Iceland's Mammut plant

This is how the world’s largest CO2 vacuum cleaner works

(Bild: Climeworks)

In order to curb climate change and its consequences, an unprecedented global effort will be needed in the coming decades - and savings alone will probably not be enough, as too much carbon dioxide (CO2) has already been blown into the atmosphere. Swiss inventors therefore want to extract it from the atmosphere again and have put the world's largest CO2 extractor, Plant Mammut, into operation in Iceland.

The Mammut plant is the second CO2 extractor in Iceland: in 2021, the Swiss start-up Climeworks opened a pilot plant there that extracts CO2 from the atmosphere and stores it in porous volcanic rock. The first plant, Orca, was supposed to suck 4000 tons per year out of the atmosphere - and was a success, which is why Climeworks has now opened an even larger plant: Mammoth. It is designed to filter and store up to 36,000 tons of carbon dioxide from the air every year. That would be as much as 15,600 Austrians produce in traffic emissions in a year - 2.3 tons per person according to the VCÖ mobility club. However, CO2 capture and storage technology still has a catch.