Governments and tech giants are pouring money
into the wildest ideas
for removing carbon dioxide from the air.
Once you capture it, you can bury it deep underground
or you can sink it into the sea.
And some startups are even trying
to turn captured carbon dioxide into products.
Jet fuel, laundry detergent with Tide,
and even sunglasses with Pangaia.
I found that one of the biggest carbon removal companies,
a Swiss startup called Climeworks,
sells removed carbon to individuals
at more than $1,000 a ton.
So that got me thinking, can I buy some captured carbon
from any of these companies
and display it on my desk?
All right, so, hi.
I understand you capture carbon dioxide
and store it somehow.
Is that right?
That's exactly right.
We capture CO2 from the tailpipe of a semi-truck
with a retrofit device.
So if I wanted to buy some of that stored carbon
so that I can put it on my desk
and show people that it's a real technology,
can I do that?
Unfortunately,
we can't really share a cylinder of liquid CO2.
I'm not sending you a ton of CO2,
you realize? No, I won't have space
for a ton of CO2, I'm afraid.
And do you have some of it right now?
I can go grab some.
Should I go grab some? That'd be great.
Alrighty. There you go.
There you go.
Show it to me a little bit.
And so, like, what the hell is that? Does it
I mean yes, it's black, so maybe it's carbon,
but what is it?
This is bio-oil, and it's very rich in carbon.
Can I get some of the captured carbon?
Unfortunately not, but for the best reasons, right?
It's captured as stone, it's mineralized.
No.
Okay, so you won't sell me this captured carbon,
but can I come and visit you in Iceland and see it?
Absolutely, you're very welcome to visit us anytime
and we will- And touch it?
Can I touch it?
Absolutely.
Great.
I expected to see a barren landscape and some mountains,
but seeing it from up close is a thing of beauty.
Under the Paris Agreement, all the world's countries agreed
to keep global warming below 2 degrees Celsius,
or if possible, below 1.5 degrees Celsius.
Now, what does that translate to?
It means that the world needs
to not just stop emitting carbon dioxide,
which it is doing currently
at nearly 40 billion tons every year,
but also remove existing carbon dioxide
that's already in the atmosphere.
An estimate suggests we will need to capture and remove
2 billion to 10 billion tons of carbon dioxide
from the air, every year,
for the rest of century, starting from 2050,
somehow.
Iceland is the only country in the world
where you can witness climate change,
the melting of the ice on the glaciers,
firsthand,
but you can also discover the solution.
This is Olafur Ragnar Grímsson,
the former President of Iceland.
The solution he's talking about is one he facilitated
between two of the biggest players
in the carbon removal space:
Climeworks and Carbfix.
Oh, wow, this is stunning.
So we are surrounded by volcanic rocks
that have been solidified,
and in the distance, we see these big, huge towers of steam
just going straight up into the air,
which I expect is the geothermal power plant.
This is energy that you can draw
from just beneath the land here in Iceland,
not very deep, maybe a few hundred meters,
and you can convert it into electricity or just heat.
We are headed to go and see the biggest startup in the world
that removes carbon dioxide from the air
and then turns it into stone
here in Iceland.
The reason these startups are here is because of this,
geothermal power that is carbon-free
so that they can do the work
to remove carbon dioxide from the air.
So what are we looking at?
So this is the world's first
direct air capture and storage unit
called Orca, operated by Climeworks.
It is the first of its kind,
and it's also the largest direct air capture unit
in the globe.
So the whole process works
that you have six chambers on each container-sized unit.
So each chamber has a specialized filter
and vents that pull in the air from the outside.
So you have the ambient air flowing through there,
the CO2 is captured in the filter,
and the cleaner air leaves directly, right?
But what do you do when the filter is full?
Well, then we have to close the compartment and-
And then what's happening
behind the closed compartment?
When it's closed,
behind the closed doors,
we apply heat, so around 100 degrees Celsius, so-
And that releases the CO2?
This releases the CO2, which is then captured
and vacuum sucked back into the processing hole
where it's further processed,
so it's 100% CO2,
and then we send it through an underground pipeline
over to Carbfix
for the mineralization process.
Carbfix is-
Is further down that way. Okay.
The surprising thing, which I kind of knew going in,
but when you see it, it really strikes you,
is that the world's largest carbon removal plant is tiny.
It's tiny in the sense of the grand scale of things, right?
Like, this plant is doing something that's science fiction,
and it's doing it in a place where
you get to see a large geothermal power plant
that's pumping out big steam plumes.
There's like real activity happening elsewhere.
If you look at the actual facility capturing carbon,
it's a small, tiny thing sitting in the corner,
not doing anything as far as you can tell.
The plant captures 4,000 tons of carbon dioxide a year,
but that only makes up the annual emissions
of about 250 US residents.
The important bit is that it's the first step
in a scale-up process.
So what's next?
Well, you can actually see it here, right next door.
This is the construction of Mammoth,
which is the next Orca-type plant in the scale-up process,
and this will capture 36,000 tons of CO2 per year.
Almost nine times as much. Yes.
But right now, the problem is 40 billion tons of CO2
being pumped into the air.
Yeah, we need to reduce emissions first and foremost.
This is not a magic solution that will remove that problem.
So what we need to do
is, like, 90% reduce emissions drastically,
and then this is 10%.
This is for the historic emissions.
This is for the unavoidable emissions in the future.
