The world's largest direct air carbon capture and storage plant has started operating in Iceland, run by Swiss company Climeworks.
Named Orca, the plant sucks carbon dioxide directly from the air and buries it as rocks deep underground, using technology from Climeworks' Icelandic partner Carbfix.
The Orca plant is made up of stackable carbon dioxide collector units
Orca has the capacity to remove 4,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere this way each year.
The number equates roughly the emissions from 870 cars or 9,281 consumed barrels of oil, according to the United States Environmental Protection Agency greenhouse gas calculator.
Plant is run on renewable energy
The Orca plant is located in Hellisheidi, Iceland, adjacent to Icelandic energy company ON Power's geothermal power plant, and is entirely run on this renewable energy. Climeworks claims it is the "world's first and largest climate-positive direct air capture and storage plant", and says it makes the capture of atmospheric carbon on an industrial scale a reality.
"Orca, as a milestone in the direct air capture industry, has provided a scalable, flexible and replicable blueprint for Climeworks' future expansion," said Climeworks co-CEO and co-founder Jan Wurzbacher.
"With this success, we are prepared to rapidly ramp up our capacity in the next years. Achieving global net-zero emissions is still a long way to go, but with Orca, we believe that Climeworks has taken one significant ...