Startup to bury CO2 underground to reach net-zero emissions

A Euro for a kilo – a good bargain? For just one Euro, you can permanently bury a whole kilogram of carbon dioxide way under the ground, “where it belongs,” if you believe Climeworks.

Climeworks, a Swiss start-up, has just begun work on construction of its second large-scale direct air capture (DAC) plant. The new “Mammoth” plant is located in Iceland and will contain around 80 large blocks of fans and filters to suck in air, extract its carbon dioxide, and bury it underground. The gas is first dissolved in water and only then injected into the ground, into basalt rock deposits where it combines with the rock to form solid calcite matter within just a few years.

Climeworks stresses that the process is a natural one and that they are merely speeding it up. In fact, the United States Geological Survey (USGS) has an entry on “Making Minerals – How Growing Rocks Can Help Reduce Carbon Emissions.” Its first-ever assessment of geologic carbon dioxide storage was released almost ten years ago, with the estimate that the US is capable of storing up to 3,000 metric gigatons of carbon dioxide.

Climeworks hopes to suck 36,000 tons of carbon dioxide from the air each year at its new plant. It admits, however, that this is a mere “sliver of the 36 billion tons of energy-related CO2 emissions produced worldwide last year” alone.

The process at Mammoth will be powered by a geothermal energy plant. According to the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), energy-intensive and expensive technologies such as DAC are going to be necessary in the next few decades in order to combat climate change and limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

So, this is just another step toward reversing all the evils unleashed on the world in the last two hundred years.  As Climeworks describes it, “A permanent and safe solution with the potential to safely store all the carbon dioxide ever emitted since the Industrial Revolution, deep under the earth.” After all, “nature cannot bear the rising levels of human-made emissions,” they continue.

And humans make a lot of emissions:

Each year, the average city-dweller emits approximately 10 tonnes of carbon dioxide . . . 28 kg of carbon dioxide per day . . . 8 kg is generated per day through food, shopping, hobbies and activities. 10 kg is generated per day by using electricity, hot water and heating in a home. 10 kg is generated per day by commuting and getting from A to B by car, bus, train, or flying.

So what’s next? Pay as you go? For each kilogram of carbon dioxide generated, pay Climeworks one Euro to have it turned into rock? Partner with Climeworks to become a walking embodiment of net-zero, just as our friend Mr. Gates recently did, when Microsoft signed a 10-year carbon removal offtake agreement that will “permanently remove 10,000 tons of carbon dioxide emissions from the atmosphere.”

Gates has admitted that making direct air capture pay off is going to be “the hardest” challenge in his current portfolio, according to the Financial Times, which notes that the UN IPCC’s report on DAC suggests that by 2100, it could be necessary to capture up to 10 gigatons of CO2 per year, “consuming an amount of energy equivalent to half of the world’s electricity production.”