So not a magic bullet,
but a part of the arsenal that we have
to fight climate change.
We are inside a lava tunnel.
About 5,000 years ago,
there was a lava explosion here in Iceland.
And when volcanoes erupt and cool down,
they leave behind lots and lots of basalt.
So all this rock is predominantly basalt,
that's pretty much what all of Iceland is made of,
and basalt rock is really good at capturing carbon dioxide.
Basalt is made of lots of salts from different metals,
iron, magnesium, calcium,
and when carbon dioxide reacts with calcium,
it forms calcium carbonate
and it traps the gas as a rock.
Carbfix imitates and accelerates these natural processes
to permanently store carbon dioxide in basaltic rock.
These futuristic pods is where it all happens.
So here we are actually doing something
for the first time in the world
in collaboration with our friends at Climeworks.
They are capturing CO2 directly from the atmosphere,
which we then take and inject into the ground
and turn it into stone.
And how do they move their CO2 to your system?
Once they have collected enough CO2,
it's piped towards our injection well,
just as this one.
And there, we co-inject the CO2 with water
to ensure that the CO2 gets dissolved in the water.
And once the CO2 is dissolved in the fluid
and we have the sparkling water,
we inject it into the bedrock.
There, the sparkling water reacts with the bedrock
and dissolves metals out of the rock
that combine with the CO2 and turn it into stone.
So when you inject CO2 underground,
you can actually now show us what exactly happens.
Yeah, this is actually a nice example
of kind of before and after.
Yeah, can I touch it?
Of course. Ooh, it is rocklike,
but it also feels a little soft to me,
like it feels like I'm gonna be able to crumble it.
You won't . Ah, no, I won't, okay.
Now, this is basalt, right?
Yes, it kind of looks like a sponge,
and these pores, and fractures, and vesicles,
they can actually host the CO2
once you've turned it into stone.
And that's what you see here.
In this rock, we've already stored some CO2.
You can see all these white spots.
So here, the pores are actually filled
with these white minerals,
and this is just simply CO2 turned to stone.
How long does that stay in the form of stone?
Forever. Oh, really?
Yeah, we are talking
about geological timescales there.
Okay, so you're gonna-
the bottle you'll send me, it has to be tightly sealed.
Yeah. Okay.
But can you show me the process of how it actually works?
Yeah, let's walk out back.
Alrighty, well, this is the corn stover,
the agricultural residue of choice for us.
And it's a mixture of things like corn cobs
as well as the stalks and leaves of corn plants.
Capturing carbon dioxide from the air
isn't the only way to do it.
A lot of carbon dioxide is naturally captured by plants.
The problem is the plants release it back into the air
when they die and rot.
A 100 million acres of corn grown every year
all over the US
that's capturing something like 600 million tons of CO2.
About 95% of it rots on the field every year,
and it's a shame, we just let it rot on the field
and all that CO2
that we've already done the hard work of capturing
by doing all this plant growing
just goes straight back into the atmosphere.
Charm Industrial says
why not take these dead plants
and bury their captured carbon in the ground
so it can't escape?
So today, we have farmers take the cornstalks
up off their field,
rake them into windrows, bale them,
transport the bales to their edge of the field,
then load the bales onto a truck
and drive those bales to one of our test sites.
So once the biomass arrives at one of our pyrolyzers,
it goes through first a step of grinding
to less than half an inch in size.
And then those very small pieces of biomass
get very rapidly heated to about 500 degrees C,
and that effectively vaporizes the biomass.
And so a really important thing to understand
is that the pyrolyzer's energy to drive that heat
is coming from the biomass itself,
it's not consuming power off grid or something like that.
Aside from a little bit of propane at startup,
it has then become self-sustaining
on the energy in the biomass.
And from there then,
we separate out, first, the solid char particles.
This what goes back into the field,
improves the soil health.
Then that vapor stream continues to the next step
where we condense the bio-oil out.
This is the bio-oil.
So this is the barbecue sauce,
and that barbecue sauce,
it literally is the natural smoke flavor ingredient
in barbecue sauce,
is very rich in carbon, and it's a dense fluid,
and we can inject that into old oil and gas reserves.
In the US today, there's about 2 million
end-of-life oil and gas wells,
places where we extracted oil previously,
so in many ways, we're sort of putting oil back
where it came from.
Late last year, Charm announced the removal
of about 5,500 tons of carbon dioxide so far.
None of these companies are capturing carbon dioxide
on a scale to make much of an impact
on addressing climate change today.
The industry must remove tens of billions of tons
from the atmosphere this century,
which will require growth
that eclipses even that
of the computer and software industries
in recent decades.
So carbon removal technology, it's not that difficult.
The ideas are quite basic chemistry,
quite basic chemical engineering,
and all they really need now is money.
So far, most of the money has gone
towards electricity and for transport.
Very little money has gone towards carbon capture.
So currently, some hundreds of millions of dollars
are being spent on these startups, like Climeworks,
every year.
That number will have to go
into the billions of dollars or tens of billions of dollars
to be able to make an impact
on actually removing lots and lots of carbon dioxide
from the air,
and the more you do it, the cheaper it becomes.
Some governments, including the US,
are finally starting to step up
and put money towards carbon capture,
but most of that money, currently, is coming
from large corporations
wanting to reach those net zero goals.
There is proof right here on my desk
that this technology can work.
We just need to make it work at scale.