Is carbon capture here?

Stephan Hitz paused from his work operating an odd-looking machine in an otherworldly landscape in Iceland and reached for a "Star Wars" analogy to explain his job at the frontier of climate technology.

"I feel like I have come from the Dark Side to become a Jedi warrior," he joked as he braced against a chill wind blowing across the treeless stretches of cooled lava and distant volcanoes.

The 37-year-old service technician from Zurich spent nine years working in the aviation and marine industries before joining Climeworks, a Swiss startup that is trying to undo the damage caused by such heavily polluting industries.

"It does give you extra satisfaction to know that you're helping the planet instead of damaging it," he said.

Hitz and his small team of technicians are running Orca, the world's biggest commercial direct air capture (DAC) device, which in September began pulling carbon dioxide out of the air at a site 20 miles from the capital, Reykjavik.

As the wind stirred up clouds of steam billowing from the nearby Hellisheidi geothermal power plant, a gentle hum came from Orca, which resembles four massive air-conditioners, each the size of one shipping container sitting on top of another.

Each container holds 12 large round fans powered by renewable electricity from the geothermal plant, which suck air into steel catchment boxes where carbon dioxide, or CO2, the main greenhouse gas behind global warming, chemically bonds with a sandlike filtering substance.

Seve

ral other firms are striving to pull carbon from the air in the United States and elsewhere, but only here in the volcanic plateaus of Iceland is the CO2 being turned into that sparkling cocktail and injected several hundred meters down into basalt bedrock.

Carbfix has discovered that its CO2 mix will chemically react with basalt and turn to rock in just two or three years instead of the centuries that the mineralization process was believed to take, so it takes the CO2 that Climeworks' DAC captures and pumps it into the ground through wells protected from the harsh environment by steel igloos that could easily serve as props in a space movie.

It is a permanent solution, unlike the planting of forests which can release their carbon by rotting, being cut down or burning in a warming planet.

Orca is billed as the world's first commercial DAC unit because the 4,000 metric tons of CO2 it can extract each year have been paid for by 8,000 people who have subscribed online to remove some carbon, and by firms including Stripe, Swiss Re, Audi and Microsoft.

The problem is that Orca's output equals just three seconds of humanity's annual CO2 emissions, which are closer to 40 billion metric tons, but Orca has at least shown that the concept of scrubbing the air clean and putting carbon back underground has moved from science fiction to science.

Christoph Gebald, Climeworks' co-founder, is adamant that the technology can grow into a trillion-dollar industry in the next three or four decades, a goal that he says would be helped if the United Nations climate conference in Glasgow, Scotland, called COP26, sees most nations commit to net zero emissions by 2050.

The challenge will hinge on reducing costs, which Gebald said are now about $600 to $800 a metric ton. Increased output could bring those costs down to $200 to $300 a metric ton by 2030, and $100 to $150 somewhere around 2035, he said.

DAC would already be competitive if it received the subsidies that helped electric vehicles and solar panels deploy and flourish, Gebald said.

A fundamental difference from wind and solar power is that they were ultimately driven by the profit motive because once subsidies had helped to make them competitive they were producing a valuable asset: cheap electricity.

Carbfix is busily exploring how to adapt its mineralization process to other types of rock and how to use seawater at sites that are short of fresh water.

Carbfix was launched as a research project in 2007 after prodding by the then-president of Iceland, Olafur Ragnar Grimsson, who had been told by a local scientist that Iceland's highly porous basalt could mineralize CO2 without creating any seismic problems.

Grimsson consolidated his role as Orca's "fairy godfather" shortly after ending his 20 years as president in 2016, when he was walking through the bar of a luxury hotel at that year's U.N. climate meeting in Marrakech, Morocco.

"I happened to overhear this American investor sitting at a table loudly boosting this new Swiss company that he said had the technology to pull carbon straight out of the air," he said. "So I stopped and said 'Hey, in Iceland we know how to turn that stuff into rock!'"

He put Gebald together with Carbfix "and bingo, that was the missing link."

"Somehow it seems that these events rarely achieve what they set out to do," she said.