The world''s largest carbon capture plant has come online in Iceland, as entrepreneurs and environmentalists seek to build momentum for technology they see as key to fighting the increasingly dire threat of climate change.
Named "Orca," the facility is located on a lava plateau in southwest Iceland, reports Michael Birnbaum for the Washington Post. Using a system of fans, filters and heaters and powered by a nearby geothermal power plant, it has the capacity to pull 4,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide out of the air each year and pump it into underground caverns where the gas, mixed with water, will slowly become stone as it cools.
"This is a market that does not yet exist, but a market that urgently needs to be built," says engineer Christoph Gebald, who co-founded Climeworks, the company behind Orca. "This plant that we have here is really the blueprint to further scale up and really industrialize."
Climeworks opened the world''s first commercial carbon capture facility in Switzerland in 2017. That original plant has the ability to capture roughly 900 tons of carbon dioxide per year, and uses the captured gas in greenhouses and sells it to carbonated beverage producers.
The construction of Orca single-handedly increases Earth''s annual carbon capture capacity by 40 percent to 13,000 metric tons, reports Corbin Hiar of E&E News, but that is a small fraction of what will be needed to significantly reverse humanity''s carbon emissions. Around 31.5 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide were emitted in 2020, reports Nikolaj Skydsgaard of Reuters. Orca will be able to capture the equivalent of the annual emissions made by 790 cars.
"We need to turn this into a Starbucks, circa 1999, where you see one on every corner," engineering researcher Peter Psarras told Hiar. "I think this is the future we might see in the next decade."
The Climeworks founders hope to be able to remove 500,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by the end of this decade, reports Ragnhildur Sigurdardottir and Akshat Rathi of Bloomberg Green. They already have plans to build a plant ten times larger than Orca within three years—and other companies aren''t far behind, reports Molly Taft of Gizmodo. A plant due in Scotland by 2026 will capture between 500,000 and 1 million metric tons of carbon dioxide, while a planned facility in Texas will capture up to 1 million metric tons per year and use it help pump oil.
Orca''s method of carbon capture, called "direct air capture," is a relatively new technique, which uses chemical reactions to remove CO2 from the atmosphere, reports Audrey Carleton for Motherboard. The method contrasts with the more commonly used technologies that capture carbon emissions directly at their sources. It''s also currently incredibly expensive, with a price tag of roughly $600 to $800 per metric ton of carbon dioxide, the Post reports.
Direct air capture''s high costs, relative lack of track record, and energy requirements have made it a controversial proposition among environmentalists, Motherboard reports. This year, hundreds of environmental groups signed an open letter to leaders in the American and Canadian governments arguing that carbon capture is not a solution to climate change because it gives cover to fossil fuel companies, among other reasons.
"National strategies should focus on eliminating the use of fossil fuels and other combustible sources in our energy system, not simply reducing their emissions intensity," the groups wrote.
Nonetheless, many scientists remain optimistic, per Gizmodo.
"Orca is still small compared to the scale of the challenge, but it''s an important step in the right direction," carbon removal expert David Morrow of American University tells Gizmodo.
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Save to read list Published by Theodore Reed-Martin, Editorial Assistant Energy Global,
While clean energy generation should remain at the ‘top of the pile’ for combatting climate change, capturing, storing, and, in some cases, recycling carbon dioxide will also play a vital role in softening the damage already incurred, and mitigating that which is anticipated, before reaching net-zero.1 CCUS is invaluable for offsetting emissions that are difficult to avoid, since even building the assets to generate green energy – such as wind turbines, which use steel – inevitably leads to emissions.2
According to the latest IPCC report, an aggressive reduction of emissions is required across all sectors in order to halve global emissions by 2030 and limit global warming to 1.5°C.3Attaining these targets without the assistance of CCUS will be very difficult, to say the least. To illustrate the magnitude of this task, 8 gtpy of CO2 needs to be captured by 2050 to reach net-zero emissions by that same year, while current global capture capacity sits at 0.04 gtpy.4How we deal with the carbon we are emitting, then, is another axis by which the climate crisis can be addressed, with Iceland providing an effective example of how CO2can be managed.
