By Andy Corbley | Good News Network
The “world’s largest” factory-built solely for the purpose of drawing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and storing it, has just come online in Iceland.
Built-in the geothermal park in Hellisheidi, the company hopes this is merely a stepping stone necessary to scale up the model by a factor of 80, and thereby remove millions of tons of CO2 by the end of the decade.
As direct a climate solution as there could be, the Orca factory, just one of a number of climate change solutions offered by the Icelandic firm Carbfix, takes CO2 from the air before separating the carbon from the oxygen, mixing it with water and sending it deep underground into basalt rock formations where it mineralizes.
With 16 locations recycling CO2, Climeworks, the Swiss company which provided Orca with the CO2 intake fans, is extremely excited to have participated in a project that will permanently remove carbon, rather than just recycling it. They say the green technology can be reproduced easily, and to scale, anywhere there is renewable energy and storage available. Orca was built adjacent to a local geothermal power plant, so it runs fully on renewable energy.
The company says it can pull 4,000 tons of CO2 out of the atmosphere every year, the equivalent of taking 870 cars off the road. On its own, it’s a small impact for the $10-15 million it takes to build, but as companies are increasingly pressured to provide carbon offsets for their operations, the technology offers a huge appeal if costs come down and production is boosted.
For example, offsetting emissions by planting trees is great, but it takes 50 years for a tree to gather enough CO2 to actually sequester it. If the tree dies before that period, it’s as if the company did nothing.
