Focusing at first on the facility in Switzerland, the teams worked together to build a digital plant solution that would help optimize operations by moving from reactive to proactive issue management. For example, the digital plant allowed for the real-time monitoring and detection of anomalies related to critical components; the optimization of energy consumption and the ideal balancing of performance, cost, and life cycle; and the correlating of CO2 production outputs and forecasts with weather and other factors.
The collaboration has helped Climeworks make major strides on its scale-up roadmap. And one that promises to have a significant impact on global climate change—and help live up to the company’s vision of inspiring one billion people to be a part of their mission to remove CO2 from air—by offering their service where anyone can contribute in carbon dioxide removal.
Additionally, the successful digital plant solution will now be used at the plant in Iceland—a first in a planned program of scaling by building more facilities. Learnings of the partnership will be applied in the new large-scale direct air capture and storage plant “Orca” in Iceland, which will capture 4000 tons of CO2 each year to store them safely and permanently deep underground through natural mineralization.
