Our Story

Founding of Carbfix

Carbfix started out as a project back in 2006 and was formalized by four founding partners in 2007; Reykjavík Energy, the University of Iceland, CNRS in Toulouse, and the Earth Institute at Columbia University. The project was driven forward by the project manager Hólmfríður Sigurðardóttir, Dr. Sigurður Gíslason, and Dr. Eric Oelkers. Since 2007, several universities and research institutes have participated in the project under the scope of EU funded sub-projects, including Amphos 21, Climeworks and the University of Copenhagen.

The idea behind Carbfix involves imitating and accelerating a natural process through which dissolved CO₂ and reactive rock formations interact to form thermodynamically stable carbonate minerals, thereby providing a permanent and environmentally benign carbon storage host. In just seven years, Carbfix was transformed from an idea on paper to a fully operational, cost-effective and environmentally benign industrial process to capture CO₂ and H₂S from emission sources and permanently store it as rock in the subsurface. This rapid and successful innovation development was founded on an industry-academia collaboration, with active involvement of interdisciplinary scientists, engineers and tradespeople. Next generation climate solution experts were simultaneously actively trained through undergraduate and graduate level research posts.

Preparation phase

During the first years of the project, the main focus of the project was to optimize the method through lab experiments, studies of natural analogues, reservoir modelling and characterization of the Carbfix pilot injection site, often referred to as the Carbfix1 site, gas capture, injection and monitoring equipment was carried out simultaneously along with a comprehensive licensing process, in which over ten permits were acquired for the intended field operations.

Pilot phase

Pilot injections were carried out in 2012 at the Carbfix pilot injection site in collaboration with ON Power, located 3 km SW of the Hellisheidi power plant in SW-Iceland. From January to March, 175 tonnes of pure CO₂ were dissolved and injected at about 500 m depth at about 35°C, and from June to August, 73 tonnes of 75% CO₂-25% H₂S gas mixture from the Hellisheidi geothermal plant were injected under the same conditions. Results from the pilot phase were published in Science in 2016, which confirmed the rapid mineralisation of the injected CO₂.

We find that over 95% of the CO₂ injected into the Carbfix site in Iceland was mineralized to carbonate minerals in less than two years. This result contrasts with the common view that the immobilization of CO₂ as carbonate minerals within geologic reservoirs takes several hundreds to thousands of years (Matter et al., 2016).

Mineralization of injected H₂S were reported to occur even faster than CO₂.

… essentially all of the injected H₂S was mineralised within four months of its injection. (Snæbjörnsdóttir et al., 2017)

Moving to industrial scale

Following successful CarbFix pilot operations and early indications of rapid mineral storage, upscaling of CCS operations at the Hellisheiði power plant to industrial scale and simultaneously capture CO₂ and H₂S through a simple single-stage water scrubbing process. A full-scale capture plant for two of six high pressure turbines was constructed next to the turbine hall, which began pilot industrial scale operations in 2014. The plant has been running continuously, without incident ever since, with a doubling of the capture capacity in 2016. Plans call for bringing emissions from the power plant down to near-zero in the coming years. Cost of on-site CCS operations at Hellisheiði is US $24.8/ton - lower than the recent average price of one carbon quota in the EU Emission Trading System. By applying the Carbfix process to capture and mineralize H₂S, instead of conventional sulfur removal methods, which involve either turning H₂S to elemental sulfur or sulfuric acid, significant economic benefits have been achieved. These include the CapEx and OpEx of the Carbfix approach only amounting to between 3-30% of conventional sulfur removal methods.

Other industries

The Carbfix process has been applied to significantly reduce CO₂ and H₂S emissions from the Hellisheiði Power Plant since 2014, following successful pilot-scale injections in 2012. The technology can be adapted to other carbon emitting industries, such as steel, iron and cement production and several pilot projects are underway with the aim of adapting the technology to other industries and other circumstances.

Incorporation of Carbfix

Carbfix was established as a subsidiary of Reykjavik Energy (OR) in late 2019 and began operations as a separate entity on January 1st 2020. The company's mission is to become a key instrument in tackling the climate crisis by reaching one billion tons of permanently stored CO₂ (1 GtCO₂) as rapidly as possible.