Orca, the world’s largest carbon capturing and storage plant, has started to operate in Iceland in an attempt to reduce CO2 from the air as a measure that can contribute towards limiting global warming.
Since humanity emitted 34.14 billion tons of CO2 in 2020, the annual amount of 4,000 tons of captured CO2 sounds of little importance. It actually equals the emissions produced by 870 cars per year. At this capacity, the world would need around 9,110,000 such installations to totally remove that which is emitted annually.
Nevertheless, Climeworks admits that although the carbon-capture industry is still in its infancy, there is room for development.
“We are prepared to rapidly ramp up our capacity in the next years. Achieving global net-zero emissions is still a long way to go but, with Orca, we believe that Climeworks has taken one significant step closer to achieving that goal,” said Climeworks co-CEO and co-founder, Jan Wurzbacher.
Climeworks’ goal is to capture 500,000 tons of annual carbon emissions by 2030. As the demand for CO2 removal is very high, the Swiss start-up is already planning to build a 10-fold larger plant than the current one within three years, Wuzbacher announced.
However, scaling up is a challenge due to the costs involved. Wuzbacher noted that spending on the construction of the plant, the development of the site, and the storage process ranged between US$10 million and US$15 million. At the current stage, the price for removing one ton of CO2 from the air is US$1,200. As the European fine for one ton of carbon dioxide emitted stands at 63 euros or US$73 dollars, turning to Orca for its services looks less attractive. However, Climeworks is aiming to slash prices to US$200-$300 per ton by 2030 and to US$100-$200 by 2035.
Despite criticism concerning the high price of the carbon-capturing service, climate scientists from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) pointed out in their latest report that carbon-capturing can help to curb climate changes.
Orca is the first carbon-capture plant that is able to permanently remove carbon from the atmosphere rather than recycling it. Only three entities have made an attempt to construct plants based on similar technology. Apart from Climeworks, US-based Global Thermostat LLC tried to build a carbon-capture plant but its efforts floundered due to organizational and financial issues and Canada-based Carbon Engineering Ltd has a working prototype that can capture about 300 tons per year but still does not have an operational facility.
To prevent a 2 degrees C increase in air temperature globally, the world needs to cut greenhouse gas emissions by about 80% according to experts.
