CO2: how the first plant that captures gas and transforms it into rock works in Iceland

On top of a formation of volcanic lava solidified thousands of years ago outside Reykjavík, the capital of Iceland, you can see what appear to be several large air conditioners – the size of shipping containers – surrounding a building.

This strange vision – which gives the finishing touch to a landscape that seems extraterrestrial – is unique not only for its appearance, but for its function: It is the first viable system in the world to take CO2 from the environment and trap it underground.

The project was developed by the Swiss company Climework with the idea that “in order to truly achieve the goal of global net zero emissions, we need solutions for removing carbon dioxide from the air” and is the first of its kind in operation today. .

BBC reporter Adrienne Murray visited the facilities of the plant known as Orca, in Hellisheiði, Iceland, which currently removes 4,000 tonnes of CO2 a year, equivalent to the emissions of 900 gasoline cars.

What appear to be air conditioners are actually a large number of fans organized on top of each other, which take air from the environment and capture the CO2 it contains through filters.

It’s the first part of a deceptively simple process that could be an important tool in the fight against climate change.

But the most important premise from which the project is based, as Climeworks representative Bryndis Nielsen told the BBC, is that the removal of CO2 from the air does not seek to replace emissions reduction measures.

“We need to play an active role in cleaning up the mess we’ve been making since the industrial revolution began,” explains Nielsen, “but we’re not here to replace emissions reductions.”

The main reason why this technology alone is not enough to address the risks of climate change is the capacity of a plant like Orca.

While it may sound impressive that a single plant has the capacity to absorb 4,000 tons of CO2 per year, global emissions reached 37.4 gigatons (37 billion tons) in 2023.

“We need to be capturing gigatons by 2050, and to get there, we need to start now,” says Nielsen.

That’s why the company’s next project, called Mammoth, is almost ten times larger than Orca.

The classic of science fiction literature “A Journey to the Center of the Earth” launched the very successful career of Jules Verne in 1864, considered by many to be the father of science fiction.

In it, readers accompany Dr. Otto Lidenbrock and his company through an incredible journey that begins in the very active volcanoes of Iceland.

This intense volcanic activity is the great reason for Climeworks to set up its plants on this island, located on the edge of the American and Eurasian tectonic plates.

In addition to providing clean geothermal energy, without greenhouse gas emissions, volcanic activity means that Iceland’s subsoil is mainly composed of basalts, porous volcanic rocks that are the perfect container for CO2 from the atmosphere.

The gas that the modular fans collect from the environment is mixed with water and sent through tubes to a kind of dome that protrudes from the surface and is operated by another company, CarbFix. Here it is injected under pressure 2km underground where it reacts with the basalts and calcifies the CO2 for millions of years.

CarbFix representative Edda Aradóttir told the BBC that the company’s plan is for the largest CO2-emitting industries in the world to hire its services to deposit their emissions in Iceland.

“With this we can take the removal of CO2 to the scale of gigatons, because we share the same atmosphere, which makes collaboration across borders necessary”Aradóttir explained.

“Orca is here to prove a point,” explains Climeworks representative Bryndis Nielsen, “and that is that a plant like this is commercially viable.”

But in addition to the difficulties that, by its very nature, this new technology faces, it also carries risks, such as countries with the highest emissions using Iceland as their emissions dump instead of reducing them.

For Aradóttir, The intention of projects like Orca is to direct efforts more toward industries that generate CO2 as an inevitable waste of their products – such as metallurgy and cement.instead of those that generate it by consuming energy.

Something that is necessary, because the elimination of emissions will not be enough to combat the worst effects of climate change, as the researcher at the University of Iceland Áróra Árnadóttir told the BBC: “We need to mitigate as much as we can, and also use these withdrawal techniques.

“But we are not there yet,” acknowledges the expert.

It is expected that the new Climeworks plant, Mammoth, will be able to extract about 36,000 tons of CO2 from the environment per year, one more step towards the great challenge of being able to extract hundreds of thousands and billions of tons of gases from the environment.

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