Pres. Biden’s Department of Energy will direct up to $1.2 billion to help pay for two direct-air carbon-emissions capture facilities in Texas and Louisiana, technology that essentially vacuums existing Earth-warming CO2 from the atmosphere.
It’s the first time for direct-air capture (DAC) projects at a commercial scale in the U.S. and follows a breakthrough in both the technology and the method to finance these types of projects in Europe earlier this year.
Read: Carbon capture, nuclear and hydrogen feature in most net-zero emissions plans and need greater investment
According to the White House, the announcement Friday will be the world’s largest investment in engineered carbon removal in history and each hub of this type will eventually remove more than 250 times more carbon dioxide than the largest direct-air capture facility currently operating, mostly as prototypes.
In January, Swiss-based Climeworks AG, a known leader in direct carbon capture, fired up its commercial-scale machine and used a third party to verify its process. Its backers, essentially customers who want to offset their own emissions, include Microsoft Corp.
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JPMorgan Chase
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and Swiss Re
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Microsoft and others paid a premium to buy carbon credits generated by Climeworks, allowing the purchasers to effectively offset their own emissions, and generate the cash the Swiss climate-tech company needs to build more units.
Related: Climate startup Climeworks captures carbon straight from the air in industry first
Climeworks and the just-announced U.S. plants pull CO2 from the air and bury carbon deep underground where it lives forever or is recycled as its own innovative energy source — that’s also a climate-focused solution that is years from viability at a large scale.
In fact, Climeworks is working with the Calcasieu Parish, La., facility, known as Project Cypress, just announced.
The other U.S. project, the South Texas DAC Hub in Kleberg County, Texas, will be operated by PointFive, a subsidiary of Occidental Petroleum
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and its partners, Carbon Engineering Ltd. and Worley. This project includes a saline geologic CO2 storage site. Siemens Energy
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made the hub’s compressors.
Carbon capture and storage can also include technology that builds a cap, some consider it a silo, at the site of natural gas
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harvesting or other traditional-energy combustion, grabbing and storing the CO2 before it flows into the atmosphere.
“ ‘…[N]early every climate model makes clear [carbon capture] is essential to achieving a net-zero global economy by 2050.’ ”
Both approaches are included in Biden’s broad climate-change initiatives within a bipartisan infrastructure bill and the Inflation Reduction Act.
The approaches do draw criticism from some advocacy groups who argue the tactics don’t do enough to lessen outright demand for fossil fuels
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which advocates and others hope to replace with solar, wind
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hydrogen, nuclear and other low- or no-emissions alternatives. It is estimated that traditional energy accounts for more than three-quarters of total Earth-warming greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions globally. That warming, scientists say, is partly responsible for the wildfires and extreme heat that has grabbed headlines this summer in particular, positioning July as the hottest month on record.
Hoesung Lee, chair of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has said using technologies that capture CO2 or remove it from the atmosphere was “no free lunch” and that countries should be wary.
Others say it will take both technology and curbing demand to slow climate change and allow mature economies reliant on energy to transition to new sources.
The federal funding in the U.S. aims to kickstart a nationwide network of large-scale carbon removal sites to address legacy carbon dioxide pollution and complement rapid emissions reductions, a statement from the DOE said.
“Cutting back on our carbon emissions alone won’t reverse the growing impacts of climate change; we also need to remove the CO2 that we’ve already put in the atmosphere — which nearly every climate model makes clear is essential to achieving a net-zero global economy by 2050,” U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm said, in a statement.
Together, these U.S. projects are expected to remove more than 2 million metric tons of CO2 emissions each year from the atmosphere — an amount equivalent to the annual emissions from roughly 445,000 gasoline-powered cars. The Biden team estimates the spending can create 4,800 jobs in Texas and Louisiana and it says workers in the traditional energy industry will be helped to find carbon-capture positions.
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