Sounds like science fiction, but Iceland is home to a pioneering power plant capable of capturing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere and transforming them into solid mineral. In this way, CO2 is stored permanently and is not released into the air. As reported by Smithsonian, it is a process that has been experienced for decades, and since 2017, the Swiss startup Climeworks and the Icelandic project CarbFix seem to have come up with a practical solution.

The Swiss startup had developed a way to filter and capture CO2 from the atmosphere, and was looking for a way to permanently store greenhouse gases. In this quest, they joined CarbFix researchers, who documented how to inject CO2 underground and convert it into carbonate minerals in less than two years. The transformation is made possible by the local Icelandic geology and certain geochemistry. Thus, Climeworks’ filter technology was installed at the Hellisheidi plant in Reykjavik, where CarbFix’s solidification technology was already being used.

For now, the plant performs the process with limited capacity, “more like a straw than a vacuum.” Its annual transformation capacity is calculated at 900 tons. However, for the participating companies, “the potential to scale our technology in combination with CO2 storage is enormous; not only in Iceland, but in many other places with similar rock formations.”