Sept.

17 2021

The excitement was palpable at the latest ‘direct air capture’, or DAC Summit, a yearly event bringing together a community focused on removing enough CO2 from the atmosphere to mitigate the worst effects of climate change. Climeworks, the organiser of the event, and one of the most advanced companies in direct air capture, had just launched Orca a few weeks prior to the summit.

Orca, a direct air capture plant which was officially launched on the 8th of September, is an engineering feat for our times. Built at record pace in less than a year, it is located near the Icelandic village of Hengill, just a half hour drive away from Reykjavik. The Orca plant consists of eight ‘collector containers’ that are encased in large wooden panels, allowing them to blend with their surrounding landscape. Each container’s main feature is a massive wall of fans pulling climate change’s main culprit, carbon dioxide (CO2), out of the air. It is then mixed with water and pumped underground where it will stay trapped for millennia inside basaltic rock formations, one of the safest and permanent ways to store carbon. In short, the facility takes CO2 out of the atmosphere and turns it into rock. 

Orca is a collaboration of some of the most exciting companies tackling the issue of climate change. Climeworks, from Switzerland, specialises in capturing CO2 from the air and has already built several DAC installations. Carbfix, hailing from Iceland, has developed an innovative carbon storage technology, which has just recently been fully vetted by scientists (both Climeworks and Carbfix are Negative Emissions Platform members). Finally, ON Power, a local utility, provides the renewable energy needed to power the installation from a nearby geothermal power plant. ON Power’s contribution is essential to the project - ‘orka’ is Icelandic for energy. 

Orca will remove 4000 tons of CO2 per year, 100 times more than previous generation DAC plants. But, on its own, it will not place humanity on the path traced by climate scientists to keep the planet under 1.5°C of warming. This is also not the main intention. Instead,  Orca is to provide a blueprint for an important part of the solution to climate change. 

Orca will remove 4000 tons of CO2 per year, 100 times more than previous generation DAC plants.

The 1.5°C temperature threshold is the stated objective of the Paris Agreement, an international treaty on climate change signed by the quasi-totality of the world’s governments. It is widely considered that crossing the 1.5°C line will exponentially increase the probability of climate events such as floods and droughts. Orca could be the beginning of a wave of technological developments that would make our odds of staying under 1.5°C a lot better.

A growing consensus exists that, while reducing our global carbon footprint should remain a priority, if we want to avoid the most disastrous effects of climate change, humanity will also need to account for those emissions that cannot be easily eliminated from our activities. For example, emissions released while growing food, processing raw materials, as well as all the emissions that we have already released in our industrial past. Orca-like plants can be used to remove some of the greenhouse gas from the total amount of CO2 present in Earth’s atmosphere, getting us closer to “net zero”and could even allow us to go “net-negative”, by removing more CO2 from the atmosphere than we add to it.

It has to be noted that direct air capture is just one of many existing methods to remove CO2 from the air. ‘Carbon removals’, as they are referred to, can most simply be defined as a set of solutions to pull carbon from the atmosphere and store it in trees, plants, soils, oceans, with the purpose of lowering the amount of C02 in the atmosphere. Carbon removal also entails trapping carbon underground, in natural, geological formations using technological solutions - which is precisely what Orca is about.

“DAC and the broader negative emission space is starting to transition from a loosely organised collection of start-ups into an nascent industry,” explains Jaco van der Bank, a policy adviser at Negative Emissions Platform, who attended the Direct Air Capture Summit. “The price for DAC is still relatively high, but we’ve seen from past technologies that a combination of scale and continual innovation can reduce cost,” he adds.

DAC and the broader negative emission space is starting to transition from a loosely organised collection of start-ups into an nascent industry.

Attendants at the DAC Summit included many of the early, private investors into the carbon removal sectors. Companies which, being at the forefront of a race to become carbon negative, are unphased by the current cost of removing carbon. One of such companies is Shopify, which was represented at the summit by its Sustainability Fund director Stacy Kauk. “If companies are not currently participating and learning and establishing relationships in the carbon removal market, they run the risk of being left behind. It is part of future proofing your business”, Kauk says.

Reinsurance company SwissRe recently sent a strong signal to the market when the signed a 10 million dollars, 10 years deal with Climeworks, and there are signs that many more will now follow in their steps. “There is a lot more momentum at the summit this year than we saw a year ago”, reflects Jan Wurzbacher, one of two Climeworks’ CEOs, “I feel a movement starting and a lot of good and encouraging developments.” […] “It was a really market focused event and that's what we need to scale faster, develop faster and that was a really encouraging to observe.” During the DAC Summit, Climeworks announced that it was already working on its next plant, Mammoth, with a capacity to capture 400,000 tons of CO2 a year.