Climeworks’ carbon removal plant in Hellisheidi, Iceland.
Photo courtesy Climeworks
Swiss company Climeworks announced Thursday that it has successfully taken carbon dioxide out of the air and put it in the ground where it will eventually turn into rock. It the first time a company has successfully both taken carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and then put it underground to be locked away permanently.
The development has been a long time coming. Christoph Gebald and Jan Wurzbacher co-founded Climeworks in 2009 as a spinoff of ETH Zürich, the main technical university in Switzerland’s largest city. They have been scaling the technology for direct carbon removal, wherein machines vacuum greenhouse gasses out of the air.
Over the last couple of years, Microsoft, Stripe and Shopify have all bought carbon removal services from Climeworks in a bid to help kickstart the nascent industry. Now Climeworks is actually starting to remove the carbon dioxide and put it underground.
The cost of carbon dioxide removal and storage for these corporate clients is confidential and depends on how much the companies pay to have removed and over what period of time. But the general price for carbon removal runs to several hundred dollars per ton. Individuals can also pay to Climeworks to remove carbon dioxide to offset their personal emissions.
In addition to getting corporate clients to pay for future removals, Climeworks has raised more than $780 million to scale up from a wide variety of investors including venture capitalist John Doerr and the the insurance company Swiss Re.
Climeworks’ largest carbon dioxide removal facility is located in Iceland, where it partners with CarbFix, which stores the gas underground. CarbFix dissolves carbon dioxide in water then intermingles that mixture with basalt rock formations. Natural processes convert the material to solid carbonate minerals in about two years.
In June, Climeworks announced it had begun construction of its second commercial-sized plant in Iceland that will capture and store 36,000 metric tons per year of carbon dioxide. Even when complete, that will amount to a tiny percentage of the total global emissions of carbon dioxide released into the air each year: In 2021, they hit a record high of 36.3 billion metric tons, according to the International Energy Agency.
