Jan Wurzbacher and Christoph Gebald, the founders of Climeworks, elaborated on the incredible journey leading to realization of the station. Katrín Jakobsdóttir, Prime Minister og Iceland, and Dagur B. Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson, opened the formal inauguration of the plant, followed by Ms. The Orca plant has the capacity of capturing 4,000 tons of CO2 per year, which is injected by Carbfix into nearby basaltic rock-formations to be permanently turned into stone.įormer President of Iceland, Mr. It only took Carbfix and Climeworks four years to advance their direct air capture and storage concept from pilot scale to commercial scale. Our partners Carbfix, experts in rapid underground mineralization mix the air-captured CO? with water and pump it deep underground, where it is trapped in stone through a natural mineralization process that takes under two years. ON Power, the Icelandic geothermal energy provider, supplies clean renewable energy to power the Orca plant.
Strong partnerships with pioneering Icelandic companies support the excellent conditions for the scale up. This optimized process means that more carbon dioxide can be captured and stored than ever before. For the technology generation which Orca represents, Climeworks has been able to intensify the process leading to increased CO2 capture capacity per module. This improved technology generation comes in an award-winning new design, which embodies the interconnection between nature and technology. Orca is the first-of-its-kind plant that translates the vision of industrial-scale direct air capture and storage into reality. Strategically located adjacent to ON Power’s Hellisheidi Geothermal Power Plant, Orca runs fully on renewable energy. Orca also supports the expansion of Climeworks, as the technology can easily be replicated at different locations worldwide and on ever larger scales, in a flexible manner wherever ample renewable energy and storage conditions are available. Compared to the previous technology generation, the use of steel in the collector units has roughly been reduced by half per output unit. This has made it possible for Orca to be operational in under 15 months. These units are powerful and compact with minimal physical footprint. The construction of Orca started in May 2020 and is based on advanced modular technology in the form of innovative stackable container-size collector units. The plant is located in proximity to the Hellisheidi geothermal power plant by ON Power near Reykjavik, Iceland. “If we are to have any hope of keeping global temperature down below 2C then we desperately need to develop ways to capture and store carbon dioxide.Last week, Swiss company Climeworks launched Orca, the world’s largest direct air capture and storage plant that permanently removes CO2 from the air. “Carbon capture and storage is going to be the only effective way we have in the short term to prevent our steel industry, cement manufacture and many other processes from continuing to pour emissions into the atmosphere,” Professor Stuart Haszeldine from Edinburgh University said in 2021 in response to criticism from green groups claiming that such technologies were a costly distraction. Scientists have also warned that it will be a vital part of holding global net emissions below zero by 2050.
The firm has commercial carbon capture facilities in Switzerland and Iceland, capable of removing roughly 4,000 metric tons of CO 2 each year.Ĭarbon capture technologies have been criticised for the vast amounts of energy and resources required to build them, though Climeworks claims its machines offer one of the only solutions for massive-scale carbon removal. One of two things happens to the Climeworks air-captured carbon dioxide: either it is returned to earth, stored safely and permanently away for millions of years, or it is upcycled into climate-friendly products such as carbon-neutral fuels and materials. This filter is then heated to close to 100C and then mixed with water in order to be pumped underground into stone storage designed to be kept out of the atmosphere for millenia. Climeworks empowers people to reverse climate change by permanently removing carbon dioxide from the air. It’s reality.”Ĭlimeworks uses giant vacuum-like devices to suck ambient air through a filter that traps massive amounts of CO 2. “This is an important inflection point in the development of direct-air capture,” said Stacy Kauk, head of sustainability at Climeworks customer Shopify. Climeworks chief executive Christoph Gebald told The Wall Street Journal on Thursday that it was the first time a company had captured and stored CO 2 from open air at a meaningful scale using a third-party verified process.
0 kommentar(er)
