Aramco and Siemens AG have created a partnership with the shared aim to build a pilot plant for Direct Air-Capture in Saudi Arabia.

Both companies agreed that Saudi Arabia would be the prime location for this plant, as it is the biggest oil producer in the Middle East and will present the companies with the largest variety of opportunities to experiment and discover new ways of tackling emissions.

The International Energy Agency has said that extracting Co2 from the atmosphere rather than the source of emissions is one of the costliest methods of Direct Air-Capture. This is one of the reasons that the companies are to sign an agreement, as one of their aims is to develop technologies and a method that will reduce the cost of Direct Air-Capture.

The chief executive officer at Aramco, Amin Nasser, said, “We believe direct-air capture will work, but needs more innovation and technologies to bring the costs down.”