Climeworks is a Swiss direct air capture company that procures CO2 via the world’s first large scale CO2 removal plant, Orca, in south-western Iceland. The company offers a DNV certified carbon capturing service to companies who are looking to reduce their emissions. The Orca plant itself consists of eight collector containers, each with a gathering capacity of 500 tpy; capturing CO2 automatically through the use of fans, a solid filter, and heat. The energy to run the Orca plant is supplied by the adjacent ON Power owned Hellisheiði geothermal power plant.5
Carbfix is a prime example of how Icelandic companies have harnessed the island’s unique geology and turned it into an asset for CO2 storage. Located atop of the mid-Atlantic ridge – a growing rift between the Eurasian and North American tectonic plates – Iceland is a beacon of volcanism and geothermal resources. Consequently, Iceland has extensive basalt formations – a reactive, permeable, and porous igneous rock that forms through the rapid cooling of low-viscosity lava. Basalt is rich in iron, calcium, and magnesium, which react with carbonated water to create stable carbonate minerals like calcite. In essence, it turns CO2 into stone.7
Carbfix has accelerated this natural process to just two years; sequestering the CO2 from companies like Climeworks and dissolving it in water through a machine akin to an enlarged sodastream machine, before depositing it in basalts underground. At the Hellisheiði power plant, they essentially hitch a ride with the geothermal water being extracted from the resource, carbonate it and then pump it back underground through the existing boreholes. This way the water is continuously recycled and carbon emissions are dealt with at the same time, an example of how efficient Iceland is with its geothermal resources (a topic which will be covered in greater depth in the Winter issue of Energy Global).
One of Carbfix''s pods that shelters workers monitoring the pumps from Iceland''s harsh elements.
Another interesting feat in Iceland is Carbon Recycling International’s (CRI) endeavours to recycle CO2 into methanol. A leitmotif when discussing the climate crisis is to view CO2 as the cause of all our ills and a harmful greenhouse gas that heats up the atmosphere. CRI is founded on the premise that carbon is not a waste gas, but a useful tool to create methanol.
The company does this by combining CO2 with hydrogen, sourced either from water electrolysis (making e-methanol), or as a by-product of industrial processes (low carbon methanol). Methanol is a versatile substance used in glue, plastics, building materials, paints, and solvents, though most importantly, it makes cleaner fuels and can easily be blended with gasoline. Methanol is being considered as an alternative in the shipping industry due to its ease of storage (it is liquid at room temperature) and lower emissions. The potential usage for methanol is huge, as it cuts CO2 emissions by 95%, with its projected usage at 500 million t by 2050.10
The company’s George Olah Renewable Methanol Park, uses flue gas emissions from the nearby Svartengi geothermal Resource Park – owned by HS Orka – to create methanol. This is another example of how every last drop of geothermal resource can be utilised in Iceland, as even the natural emissions of CO2are used in other exploits. Here CRI is able to recycle roughly 5500 tpy of CO2 and create 4000 tpy of methanol.
Elsewhere, the latest plant running on this technology is recycling around 160 000 tpy of CO2 into methanol. CRI has also managed to produce methanol for residual steel gas in the company’s FReSMe project in Sweden, which is particularly important relating back to the issue of steel being used to create wind turbines.11Carbon recycling is scalable, and valuable to the green transition through its ability to deal with unavoidable emissions, and create cleaner fuels in the process.
These three examples illustrate how a change in the treatment of carbon can help combat climate change beyond the scope of merely switching to clean energy. The reality is that emissions are unavoidable in the transition to net-zero; the damage being done and the damage that will be done needs to be addressed,and these technologies are a good way to do it. While there is a lot of work to do, with numbers still being far off the gigatonne level required by 2050, the growth in this industry is sure to happen. CCUS technologies function as a supplement to the green transition, as showcased by these three companies in Iceland.
Article by Théodore Reed-Martin, Editorial Assistant for Energy Global and LNG Industry at Palladian Publications Ltd.
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