A startup in Iceland is fitting a key piece of the puzzle of fighting climate change by turning carbon dioxide (CO2) into rock, allowing the greenhouse gas to be stored forever instead of escaping into the atmosphere and trapping heat.
Based in Reykjavik, Carbfix captures and dissolves the CO2 in water, then injects it into the ground, where it turns into rock in less than two years. “This is a technology that can be scaled up: it’s cheap, economical and environmentally friendly,” Carbfix CEO Edda Sif Pind Aradottir stressed in an interview. “Basically, we are just doing what nature has been doing for millions of years, so we are helping nature to help itself.”
Once considered an impossible dream, capturing and storing CO2 has in recent years become an area of immense interest to top investors such as Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who are looking for solutions to prevent the worst effects of global warming.
The technology can work in two ways. The first is called “carbon capture,” in which gas is captured from the smokestacks of factories and power plants before escaping into the atmosphere. A second, more challenging process is “carbon removal,” that is, removing CO2 from the air around us. Carbon capture can reduce a company’s or government’s emissions to zero, while carbon removal helps offset emissions and can even make the impact negative by removing more CO2 from the air than it produces.
Carbfix does both. The company is expanding its project at the Hellisheidi geothermal power plant to capture carbon emissions as they are released, and has partnered with Swiss startup Climeworks that makes machines to capture CO2 directly from the air. Although geothermal power plants are already classified as renewable energy, they still produce a small fraction of the CO2 generated by a natural gas plant.
