Sucking carbon dioxide out of the air is now possible, but to meet climate goals, we're

going to need a bigger vacuum.

From American public media, this is Marketplace Tech.

I'm Megan McCarty-Carrino.

A plant in Iceland recently became verified as the first large-scale facility.

To remove carbon dioxide from the air, on behalf of corporate clients, paying to reduce

their carbon footprints.

The Climb Works operation uses a process called Direct Air Capture or DAC for short.

Anirud Mohan is a distinguished postdoctoral fellow at the Andlinger Center for Energy

and the Environment at Princeton.

He says the technology could be key to averting the worst of climate change.

We've kind of locked ourselves into a series of bad options right now in terms of the climate

crisis.

So we have legacy emissions that we need to deal with.

We're already about 1.2 degrees of warming compared to pre-industrial levels.

We don't see the likelihood of getting to net zero globally anytime soon.

So we're going to have these continued emissions that we need to account for in some way.

And at the same time, we need to deal with historical emissions.

So Direct Air Capture is a way by which we can reduce CO2 levels overall, both in terms

of getting to net zero in the economy, because they might be harder to decarbonize sectors,

such as heavy industry or heavy transportation, where we might need this Direct Air Capture

to actually account for those residual emissions.

...