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Here are six things to know about it.
If one company has set the pace for direct air capture, it’s Climeworks. The Switzerland-based business opened its — and the world’s — first commercial DAC plant in 2017, capable of capturing “several hundred tons” of carbon dioxide each year. Today, the company unveiled its newest plant, the aptly named Mammoth. Located in Iceland, Mammoth is designed to take advantage of the country’s unique geology to capture and store up to 36,000 metric tons of carbon per year — eventually. Here’s what you need to know about the new project.
Mammoth is not yet operating at full capacity, with only 12 of its planned 72 capturing and filtering units installed. When the plant is fully operational — which Climeworks says should be sometime next year — it will pull up to 36,000 metric tons of CO2 out of the atmosphere annually. For scale, that’s about 1/28,000th of a gigaton. To get to net zero emissions, we’ll have to remove multiple gigatons of carbon from the atmosphere every year.
“The engineered solutions will have to play a major — and I would say even the major part of this task,” said Climeworks CEO Jan Wurzbacher at the virtual press conference for Mammoth’s unveiling. In his opinion, nature-based solutions “will not be able to scale to the level where we need them to be.”
So in the context of where we need to go, Mammoth is almost nothing. But in the context of our current reality, it’s nine times the size of the next largest DAC facility: another Iceland-based Climeworks plant called Orca. And it’s a major stepping stone towards the company’s ultimate goal of capturing a million metric tons of CO2 yearly by 2030 and a billion by 2050.
Climeworks first broke ground on Mammoth in June 2022, and 18 months later the company announced that the “core pieces of the plant are built.” Now that the plant has started capturing CO2, Climeworks says the rest of 2024 will be devoted to installing the remaining CO2capture units and ramping toward full capacity.
Thus far in its history, Climeworks has largely avoided the construction delays that often plague first-of-its-kind projects. “They’re coming out with new projects every three to four years, which is a pretty wild timeline,” said Erin Burns, Executive Director of the nonprofit Carbon180.
Through Climework’s partnership with Icelandic geothermal company ON Power, Mammoth is powered in full by geothermal energy — although the company has long been reticent about how much energy, exactly, it needs.
At any rate, Climeworks has committed to powering the direct air capture process as well as its storage process with 100% renewables in the long run. The company cited Kenya, New Zealand, and Indonesia as other areas that would be geologically advantageous for future Climeworks facilities, as all have substantial geothermal resources.
Climeworks said it would be able to disclose an exact cost per metric ton of carbon removal figure after Mammoth has been operational for a year or two. But in the meantime, Wurzbacher said the company is “closer to the $1,000 per ton mark than we are to the $100 per ton mark.” He expects prices to drop as the company further scales, and is aiming for $300 to $350 per metric ton by 2030, and ultimately $100 per metric ton by 2050. That’s in line with the Department of Energy’s Earthshots initiative, which aims to reduce the cost of a variety of carbon dioxide removal pathways to below $100 per metric ton by 2050.
While Climeworks hasn’t divulged Mammoth’s lifetime carbon removal capacity, it said the plant is designed to operate for 25 years, and that a third of its lifetime capacity has already been sold. The remainder will be sold in the next year or two, representatives told reporters
The company has offtake agreements with more than 160 organizations including some major corporate buyers such as JPMorgan Chase, Boston Consulting Group and Microsoft. Many of these agreements span a decade or more and involve tens of thousands of tons of CO2 removal from current and future Climeworks projects. (The company also recently opened a marketplace, Climeworks Solutions, to package and sell “high quality” carbon credits from other carbon removal companies.)
The Mammoth plant was primarily financed by Climework’s own equity, said Wurzbacher. “But going forward, project financing will be vital to accelerate the scale up. And for that, such long-term offtake agreements are important.”
Now that the plant is operational, it should help drive more investment, Dana Jacobs, chief of staff at the Carbon Removal Alliance, told me. “Having carbon removal projects that you can see and reach out and touch and understand is so critical,” she said.
Climeworks said the lessons from Mammoth will help the company scale further as it enters the U.S. market through its participation in the Department of Energy-funded direct air capture hub, Project Cypress in Louisiana.
Climeworks is working on Project Cypress alongside developer Battelle and another direct air capture company, Heirloom. The project is designed to capture a million metric tons of CO2annually by 2030, and recently received an initial $50 million grant from the DOE to kickstart the project’s planning, design and community engagement processes.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated with quotes and additional information from Climeworks’ team.
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“I believe the tariff on copper — we’re going to make it 50%.”
President Trump announced Tuesday during a cabinet meeting that he plans to impose a hefty tax on U.S. copper imports.
“I believe the tariff on copper — we’re going to make it 50%,” he told reporters.
Copper traders and producers have anticipated tariffs on copper since Trump announced in February that his administration would investigate the national security implications of copper imports, calling the metal an “essential material for national security, economic strength, and industrial resilience.”
Trump has already imposed tariffs for similarly strategically and economically important metals such as steel and aluminum. The process for imposing these tariffs under section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962 involves a finding by the Secretary of Commerce that the product being tariffed is essential to national security, and thus that the United States should be able to supply it on its own.
