By Justine Calma , a senior science reporter covering energy and the environment with more than a decade of experience. She is also the host of Hel

The world’s largest carbon removal plant is here, and bigger ones are on the way

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2024-05-08 17:00:04

By Justine Calma , a senior science reporter covering energy and the environment with more than a decade of experience. She is also the host of Hell or High Water: When Disaster Hits Home, a podcast from Vox Media and Audible Originals.

Mammoth, the largest industrial facility yet built to filter carbon dioxide out of the air, just powered up in Hellisheiði, Iceland. It’s run by Swiss climate tech company Climeworks, whose clients include JPMorgan Chase, Microsoft, Stripe, and Shopify, among others.

It was the latest industrial plant built with the purpose of sucking carbon dioxide out of the air, a process called direct air capture (DAC) — with more facilities planned around the world. DAC is supposed to be a way to fight climate change by getting rid of greenhouse gas emissions that have built up in the atmosphere, but the process still has to prove that it can scale up enough to have a meaningful impact.

Mammoth is the biggest DAC plant running yet. But in the grand scheme of things, it’s relatively small compared to other projects in the pipeline. Climeworks’ operations in Iceland were meant to show the world that this technology can work. Now, it’ll have to see if it can replicate that early success in a growing market in the US.