ALBAWABA - Iceland now has the biggest plant in the world for directly removing carbon dioxide from the climate, built by Swiss company Climeworks, boosting the global capacity for direct air capture (DAC) more than four folds, according to The Verge.
Dubbed “Mammoth”, the facility is considered the second commercial direct air capture plant to open in the country, built to extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere via a technique known as direct air capture, as a strategy to combat climate change by reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere.
Climeworks intends to move the carbon underground, where it will organically convert to stone and be locked away for good, as reported by CNN, with the readily available, pure geothermal energy of Iceland as a power source.
The country is undertaking this ‘sequestration procedure' in collaboration with the Icelandic business Carbfix, which will help to prevent it from leaking back into the atmosphere by mixing it with water then pushing the resulting mixture underground, where it will ultimately solidify into rock.
The total amount of carbon that the DAC projects throughout the world have managed to remove from the atmosphere on an annual basis is just around 10,000 tons so far, according to NewScientist, however, when Mammoth becomes completely functional this year, it is expected to be able to collect up to 36,000 tons of carbon dioxide yearly.
