The carbon removal technology company Climeworks has now built the world’s largest direct air capture and storage facility — twice.
Climework’s first commercial plant, Orca, came online in September 2021, in Hellisheiði, Iceland. The plant consists of eight collector containers — the proprietary and most crucial component of the company’s carbon removal technology — that each capture 500 tons of carbon per year. That puts Orca’s total annual carbon capture capacity at 4,000 tons annually.
But before Orca was even finished, Climeworks was making plans for its next plant, Mammoth, to be built just down the street. It would be 10 times larger than Orca.
“For us being first to market and demonstrating to the world that direct air capture was possible at scale as quickly as possible was really important,” said Doug Chan, chief operating officer at Climeworks, on The Green Blueprint podcast.
In June 2022, Climeworks broke ground on Mammoth. They had two specific goals for the plant: improve the CO2 purification, and make the collector containers more manufacturable at a larger scale. Both meant coming up with some new designs.
“Within these containers there’s filter elements which went from hundreds to thousands,” explained Chan. “So we actually had to improve the design of the filter elements inside the box to be more mass manufacturable…probably the biggest thing that we [redesigned] to make it more manufacturable.”
Listen to Doug Chan’s whole interview on The Green Blueprint:
To keep the title of world’s largest direct air capture and storage facility, Chan decided to test the new prototypes while they were being sent to manufacturing. Competition for the title was growing; 1PointFive and Carbon Engineering, among others, had both announced plans to build bigger facilities within the next three to four years.
“While we were testing the prototypes, we actually did see some failures that were earlier than we had expected. And…we’re also doing a serial production at the same time,” said Chan, who was then forced to make one of the toughest decisions of the project.
“Do we pause everything and redesign? Do we continue manufacturing? So we actually had to go through some quite challenging decisions there with the design and manufacturing team to determine that balance between schedule and technology as we were moving forward,” Chan said.
Because being first to market was so important, Chan and his team decided to continue manufacturing the filter without pausing manufacturing, but they also sent a new design to address the failures.
“We decided to continue with the ones that were already there and essentially deploy a field patch or a field reinforcement to strengthen the failure mode that we had seen,” he said.
Despite the ongoing filter challenges, the Climeworks team pushed forward with construction through 2023. The modular design of the plant allowed them to install and test collector containers in groups of 12, working toward their final target of 72 containers.
On Christmas Eve 2023, the team gathered in Iceland to flip the switch on Mammoth.
“We’re all kind of staring at the meter saying, oh yeah, we’re going to get one kilo. And as soon as we saw that number pop up, it was…a big celebration for the team,” said Chan.
Last summer, Mammoth was officially commissioned, though Chan acknowledges they’re still addressing some “teething pains” with scaling manufacturing, and are continuing to address some of the issues with the filter elements. “I mean Band-Aid fixes are band-aids because they’re exactly that,” he said.
“I think that’s a very Silicon Valley mindset, right? It’s like fail, fail fast,” said Chan. “But the inverse of that is that you’re not going to have complete information. Let’s do the best that we can with the information that we have at hand and then move forward.”
Even before Mammoth was complete, Climeworks began planning its next and biggest facility yet — Project Cypress in Louisiana. Supported by $50 million in federal funding from the Regional Direct Air Capture Hub program, Cypress aims to capture one million tons of CO2 annually.
For Chan and his team, it represents the next step toward their ultimate goal of reaching gigaton-scale carbon removal by 2050.
This story borrows from an interview that appeared on The Green Blueprint, a Latitude Media podcast.
