this isn't some far away planet these Martian likee Landscapes are found in Iceland it could almost be a scene from science fiction seemingly in the middle of nowhere these taring machines are guzzling up carbon dioxide a global warming gas so could this much hyped technology help us fight the climate crisis Mammoth is the world's largest direct air capture and storage facility what you see here are 12 of our collector containers when the plant is fully operational we'll actually have 72 around the plant that will enable us to capture 36,000 tons of CO2 every year it
works like a giant vacuum each of these units is the size of a ship and container and has a dozen powerful fans sucking in the surrounding air they pull in an Olympic swimming pool's worth of air every 40 seconds and then inside a filter separates the CO2 in the atmosphere its concentration is very dilute capturing even smaller amounts requires lots of energy and Mammoth gets both power and hot water from the nearby geothermal plant for us to do direct air capture effectively and efficiently we want to make sure that we're using energy that has a
low carbon footprint some would look at this and say hang on where's the industry would it not be more efficient to have one of these next to a factory that's actually making the pollution carbon dioxide tends to just disperse and diffuse in the air the effectiveness of direct air capture is not dependent on being located close to Industrial emitters okay I'll let you show me where the CO2 goes that lowest line here that's actually the CO2 that's coming from those 12 containers outside these two balloons are really good visual representation of what in total one
ton of CO2 looks like this Tower then Works a bit like a sooda stream dissolving the pure CO2 in water from the top we have water coming in so it's like a shower it's sort of at home if you're making sparkling water same idea that fizzy water is sent to these Igloo like domes so here we have one of our injection Wells please come inside this well is going 700 M down into the underground here the CO2 and water is pumped deep into the Bassel Bedrock where it reacts and turns to Stone so you've got
a couple of rocks yes exactly I'm a geologist so I brought rocks this is a fresh bazal here actually from one of the last volcanic eruptions here in Iceland you can see there's a lot of paracity in here here you can see there's a lot of these pores now filled with W of specs some of these contain the mineralized CO2 and Copic says that happens pretty quickly we're not talking about millions or tens of thousands of years around about 95% of the CO2 was mineralized here within 2 years in the pilot project this is incredibly
fast geologically speaking Mammoth is climar second commercial plant and almost 10 times bigger than the last one collecting 36,000 tons of CO2 annually about the same amount is taking 8,000 petrol cars off the road but it costs a whopping thousand to remove just one ton what do we mean by removing emissions among its customers on Microsoft H&M and Lego worldwide more plants like these are on the way though they'll still only remove a fraction of what's needed and despite calls to slash our emissions this CO2 we churn out continues to grow do you think direct
air capture Can Be an Effective tool for removing carbon we release about 40 billion tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere every year so this won't make a dent into the big problem but I think you should use all methods and methodologies to to fight this problem what's it going to take to scale it up bring cost down and make it really impactful by the end of the decade we want to be at a cost of capture of between and $400 technology improvements will help drive down cost a second lever will will be scale the
team says this is just the beginning Mammoth will soon be dwarfed by another much bigger plant project Cyprus in the United States which will eventually capture a million tons of CO2 each year from Mammoth to Cyprus we're now looking to break that hundreds of thousands of tons of capture capacity a year I really do believe direct air capture and other engineered Solutions are going to be able to get us to the point that we need to to help fight climate change but
