A Tidbit about the Icelandic DAC Plant

The unveiling of the world’s biggest carbon sequestration plant in rural Iceland on September 8, 2021, is a landmark step towards an optimistic direction, giving a much-needed boost to a global drive in trimming down greenhouse gas emissions.

Operated by the Swiss company Climeworks in collaboration with the carbon storage company Carbfix and the region’s geothermal energy supplier ON Power, the plant — dubbed “Orca” — is located about 30km from the capital city of Reykjavík. It is noteworthy that Orca isn’t the first-ever commercial plant to bear the Direct Air Capture (DAC) reputation — that title goes to another Climeworks-operated plant (in collaboration with KEZO, Gebrüder Meier, and the Swiss Federal Office of Energy) that made its debut in Hinwil, Switzerland back in 2017. However, Orca is the first and largest plant of its kind to utilize geological sequestration on a massive scale — by directly pulling carbon dioxide out of the air via industrial vacuums and storing it underground. It is touted to store about 4,000 tons of CO2 per year, in contrast to the Switzerland-based plant that captures 900 tons per year.

Explaining the DAC process, Climeworks explained, “Air is drawn into the collector with a fan. CO2 is captured on the surface of a highly selective filter material that sits inside the collectors. Then, after the filter material is full of CO2, the collector is closed. We increase the temperature to between 80 and 100 °C — this releases the CO2. Finally, we can collect this high-purity, high-concentration carbon dioxide.”

The company also stated that the carbon credits that are generated through these sequestration efforts would also be sold to companies via emissions trading.

Climeworks was founded in November 2009 by Germans Christoph Gebald and Jan Wurzbacher, and is now the world’s leading DAC company, with an ultimate goal of curbing climate change by capturing billions of tons of CO2 from the atmosphere every year.