Is removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere one of the best weapons against climate change? Climeworks, a Swiss company, believes so, as they have recently unveiled the world’s largest direct carbon capture and storage plant.

The new facility, Mammoth, will be located in Hellisheiði, Iceland, and will be nine times larger than Climeworks’ original plant, Orka. Mammoth’s goal is to extract 36,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere annually, equivalent to removing approximately 8,600 cars from the road.

Powered by renewable energy, Mammoth captures carbon dioxide from the air and transports it to a facility where it is combined with water and injected deep underground. The carbonated water reacts with porous basalt rocks, transforming them into solid carbonate minerals that securely sequester the carbon underground for thousands of years.

The Mammoth Power Plant aims to have 12 of its 72 heat collection containers installed and fully operational by the end of 2024.

Swiss mechanical engineers and Climeworks founders Christoph Gevaert and Jan Wurzbacher introduced the concept of a direct air capture plant in 2015. Since then, the company has expanded rapidly, with Orka and Mammoth just the beginning of their efforts to reduce atmospheric carbon levels.

Keeling Curve, a daily measurement from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, shows an atmospheric concentration of CO2 around 427 ppm, well above pre-industrial levels below 300 ppm.

Climeworks is developing third-generation direct air capture technology for a large-scale facility in the US, paving the way for additional carbon capture plants worldwide.

By expanding with facilities like Orka and Mammoth, Climeworks aims to achieve megatonne-scale carbon removal capacity by 2030 and gigatonne-scale capacity by 2050.

While the impact on atmospheric carbon levels remains uncertain, the technology is expected to play a significant role in shaping the planet’s future over the coming decades.