World’s largest direct air capture plant starts sucking CO2 from the…

Direct air capture has been in development for decades, and 27 test, pilot, and commercial projects have been commissioned around the world. That includes Climeworks’ first DAC project in Hinwil, Switzerland, which captured up to 900 metric tons of CO₂ per year but has since been phased out.

Yet DAC continues to be the most expensive carbon-removal solution. Because CO₂ is so diluted in the atmosphere, DAC plants must use copious amounts of energy and novel materials to both absorb CO₂ and then release it so that it can be permanently sequestered or used to make synthetic fuels or industrial products.

In 2023, Climeworks sold credits to JPMorgan Chase worth around $800 per ton of CO₂ removal, as part of a $20 million, nine-year agreement with the global banking giant. That per-ton figure is about eight times more expensive than what the industry generally considers to be the benchmark for achieving economic viability.

Wurzbacher said it was too early to give a precise number for the per-ton cost of operating Mammoth at full capacity. ​“On a ballpark level, we’re closer to the $1,000 per ton mark than we are to the $100 per ton mark,” he said on a Wednesday call with reporters. But future facilities using the company’s next generation of DAC technology are expected to approach $300 to $350 per ton of captured CO₂ by 2030, he added.

That’s because as Climeworks and other companies continue to expand and improve their technologies, the cost of developing and building new projects is expected to decline in step.

Douglas Chan, chief operations officer for Climeworks, said that’s been the case in Iceland. Between Orca and Mammoth, the company saw a 10 to 20 percent reduction in capital expenditures per ton of CO₂ captured. It also slashed its operations and maintenance costs in half. (Even with the improvements, the plant cost on the order of ​“low triple digit millions” to build, he said.)

“To really drive down the cost of direct air capture, we really need to understand how they operate in the real world,” said Giana Amador, the executive director of Carbon Removal Alliance, an advocacy group. ​“We’re at an inflection point, where we’re starting to see larger-scale projects [like Mammoth] that can give us some important information about what their potential to scale is.”

The Mammoth facility in Iceland is ​“a great opportunity for Climeworks to test technology that they’ll then export to the U.S.,” she added, referring to Project Cypress in Louisiana.

Last August, the Biden administration named Project Cypress as one of the early winners in its $3.5 billion ​“DAC hub” program, which was created in 2021 by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. Climeworks and its partners will design and operate a carbon-sucking machine capable of removing over 1 million metric tons of CO₂ per year. The company Gulf Coast Sequestration will take the captured CO₂ and permanently store it in a Class VI deep saline aquifer. The project is likely still a few years away from starting construction.

For carbon-removal proponents, the 36,000-ton Mammoth plant and even the much larger Project Cypress are still only the beginning. The world will eventually need to build DAC plants big enough to capture 1 billion metric tons of CO₂ per year to have any meaningful impact on limiting global temperature rise, they say.

To reach that scale, the U.S. will need to adopt stronger federal policies that boost government support and accelerate private-sector investment in these new, risky, technologies, said Burns of Carbon180. The business models of today’s startups largely rely on voluntary commitments from private companies, like Climeworks’ deal with JPMorgan Chase and others.

“The carbon-removal sector as a whole needs to keep our eye on the fact that voluntary compliance markets, while extremely helpful, are going to be totally insufficient to get us to gigaton scale, which is what we need to meet our climate goals,” she said.