Its called direct-air capture, and it consists of machines that work like a tree does, sucking carbon dioxide (CO2) out from the air, but on steroidscapturing thousands of times more carbon in the same amount of time, and, hopefully, ensuring we dont suffer climate catastrophe.
Three companiesSwitzerlands Climeworks, Canadas Carbon Engineering, and the USs Global Thermostatare building machines that, at reasonable costs, can capture CO2 directly from the air. (A fourth company, Kilimanjaro Energy, closed shop due to a lack of funding.)
Over the past year, Ive been tracking the broader field of carbon capture and storage, which aims to capture emissions from sources such as power plants and chemical factories. Experts in the field look at these direct-air-capture entrepreneurs as the rebellious kids in the class. Instead of going after the low-hanging fruit, one expert told me, these companies are taking moonshotsand setting themselves up for failure.
Climeworks just proved the cynics wrong. On Oct. 11, at a geothermal power plant in Iceland, the startup inaugurated the first system that does direct air capture and verifiably achieves negative carbon emissions. Although its still at pilot scalecapturing only 50 metric tons CO2 from the air each year, about the same emitted by a single US household or 10 Indian householdsits the first system to convert the emissions into stone, thus ensuring they dont escape back into the atmosphere for the next millions of years.