Copper has been referred to as the “metal of electrification” because of its centrality to a broad array of electrical technologies, including transmission lines, batteries, and electric motors. Electric vehicles contain around 180 pounds of copper on average. “Copper, scrap copper, and copper’s derivative products play a vital role in defense applications, infrastructure, and emerging technologies, including clean energy, electric vehicles, and advanced electronics,” the White House said in February.
Copper prices had risen around 25% this year through Monday. Prices for copper futures jumped by as much as 17% after the tariff announcement and are currently trading at around $5.50 a pound.
The tariffs, when implemented, could provide renewed impetus to expand copper mining in the United States. But tariffs can happen in a matter of months. A copper mine takes years to open — and that’s if investors decide to put the money toward the project in the first place. Congress took a swipe at the electric vehicle market in the U.S. last week, extinguishing subsidies for both consumers and manufacturers as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. That will undoubtedly shrink domestic demand for EV inputs like copper, which could make investors nervous about sinking years and dollars into new or expanded copper mines.
Even if the Trump administration succeeds in its efforts to accelerate permitting for and construction of new copper mines, the copper will need to be smelted and refined before it can be used, and China dominates the copper smelting and refining industry.
The U.S. produced just over 1.1 million tons of copper in 2023, with 850,000 tons being mined from ore and the balance recycled from scrap, according to United States Geological Survey data. It imported almost 900,000 tons.
With the prospect of tariffs driving up prices for domestically mined ore, the immediate beneficiaries are those who already have mines. Shares in Freeport-McMoRan, which operates seven copper mines in Arizona and New Mexico, were up over 4.5% in afternoon trading Tuesday.
“We had enough assurance that the president was going to deal with them.”
A member of the House Freedom Caucus said Wednesday that he voted to advance President Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” after receiving assurances that Trump would “deal” with the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean energy tax credits – raising the specter that Trump could try to go further than the megabill to stop usage of the credits.
Representative Ralph Norman, a Republican of North Carolina, said that while IRA tax credits were once a sticking point for him, after meeting with Trump “we had enough assurance that the president was going to deal with them in his own way,” he told Eric Garcia, the Washington bureau chief of The Independent. Norman specifically cited tax credits for wind and solar energy projects, which the Senate version would phase out more slowly than House Republicans had wanted.
It’s not entirely clear what the president could do to unilaterally “deal with” tax credits already codified into law. Norman declined to answer direct questions from reporters about whether GOP holdouts like himself were seeking an executive order on the matter. But another Republican holdout on the bill, Representative Chip Roy of Texas, told reporters Wednesday that his vote was also conditional on blocking IRA “subsidies.”
“If the subsidies will flow, we’re not gonna be able to get there. If the subsidies are not gonna flow, then there might be a path," he said, according to Jake Sherman of Punchbowl News.
As of publication, Roy has still not voted on the rule that would allow the bill to proceed to the floor — one of only eight Republicans yet to formally weigh in. House Speaker Mike Johnson says he’ll, “keep the vote open for as long as it takes,” as President Trump aims to sign the giant tax package by the July 4th holiday. Norman voted to let the bill proceed to debate, and will reportedly now vote yes on it too.
Earlier Wednesday, Norman said he was “getting a handle on” whether his various misgivings could be handled by Trump via executive orders or through promises of future legislation. According to CNN, the congressman later said, “We got clarification on what’s going to be enforced. We got clarification on how the IRAs were going to be dealt with. We got clarification on the tax cuts — and still we’ll be meeting tomorrow on the specifics of it.”
Neither Norman nor Roy’s press offices responded to a request for comment.
The state’s senior senator, Thom Tillis, has been vocal about the need to maintain clean energy tax credits.
The majority of voters in North Carolina want Congress to leave the Inflation Reduction Act well enough alone, a new poll from Data for Progress finds.
The survey, which asked North Carolina voters specifically about the clean energy and climate provisions in the bill, presented respondents with a choice between two statements: “The IRA should be repealed by Congress” and “The IRA should be kept in place by Congress.” (“Don’t know” was also an option.)
The responses from voters broke down predictably along party lines, with 71% of Democrats preferring to keep the IRA in place compared to just 31% of Republicans, with half of independent voters in favor of keeping the climate law. Overall, half of North Carolina voters surveyed wanted the IRA to stick around, compared to 37% who’d rather see it go — a significant spread for a state that, prior to the passage of the climate law, was home to little in the way of clean energy development.
But North Carolina now has a lot to lose with the potential repeal of the Inflation Reduction Act, as my colleague Emily Pontecorvo has pointed out. The IRA brought more than 17,000 jobs to the state, per Climate Power, along with $20 billion in investment spread out over 34 clean energy projects. Electric vehicle and charging manufacturers in particular have flocked to the state, with Toyota investing $13.9 billion in its Liberty EV battery manufacturing facility, which opened this past April.
North Carolina Senator Thom Tillis was one of the four co-authors of a letter sent to Majority Leader John Thune in April advocating for the preservation of the law. Together, they wrote that gutting the IRA’s tax credits “would create uncertainty, jeopardizing capital allocation, long-term project planning, and job creation in the energy sector and across our broader economy.” It seems that the majority of North Carolina voters are aligned with their senator — which is lucky for him, as he’s up for reelection in 2026.