From Thin Air to Stone: Greenhouse Gas Test Starts in Iceland

A Swiss company will start to extract carbon dioxide from thin air in Iceland on Thursday, seeking to transform the gas into rock far below ground in a first test of a costly technology meant to slow climate change.

The engineering experiment, by Swiss firm Climeworks with Reykjavik Energy, will cost hundreds of dollars to extract each ton of greenhouse gases from nature and entomb it permanently underground.

Climeworks plans to suck 50 tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere over a year - roughly the greenhouse gas emissions of a single American family - using special fans and chemicals in the European Union-backed project.

The gas will be dissolved in water and piped about 1,000 meters (3,300 ft) underground, where Reykjavik Energy says carbon reacts with basaltic rock and turns to stone.

The hope is that the high costs will fall.

“This is small scale, but the main reason is to prepare a scale-up” of the technology, Jan Wurzbacher, director and founder of Climeworks, told Reuters before the formal launch on Thursday.

He said it was the world’s first test to twin carbon capture from air with carbon burial.

Edda Sif Aradottir, the project’s manager at Reykjavik Energy, which has injected carbon from the Hellisheidi geo-thermal power plant into the ground since 2007, said most has turned to stone within two years, centuries faster than previously estimated.

“It’s a very environmentally benign method of reducing emissions,” she said.  She said that there were similar basalt deposits in many parts of the world.

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