In order to mitigate the effects of climate change, Carbon capture may become necessary.Climeworks, a Swiss engineering start-up, opened the world’s largest DAC facility on Sept. 8 in Iceland.The Orca plant will reduce annual emissions by the equivalent of around 870 automobiles.The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change stated last month that we must begin removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere if we are to avoid the worst effects of global warming.
The fossil fuel economy must be properly reversed. Planting trees, the most basic and low-cost method, takes a lot of area in comparison to the scale of intervention required. As a result, a few companies have begun experimenting with “direct air capture” (DAC), or large CO2-sucking equipment.
The world’s largest DAC plant in Iceland, known as Orca, is to be operated by Climeworks, a Swiss engineering firm, and will yearly remove emissions equivalent to around 870 automobiles. Orca will increase worldwide DAC capacity by around 50%, complementing the dozen or so smaller plants already in operation in Europe, Canada, and the United States.

The plant is made up of eight boxes the size of shipping containers, each with a dozen fans pulling in air. CO2 is filtered out of the atmosphere, mixed with water, and pumped into deep underground wells, where it turns to stone over the course of a few years, effectively removing it from circulation.
The cost of removing carbon from the atmosphere is still prohibitively high.Climeworks signed a $10 million contract with reinsurance giant Swiss Re last week, and the Orca launch comes on the heels of that. The insurance business was essentially purchasing an undisclosed amount of carbon offset certificates to offset its own emissions. Climeworks hasn’t revealed their price per tonne, but according to a press release from Swiss Re, it’s “several hundred dollars.”
Climeworks is attacking a crucial difficulty for the new DAC industry: how to make money, with this business model—the sale of offsets. The other option is to sell the CO2 captured to companies who can utilise it as a raw ingredient for cement and other products, or to oil corporations that, paradoxically, use it to help dredge up more oil. However, those clients are used to paying around $100 per tonne.
Because the carbon offset market is rife with cheap, dubious offsets, certain emitters, such as Swiss Re (and Coca-Cola and Microsoft, both significant Climeworks clients), may be willing to pay high cash for a rock-solid offset. This money will help DAC scale and lower costs; analysts believe that in the next 5-10 years, it might reach $150 per tonne.
Orca will almost certainly be eclipsed in the next two years by competing ventures in the United States and Scotland. Even still, without significantly additional public and private investment, the industry will fall far short of the 10 million tonnes per year required by 2030, according to the International Energy Agency.