![]() ![]() Overall, the market for carbon credits could be worth upward of $50 billion in 2030. The Taskforce on Scaling Voluntary Carbon Markets (TSVCM), sponsored by the Institute of International Finance (IIF) with knowledge support from McKinsey, estimates that demand for carbon credits could increase by a factor of 15 or more by 2030 and by a factor of up to 100 by 2050. For many, it will be necessary to use carbon credits to offset emissions they can’t get rid of by other means. The challenge is especially tough for organizations that aim to achieve net-zero emissions, which means removing as much greenhouse gas from the air as they put into it. ![]() Yet many businesses find they cannot fully eliminate their emissions, or even lessen them as quickly as they might like. “We are ambitious and have high hopes that we can bring the technology to scale-and there I’m talking about the gigaton scale-and that we’re able to do this quickly because that’s what the world needs.More and more companies are pledging to help stop climate change by reducing their own greenhouse-gas emissions as much as they can. “It will never be the only solution,” said Aradottir. Europe could theoretically store at least 4,000 billion tons of CO₂ in rocks, while the U.S. The global storage potential using the technology is greater than the emissions from burning all fossil fuels on earth, according to Carbfix. The company aims to reach 1 billion metric tons of permanently stored CO₂ in 2030. Carbfix is also working with research institutions on making the technology applicable for other types of rock. The technology relies on basalts, where the carbonated water reacts with elements such as calcium, magnesium and iron, forming carbonates that fill up empty spaces in the rocks underground. In 2017, Climeworks installed its direct-air-capture machine at Hellisheidi. The plant’s capture capacity was then doubled in 2016 and the aim is to bring emissions from the plant down to near-zero in the coming years. The first pilot injections were done in 2012, followed by a full-scale capture plant for two of six high-pressure turbines at the Hellisheidi plant in 2014. CarbFix said it’s taking part.Ĭarbfix was born from a research project and founded in 2007 by Reykjavik Energy, the University of Iceland, CNRS in France and the Earth Institute at Columbia University. That’s one reason why Gates and Microsoft are backing projects by Climeworks. “Climeworks’ direct air capture technology will serve as a key component of our carbon removal efforts,” said Elizabeth Willmott, Microsoft’s carbon removal manager. Musk announced last month that he’ll fund a new Carbon Removal Prize that will distribute $100 million to the best technology innovations over four years. Yet a growing number of analysts say such offsets will need to become part of the program to ensure Europe meets its Green Deal objective of becoming climate-neutral by 2050. The EU’s ETS was created before direct air capture became a viable technology, and it doesn’t currently accept credits for direct air capture. While geothermal plants are already classified as renewable energy, they do produce a small fraction of the CO₂ that would be generated by a natural gas facility. It’s scaling up its project at the Hellisheidi geothermal power plant to capture carbon emissions as they are released, and it’s partnering with Swiss startup Climeworks AG that builds machines to capture CO₂ directly from the air. Carbon capture can cut a company or government’s emissions to zero, while carbon removal can help offset its emissions, or even make its impact negative, by taking more CO₂ out of the air than it produces.Ĭarbfix is doing both. A second, more challenging process, is “carbon removal” - withdrawing CO₂ from the air around us. The first is called “carbon capture,” where the gas is trapped from the smokestacks of factories and power plants before it escapes into the atmosphere. founder Bill Gates and Tesla Inc.’s Elon Musk, who are searching for solutions to avoid the worst effects of global warming. Once considered a pipe dream, capturing and storing CO₂ has in the last few years become an area of immense interest for high-profile investors, such as Microsoft Corp. “Basically we are just doing what nature has been doing for millions of years, so we are helping nature help itself.” Reykjavik-based Carbfix captures and dissolves CO₂ in water, then injects it into the ground where it turns into stone in less than two years. “This is a technology that can be scaled-it’s cheap and economic and environmentally friendly,” Carbfix Chief Executive Officer Edda Sif Pind Aradottir said in an interview. ![]()
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