatively small scale — as well as concern that it could be a potential fig leaf to fossil fuels. 

With Mammoth, Climeworks is hoping to address several of those challenges, though work remains to be done. 

For example, CEO and co-founder Jan Wurzbacher told reporters on Wednesday that the project was financed by Climeworks’ own equity: “But going forward, project financing will be vital to accelerate the scale up,” he added. And for that, long-term offtake agreements are essential.

To date, Climeworks has sold around one-third of the new facility’s total capacity, Wurzbacher said, and he expects to sell the remaining offtakes in the next one to two years. Both Wurzbacher and Climeworks COO Douglas Chan declined to share the exact cost of building Mammoth, but Chan told reporters the number was somewhere in the “low triple-digit millions.”

And the plant’s removal cost, Wurzbacher said coyly, is “closer to the $1,000 per ton mark than…to the $100 per ton mark.” That’s in part due to the scale of the Mammoth plant. 

“While it is a big step for us and looks really like a big plant, compared to a million tons per year scale, this is still relatively small” he said. “We have by far not tapped into all the potential of scaling.”

Tech efficiencies

High prices and financing challenges aside, Mammoth features several significant process improvements over its predecessors that make it more efficient.

Compared to the Orca facility, Mammoth boasts an up to 20% reduction in the capital expenditure per ton of captured carbon, which Chen said is key for driving down the price for offtakers. Mammoth also halves Orca’s maintenance costs, and increases the efficiency of the removal process by around 15%.

“What we did at Mammoth relative to Orca was we cut down the steps [in the capture and purification process],” Chan said, emphasizing that those simplified steps were both complex and energy-intensive. That has increased the facility’s recovery rate, or the amount of carbon dioxide that actually makes it into the earth for storage, to about 90%, he added. 

There are also efficiency improvements in the design of the facility itself. At Mammoth, Chan said, the arrangement of the collection containers is designed to minimize the length of the piping system.

“Piping is actually one of the big capex drivers,” Chan said. Minimizing that length of piping needed at a given facility is a key “design philosophy” Climeworks will be taking with it to future facilities, he added.

Another key difference between Mammoth and its neighboring Orca: the newer plant has a dedicated onsite control room. Normal operation of Mammoth, Chan said, will involve one person operating the panel in that room, and another person in the field, conducting equipment checks. 

Ultimately, Wurzbacher said, Mammoth is an incremental step on Climeworks’ journey to perfecting DAC. 

“About 200 out of the 500 people at Climeworks are constantly working on developing the next generation direct air capture technology,” he said. And that entails optimizing and developing new sorbent materials, and working to ensure higher throughput and lower energy needs, he added. 

Wurzbacher said the company will be releasing a next generation of technology “quite soon,” which will offer new efficiencies — and a “steep cost reduction.”