Climeworks wins funding to study large-scale DAC+S in Norway

Swiss direct air capture (DAC) specialist Climeworks has been awarded US$2.4m in funding from Enova, the state enterprise owned by the Norwegian government’s Ministry of Climate and Environment.

The funding will go towards a feasibility study for a multi-kiloton-capacity DAC and storage (DAC+S) plant in Norway.

To be supplied at 50% funding intensity in the framework of Enova’s ‘Preliminary Study Carbon Capture 2030’, the financing aims to help companies such as Climeworks capture large amounts of carbon dioxide (CO2) to get closer to an investment decision for capture plants, with the goal of operation by 2030.

The combined targeted capture capacity for all nine projects to win funding totals 1.7m tonnes, equivalent to almost half of all emissions from passenger cars in Norway.

“We are pleased to be able to support Climeworks’ work in the development of industrial carbon removal projects,” said Nils Kristian Nakstad, CEO of Enova.

“This technology will play a decisive role in the transition to a low-emissions society, and this project is an important step in the right direction.”

Norway was chosen partially because of its wide-scale availability of renewable energy, with 98% of electricity produced from renewable sources such as hydro.

The country also offers considerable storage potential, with the Norwegian Continental Shelf capable of holding ‘many gigatonnes’ of CO2, according to Climeworks.

Leveling up DAC

To boost carbon removal efforts in the country, the government of Norway announced last year that it is looking at introducing a subsidy for DAC.

The reverse tax amount considered is 2000 NOK ($187) per metric tonnes of CO2 removed from the atmosphere using the technology.

The latest funding allocation for DAC highlights the emphasis placed on CO2 removal in the Norwegian climate strategy.

Figures from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) suggest that humanity must remove up to 660 billion tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere by the end of the century to limit global warming to 1.5C.

Advocates of DAC say the technology could reduce the need for fossil fuels in industries such as aviation by making use of the captured CO2 to produce useful chemicals such as synthetic fuels.

Critics suggest that the high energy cost (up to $600 to remove a tonne of CO2) and materials used for DAC make it too expensive and impractical on the tight timescale left to avert climate change.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) forecasts that it will be removing 90m tonnes a year in 2030, 620m tonnes in 2040 and 980m tonnes annually in 2050. Only 19 DAC projects have come online since 2010, which collectively remove 0.008m tonnes of CO2 each year.

However, with deployment of large-scale DAC technologies such as Climeworks’ Orca plant and its upcoming Mammoth project, deployment is gaining momentum and there are signs that costs are falling.

Costs are expected to drop to between $125 and $335 per tonne of CO2 in the 2030s, potentially dropping to below $100 by 2040.