This story is an opportunity for me to throw an editorial wrapper around a short announcement.
The plant is small and the technology is expensive but this really is the wave of the future.
As to size, a few years ago Sweden's Lund University calculated that Bill Gates' 59 trips on his jets (I think he has four now, two big Airbus' and two big Gulfstreams) produced 1600 tonnes of CO2.
Here's the headline story and then a bit more editorializing. From The Chemical Engineer, September 21:
Climeworks starts up industrial-scale direct air capture facility
CLIMEWORKS has started operations at the world’s largest direct air capture and CO2 storage facility, in Iceland.
The construction of the facility, known as Orca, began in May 2020. It is constructed with advanced modular technology of container-sized units and has a capture capacity of 4,000 t/y of CO2. It is situated next to ON Power’s Hellisheiði Geothermal Power Plant so that it runs entirely on renewable electricity. The captured CO2 will be stored underground by partner Carbfix, which mixes the CO2 with water for rapid underground mineralisation in a process that takes less than two years....
....MORE
So this plant, currently the world's largest would remove the equivalent of one guy's travel emissions for 2 1/2 years..
Big whoop. However...
Carbon capture and storage is favored at some of the highest political levels and will be used by companies that are so big they see the expense required to get to negative emissions as a competitive advantage against smaller competitors who will be crushed by the costs. This is the same approach multinationals take toward regulation: bring it on and bury the little guys.
There are voices in the control-freak wing of the green coalition that are already howling that this technology will allow "business-as-usual" to continue which is a threat to their wannabe power over people and economies. They will probably be bought off.
One last note: the approach that Carbfix uses, solidifying the CO2 is absolutely the way to go versus pumping CO2 gas into disused caverns or oil and gas fields or under the sea.
Although more expensive initially, it eliminates the threat of carbon dioxide belches that could be, not just counterproductive to the storage effort, but physically dangerous to people in the vicinity. See Cameroon's Lake Nyos for an example.
