Direct air capture (DAC) trailblazer Climeworks has unlocked a substantial increase in CO2 capture capacity while slashing operating costs by more than half at its Mammoth plant in Iceland.
With this breakthrough, the innovative company is paving the way for large-scale DAC, which could be a valuable tool in the global effort to curb the effects of climate change.
In a publication, Climeworks shares that the DAC breakthrough at Mammoth was made possible by optimizing the sorbent material and improving the plant design.
For the past 18 months, the company has been running DAC operations at this plant, and during this time, the tech alterations have resulted in more than a twofold increase in throughput. The company has already deployed the first upgraded collector containers at Mammoth, which are now achieving the original design run rates under real-world conditions.
These improvements not only increase the volume of captured atmospheric CO2, but they also reduce the cost of DAC carbon removal, presenting a potential solution to one of the biggest scaling obstacles for this climate technology.
Talking to Bloomberg, Climeworks co-founder and co-CEO Jan Wurzbacher shares that when the company launched Mammoth, volume was the main focus of investors and the sector, with the task at hand being how fast the technology could tackle as much emissions as possible.
Since then, as the world and the climate sector evolved, the focus has shifted towards performance, according to Wurzbacher. His company has now made major progress in this domain by working on two specific areas of operation.
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The optimizations that enabled Climeworks’ DAC milestine
One of the areas is its sorbent filter material that captures CO2 from the air. Leveraging insights gained from operating Mammoth, the company refined the sorbent formulation and its production process, increasing its capture capacity and improving how it performs under real-world conditions.
The second area that enabled the capacity and costs optimization is the mechanical design and plant operation, for which Climeworks upgraded Mammoth’s equipment and refined the operating processes, making the plant more reliable and more efficient.
Climeworks applied these upgrades at two collector containers at Mammoth for more than six months, achieving improved capture volumes and lower costs.
Looking ahead, Climeworks shares, “By the end of 2026, we will introduce the new sorbent and mechanical upgrades across all 12 collector containers in one plant module at Mammoth. This will bring the upgraded technology to a larger operational scale, further increasing production and reducing costs.”
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