The world’s largest direct air capture and storage plant that permanently removes CO₂ from the air has opened in Iceland. Run by Swiss company Climeworks, Orca sucks carbon dioxide directly from the air and buries it as rocks deep underground, using technology from Climeworks' Icelandic partner Carbfix. Orca has the capacity to remove 4,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere this way each year. The number equates roughly the emissions from 870 cars or 9,281 consumed barrels of oil, according to the United States Environmental Protection Agency greenhouse gas calculator. The Orca plant is located in Hellisheidi, Iceland, adjacent to Icelandic energy company ON Power's geothermal power plant, and is entirely run on this renewable energy. Climeworks claims it is the "world's first and largest climate-positive direct air capture and storage plant", and says it makes the capture of atmospheric carbon on an industrial scale a reality. "Orca, as a milestone in the direct air capture industry, has provided a scalable, flexible and replicable blueprint for Climeworks' future expansion," said Climeworks co-CEO and co-founder Jan Wurzbacher. "With this success, we are prepared to rapidly ramp up our capacity in the next years. Achieving global net-zero emissions is still a long way to go, but with Orca, we believe that Climeworks has taken one significant step closer to achieving that goal." Climeworks' plant was built in 15 months, using a modular system in the form of stackable container-sized collector units. Eight such units make up the Orca plant. The company claims this system has a small physical footprint, cuts construction time and can be replicated anywhere in the world with sufficient renewable energy and storage conditions. It also uses around half as much steel as Climeworks' previous technology. The company launched a pilot plant in Switzerland in 2017, which packaged the collected carbon up for commercial use in fertilisers, fizzy drink