World's Largest Direct Air Carbon Capture System Goes Online

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: The largest carbon capture facility in the world is slated to come online Wednesday in Iceland, amid growing skepticism over the technology's role in addressing the climate crisis. The Orca, a direct air capture plant constructed by Swiss carbon capture company Climeworks AG, with support from Microsoft, started running Wednesday around 20 miles southeast of Reykjavik.

The facility is made up of eight air collection containers, each holding several dozen cylindrical fans, which pull in ambient air and filter carbon dioxide from it using a filter, according to the Climeworks' press materials. What's trapped is heated, mixed with water, and pumped deep underground. The plant would pull 4,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide from the air per year in total, which the company anticipates would be stored for 'thousands of years.' Their process is proprietary, but it's part of a broader form of carbon capture called direct air capture (DAC), a method of geoengineering that's become controversial in recent years for its dubious efficacy and practicality. DAC proposes to slow climate change by sucking greenhouse gasses like CO2 directly from the atmosphere, DAC has splintered environmentalists, some of whom laud it as a potential savior, while others call it as a costly, risky distraction from meaningful emissions distractions.

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