The world’s “largest” vacuum cleaner designed to suck climate pollution out of the air has just opened its doors. This is how it works

The “world’s largest power plant” designed to suck pollution caused by global warming out of the atmosphere like a giant vacuum cleaner began operating in Iceland on Wednesday.

“Mammoth” is the second commercial direct air capture plant opened by Swiss company Climeworks in the country, and is 10 times larger than its predecessor, Orca, which began operating in 2021.

Direct air capture, or DAC, is a technology designed to suck in air and remove carbon using chemicals. The carbon can then be injected at depth, reused or transformed into solid products.

Climeworks plans to transport the carbon underground where it will be naturally turned into stone, locking the carbon in permanently. It partners with the Icelandic company Carbfix for this so-called sequestration process.

The entire operation will be powered by Iceland’s clean and abundant geothermal energy.

Next-generation climate solutions like DAC are gaining increasing attention from governments and the private sector as humans continue to burn fossil fuels. Concentrations of planet-warming carbon dioxide in the atmosphere hit a record high in 2023.

As the planet continues to warm – with devastating consequences for humans and nature – many scientists say the world must find ways to remove carbon from the atmosphere in addition to rapidly reducing fossil fuels.

But carbon removal technologies such as DAC remain controversial. They have been criticized as expensive, energy-intensive and unproven on a large scale. Some climate advocates also worry they will distract from policies aimed at reducing fossil fuels.

The technology “is full of uncertainties and ecological risks,” said Lili Fuhr, director of the fossil economy program at the Center for International Environmental Law, speaking about carbon capture in general.

Climeworks began building Mammoth in June 2022 and the company says it is the largest factory of its kind in the world. It has a modular design with space for 72 “collector containers” – the vacuum parts of the machine that capture carbon from the air – which can be stacked on top of each other and moved easily. There are currently 12 in place with more expected to be added over the coming months.

Mammoth will be able to extract 36,000 tons of carbon from the atmosphere per year at full capacity, according to Climeworks. That’s the equivalent of taking about 7,800 gasoline-powered cars off the road for a year.

Climeworks did not give an exact cost for each tonne of carbon removed, but said it was closer to $1,000 per tonne than $100 per tonne – the latter amount widely seen as a key threshold for making affordable and viable technology.

As the company increases the size of its plants and reduces costs, the goal is to reach $300 to $350 per ton by 2030 before reaching $100 per ton around 2050, Jan Wurzbacher said, co-founder and co-CEO of Climeworks, on a call with journalists.

The new plant is “an important step in the fight against climate change,” said Stuart Haszeldine, professor of carbon capture and storage at the University of Edinburgh. This will increase the size of equipment capable of capturing carbon pollution.

But, he warned, this is still only a tiny fraction of what is needed.

All the world’s carbon removal equipment is only capable of removing about 0.01 million tonnes of carbon per year, a far cry from the 70 million tonnes per year needed by 2030 to meet climate goals worldwide, according to the International Energy Agency.

Much larger DAC plants are already in the works by other companies. Stratos, currently under construction in Texas, for example, is designed to eliminate 500,000 tons of carbon per year, according to Occidental, the oil company behind the plant.

But there may be a catch. Occidental says the captured carbon will be stored in rocks deep underground, but its website also refers to the company’s use of the captured carbon in a process called “enhanced oil recovery.” This involves pushing carbon into wells to expel hard-to-reach leftover oil, allowing fossil fuel companies to extract even more from aging oil fields.

It’s this kind of process that has some critics worried that carbon removal technologies could be used to prolong fossil fuel production.

But for Climeworks, which has no ties to fossil fuel companies, the technology has huge potential and the company says it has big ambitions.

Jan Wurzbacher, the company’s co-founder and co-CEO, said Mammoth is just the latest step in Climeworks’ plan to reach 1 million tons of carbon removal per year by 2030 and 1 billion tonnes by 2050.

Plans include possible DAC factories in Kenya and the United States.

This story has been updated with additional information.

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