The first commercial carbon removal plant, where CO2 is sucked out of the air and stored underground, is in a remote part of Iceland, nowhere near a city. It’s a massive industrial operation. But the carbon-capturing technology doesn’t need to be sequestered to the middle of nowhere: It could also be incorporated into neighborhoods—something that might help build community support for the larger build-out of industrial plants that will likely be needed to help tackle the climate crisis. By the middle of the century, thousands of large direct air-capture plants may be needed globally to pull emissions from the atmosphere at the same time as the economy decarbonizes.

In new renderings, Carbon180, a nonprofit focused on carbon removal, imagines how the technology could be added to local parks or apartment buildings or grocery stores. “When we think about direct air capture today . . . we think of these very large-scale industrial facilities, which we know are going to be necessary in order to meet the scale of the climate crisis and to meet our carbon removal goals,” says Giana Amador, cofounder and policy director of Carbon180. “But we also think there’s a role for smaller-scale innovative projects that are integrated into communities.”

The technology can be used anywhere on the planet, since it pulls carbon directly from the air, and the air everywhere is full of carbon. Because of the logistics of moving CO2 around, many plants will be located next to the places where the carbon can be stored—for example, at an old oil well, where it can be pumped underground into rock formations. Because the technology uses a lot of energy, it also makes sense to put it next to cheap renewable sources (at the recently-built plant in Iceland, the process runs on geothermal energy). In other cases, it could be built next to factories that could use the CO2, instead of fossil fuels, to make new materials.

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