Suck It, Carbon
Climeworks and CarbFix have opened a new carbon capture facility (image: Climeworks).
The Hengell volcano in Iceland is now home to Orca, the world’s largest carbon capture facility. Built in just 15 months by Swiss technology company Climeworks and Icelandic startup Carbfix, Orca will be able to suck 4,000 tons of carbon out of the air a year, bringing the global carbon capture capacity up to a grand total of... 13,000 tons per year.
Considering that there’s a coal plant in Poland called Bełchatów that belches out 38 million tons of carbon a year, Orca is a drop in the (rapidly acidifying) ocean. But Climeworks’ hopes that the facility will be a proof of concept for the technology, and that eventually enough could be built to fulfil the company’s somewhat modest goal of reversing climate change.
“Orca, as a milestone in the direct air capture industry, has provided a scalable, flexible and replicable blueprint for Climeworks’ future expansion,” said its co-founder Jan Wurzbacher. “With this success, we are prepared to rapidly ramp up our capacity in the next few years.” Bloomberg reported that the facility took up to $15m to build, with Climeworks listing backers including Microsoft and Shopify. A whole pod of Orcas will be very costly indeed.
“We are prepared to rapidly ramp up our capacity in the next few years.”
In case that’s too much of a downer, there’s plenty of things that are cool about the achievement. Orca took just over a year to build thanks to its prefabricated system. It gets all its renewable energy from Hellisheiði Power Station, a geothermal power plant that’s right next door. Climeworks has halved the amount of steel it needs to make the collector units. And Disegno loves the name, which sounds like “orka” – the Icelandic word for energy – and is also spelt like the killer whales, animals that are so badass even sharks are afraid of them.
The technology behind the carbon capture facility is pretty neat, too. Eight large metal boxes are raised up on concrete plinths. Each box contains industrial-scale fans and filters that suck in air and collect carbon. Once the filter is full, the box is shut and heated until the carbon is released and pumped down as carbonated water into the basalt rock of the lava field below. CarbFix developed this method, whereby the carbon reacts with basalt and forms calcite.
“We need to turn this into a Starbucks, circa 1999, where you see one on every corner. ”
Injecting carbon into the rock has proved an effective way of locking away carbon without any noxious byproducts. It’s also very cheap, costing as little as $25 a ton of carbon. However, it does require the right kind of reactive rock – you can’t just pump fizzy water into the ground willy nilly and expect to turn carbon into stone. It also makes waves of the seismic kind, which is less than ideal. The area around CarbFix’s test injection wells suffered a series of earthquakes in 2011, which understandably freaked out the people living nearby and led to an increase in monitoring of the site. And Climeworks collector units do need steel, which produces 1.85 tons of carbon for every ton of the metal produced.
These kinds of carbon capture facilities are no silver bullet. They’re expensive to build, require a very particular location, and come with an earthquake warning. This is tricky when we’d need so many to make a dent in the vast amounts of carbon human industry releases into the atmosphere each day. “We need to turn this into a Starbucks, circa 1999, where you see one on every corner,” Peter Psarras, an engineering professor at University of Pennsylvania told Environment & Energy Publishing. A nice idea, but while Starbucks may be tax-evading barristards they’ve never caused any seismic activity – at least as far as Disegno is aware.
Story source: The Architect’s Newspaper, E&E News