| By Ragnhildur Sigurdardottir Amid the steam rising around Iceland's Hellisheioi station sits a newly built warehouse surrounded by giant fans run by carbon removal startup Climeworks. Dubbed Mammoth, the project is now the world's biggest plant to suck carbon dioxide from the air. The plant is a critical step in the race to remove billions of tons of carbon a year by mid-century, a move that will likely be needed to keep global warming to relatively safe levels. It also illustrates the increasingly competitive landscape for companies trying to suck carbon from the sky.  Collector containers at Climeworks' Mammoth carbon removal plant in Hellisheioi, Iceland. Photographer: Heida Helgadottir/Bloomberg Once fully operational, Mammoth will be capable of capturing up to 36,000 tons of carbon dioxide a year using a technique known as direct air capture (DAC). That's less than a minute of humanity's emissions, though nine times more CO2 than Climeworks' Orca plant, which also sits among Hellisheioi's rocky, moss-covered landscape and began operating in 2021. Switzerland-based Climeworks is the current leader in developing DAC technology, but a number of startups are utilizing other techniques, including relying on materials like limestone as well as electricity and even water in the air. If all of the 22 proposed DAC projects come to fruition, they could remove 12 million tons of CO2 by the end of the decade, according to BloombergNEF analysis. "Profitability is the best thing that could happen to this industry, and the higher the profitability the better because profitability means more scale," said Christoph Gebald, Climework's co-founder and co-chief executive officer. "If we can show a 10% to 15% returns on investment for projects we are building, there will be a lot of capital from large asset managers like pension funds and sovereign wealth funds." Climeworks has aims to remove 1 million tons of CO2 from the air by 2030 and 1 billion tons by 2050. While Iceland has been a proving ground for its technology, Climeworks is also starting work elsewhere in a bid to scale. That includes work in Louisiana as part of a so-called DAC hub funded by the Biden administration. One of the challenges Climeworks and other companies will have to overcome is the very high cost of removing CO2 from the atmosphere using DAC. It will cost $1,000 to remove a ton of CO2 from the air using Mammoth, which is slightly less than Orca, according to Gebald. He said he expects the cost of DAC to fall somewhere between $200 and $300 per ton in the next 15 years. Getting costs to $100 per ton by mid-century is seen as a key threshold for carbon removal being a viable industry. Energy use is also a major concern, particularly since other forms of carbon removal can be less energy-intensive. That will require being "clever" and arranging renewable energy and carbon removal technologies "like a Rubik's cube," according to Ben Kolosz, an assistant professor of renewable energy and carbon removal at the University of Hull. "All of these pieces of tech need to work together in order to remove 10 billion tons of CO2 per year by 2050, and DAC is only a small part of that," he added. Get the full story. By Michelle Ma Rice farming is responsible for emitting a surprising 10% of the world's methane. Yet while a solution to tackle emissions has existed for decades, farmers haven't embraced it. Now, a startup has found a way to get them on board with a technique that can halve harmful emissions. Singapore-based Rize has raised $14 million in Series A funding, a round co-led by Breakthrough Energy Ventures, GenZero, Temasek and Wavemaker Impact. Rice is largely grown in flooded fields as a weed-avoidance practice, since other grasses aren't adapted to live under flooded conditions. The water cuts off soil and organic matter from oxygen, which leads to the production of methane, a gas that has 80 times the near-term global warming potential of carbon dioxide. Rize plans to tackle this issue by helping farmers use a simple technique called alternate wetting and drying, which involves drying out rice paddies for brief periods throughout the season. As the rice canopy grows, it becomes safe to dry out the field and thus reduce methane emissions. It's a proven technique, but farmers aren't implementing it because they have no incentive to, according to Ben Runkle, an associate professor at the University of Arkansas's Department of Biological and Agricultural Engineering. Rize gets around that hurdle by selling farmers seeds, fertilizer, pesticides and other inputs for a slightly lower price than local farm stores in exchange for implementing the practice. It can offer a lower price by buying those supplies in bulk at wholesale discounts that smallholder farms can't get, said Chief Executive Officer Dhruv Sawhney. Farmers "are taking a risk on their livelihood every time they change an agricultural practice, especially one like changing your irrigation practice," said Marie Cheong, founding partner of Wavemaker Impact. "So we had to really think through what would be the right incentive model for farmers adopting this practice to be worthwhile." Learn about Rize's promising early results.
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