Climeworks says it has successfully taken
carbon dioxide out of the air and put it in the ground where
it will turn into rock in a process that has been verified by
third party certifiers — a first.
Companies like Microsoft, Stripe and
Shopify had previously paid Climeworks in advance to offset
their future carbon emissions, as part of a broader effort to
kickstart the nascent carbon removal industry.
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 in a
process that has been verified by an independent third-party auditor.
It the first time a company has successfully taken carbon dioxide out
of the atmosphere, put it underground to be locked away permanently
and delivered that permanent carbon removal to a paying customer.
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 future carbon removal services from Climeworks in a bid to help
kick-start the nascent industry. Now Climeworks is actually removing
the carbon dioxide and putting it underground in a process that has
been certified byDNV,
an independent auditor.
The cost of carbon dioxide removal and storage for these corporate
clients is confidential and depends on what quantity of carbon dioxide
the companies want 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 insurance companySwiss
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.
