Climeworks doubles CO2 capture, halves costs at Iceland plant

Climeworks, the Swiss carbon removal company, announced on September 10 that technology upgrades at its Mammoth direct air capture facility in Iceland have more than doubled CO₂ capture performance in upgraded collector containers, while cutting operating costs per ton by more than half.esgtoday+1

The improvements, drawn from 18 months of operating the world's largest direct air capture plant, mark a turning point for a sector under pressure to prove it can scale economically as global temperatures continue to rise.

What Changed

Climeworks said the gains came from two areas: refinements to its sorbent — the filter material that binds CO₂ from ambient air — and mechanical upgrades to the plant's design and operating processes. The first upgraded collector containers are now achieving their original design run rates under real-world conditions.decarbonfuse+2

The Mammoth facility removed 675 tons of CO₂ in the first half of 2026, almost six times as much as the same period a year earlier, according to Bloomberg. The plant, which began operations in 2024, has a stated capacity of up to 36,000 tons per year but has so far operated well below that level.energyconnects

"When we decided to build Mammoth, the world around us, also our investors, were all about how can we be as fast as possible with as much volume as possible in the field and at almost any cost," co-founder and co-CEO Jan Wurzbacher told Bloomberg. "It was really a volume game." Since Mammoth opened, "the world has changed a bit," with the focus now on performance rather than total tons removed, he said.energyconnects

Scaling Plans

Climeworks said it plans to roll out the sorbent and mechanical upgrades across all 12 collector containers in one plant module at Mammoth by the end of 2026. The company also said it will begin testing its next-generation direct air capture technology at the site in early 2027, with lab results showing a tenfold improvement in sorbent lifetime and a fourfold improvement in process densification, which would allow fewer containers to produce the same output.carbonherald+1

A Long Road Ahead

The advances arrive amid growing urgency. The United Nations said last week that the world will likely surpass the Paris Agreement's 1.5°C warming threshold within the next few years, and that some amount of carbon removal is now essential to bring temperatures back down. More than 100 direct air capture startups have formed in recent years, with projects that could total 4.5 million tons of annual capacity by 2035, according to BloombergNEF — though many of those are unlikely to materialize.energyconnects

Reducing operating costs by more than 50 percent is "an important milestone in improving the economics of direct air capture" and increasing its appeal, Climeworks said.onestopesg+1