First Southern Hemisphere Direct Air Capture Plant Planned

Antony Sguazzin, Bloomberg News

A worker walks through the Carbon Engineering Innovation Centre, a Direct Air Capture research and development (R&D) facility, in Squamish, British Columbia, Canada, on Friday, May 26, 2023. Direct Air Capture is a technology that captures carbon dioxide directly from the air with an engineered, mechanical system to help counteract today's CO2 emissions, and address the large quantities of CO2 emitted in the past that remains trapped in our atmosphere. , Bloomberg

(Bloomberg) -- Octavia Carbon and Cella Mineral Storage have agreed to build the first direct air capture plant in the southern hemisphere, using an experimental technology to remove climate-warming carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

The Kenyan plant, to be known as Project Hummingbird, aims to trap 1,000 tons of carbon dioxide annually and store it underground, the companies said in a statement on Wednesday. The gas will be injected into volcanic rocks using geothermal energy from Kenya’s Rift Valley.

There are currently 18 direct air capture plants globally, with those operating in Canada, the US and Europe, according to the International Energy Agency. The biggest is a 4,000 ton-per-annum plant in Iceland.

Project Hummingbird plans to start operations in October next year and sell carbon credits verified by Puro.earth, a company that assesses credits earned through “engineered carbon removal.”

Read More: Carbon Removal Gets New Science Platform as It Looks to Scale