The biggest industrial plant yet to suck tons of planet-heating carbon dioxide out of the air came online yesterday in southwest Iceland. Direct air capture plants like this one have been hyped up lately by world leaders and giant corporations — notably Microsoft — that are looking to erase their legacy of greenhouse gas pollution. This particular operation is ideally located to test the emerging technology.
The new plant, built by Swiss company Climeworks, is powered by renewable energy from a geothermal power plant nearby. Climeworks also plans to lock the captured CO2 away in basalt rock formations just three kilometers from the geothermal plant. It’s a storage plan that likely bypasses the need for controversial new carbon dioxide pipelines. “It’s going to be, I think, an interesting test case,” says David Morrow, director of research at the Institute for Carbon Removal Law and Policy at American University. “But it’s also sort of a baby step in the big scheme of thing