🌱 Carbon Removal at Industrial Scale
Climeworks, the Swiss direct air capture (DAC) company, and India's Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change announced on May 22, 2026 a partnership to build the world's largest carbon dioxide removal facility in the Himalayan foothills of Uttarakhand. The $1.4 billion project combines Climeworks' third-generation solid sorbent DAC technology with enhanced rock weathering (ERW) using crushed Himalayan basalt, a volcanic rock rich in calcium and magnesium silicates that naturally react with atmospheric CO2 to form solid carbonate minerals.
The facility targets 2 million metric tons of annual CO2 removal by 2029, which would be approximately 50 times larger than Climeworks' current Mammoth plant in Iceland (36,000 tons/year capacity) and larger than Occidental Petroleum's Stratos DAC facility in Texas (500,000 tons/year, under construction).
The economic model combines sovereign green bonds and private carbon credit pre-purchases. India's government will finance 60% of the construction cost ($840 million) through its sovereign green bond program, which has issued $22 billion since 2023 to finance India's net-zero-by-2070 transition. The remaining 40% ($560 million) comes from advance carbon credit purchase agreements: Microsoft has committed $280 million (20 years of credits at a floor price of $180/ton for 100,000 tons/year), the Frontier consortium (Stripe, Shopify, Alphabet, Meta, and McKinsey Sustainability) committed $200 million, and JPMorgan Chase committed $100 million.
The blended financing structure brings the effective cost of carbon removal from the current $600-1,000/ton at Climeworks' earlier plants to an estimated $250-350/ton at scale, approaching the U.S. Department of Energy's Carbon Negative Shot target of $100/ton by 2030.
✨ The Himalayan Geology Advantage
The Uttarakhand site was selected for its unique geology: the Himalayan orogeny has exposed massive formations of reactive basalt and peridotite with a total CO2 mineralization potential estimated at 50-100 gigatons, according to research by the Indian Institute of Science. Enhanced rock weathering accelerates the natural process of silicate rock carbonation, which naturally removes approximately 1 gigaton of CO2 per year globally over geological timescales.
By crushing basalt to fine dust and spreading it across a combination of agricultural land and dedicated reaction beds, the reaction rate can be accelerated to remove CO2 over years to decades rather than millennia. The crushed basalt also serves as a soil amendment, adding essential plant nutrients including phosphorus, potassium, and micronutrients—a co-benefit that makes Indian agricultural regions a natural deployment zone.
The project faces substantial engineering and logistical challenges. Crushing, transporting, and distributing the 20-30 megatons of basalt required to capture 2 megatons of CO2 annually involves mining, rail, and trucking operations on a scale comparable to a medium-sized mining operation. Water availability for the DAC chemical processes in a region with seasonal monsoon-dependent water supply is a design concern Climeworks says it is addressing with closed-loop water systems.
And the MRV (measurement, reporting, and verification) challenge—proving with rigor that carbon has been permanently removed—is particularly complex for enhanced weathering, where CO2 uptake occurs over years in open-field conditions rather than in the controlled environment of DAC contactors. Climeworks and academic partners at ETH Zurich are developing isotopic tracer methodologies to verify mineralization rates with scientific rigor.