![]() ![]() Occidental’s Hollub said at the March conference that direct-air-capture technology “gives our industry a license to continue to operate for the 60, 70, 80 years that I think it’s going to be very much needed.” Such fears have been reinforced by recent statements from oil and gas industry executives. “Once you’ve expended huge amounts of energy to remove the carbon, you are still stuck with the problem of what to do with it, which brings us back to the inherent issues of storage or reuse.” “To have any significant effect on global CO 2 concentrations, would have to be rolled out on a vast scale, demanding very large amounts of water and energy, and raising environmental justice concerns about the toxic impacts of the chemical absorbents used in the process,” the group said in an earlier statement. Other, earlier-stage projects that received up to $3 million under the Department of Energy’s direct-air-capture hubs program included a General Electric research effort to evaluate the feasibility of a project in the greater Houston area a Northwestern University initiative to use nuclear power to support carbon removal in the Midwest and a Fervo Energy proposal to establish DAC facilities powered through geothermal energy in southwestern Utah.Īfter the plan to create direct-air-capture hubs was announced last year, the Climate Justice Alliance called the program a “dangerous gamble that puts frontline communities at further risk.” “It’s just a massive opportunity to define what successful carbon-removal projects look like, and really generate the momentum that we know we need,” she says. In effect, the federal government is helping to support the buildout of the direct-air-capture industry and acting as a customer for it, both of which will be crucial for developing the sector, says Sasha Stashwick, director of policy at Carbon180. The same notice of intent also revealed upcoming funding opportunities for additional approaches to carbon removal, including those that rely on biomass, minerals, and the oceans to capture the greenhouse gas. It “sets up the future where the United States government could be one of the largest purchasers of carbon dioxide in the world,” Andreasen says. While the federal procurement effort is small today, industry sources hope it could be the starting point for a much larger program. ![]() That’s why, separately, the Department of Energy also confirmed this week that it’s taking steps to spend $35 million on carbon-removal purchases, potentially from the DAC hubs it’s helping to establish and other sources that are “consistent with the objectives” of its programs. So carbon removal will need to be supported as a public good, largely funded, incentivized, or mandated by the government to mitigate the dangers of climate change. ![]() ![]() Some removed carbon dioxide could be reused in products, like fuels, chemicals, and cement, but nothing like 10 billion tons a year. Given these costs and scales, the carbon-removal sector isn’t likely to ever fully stand up on its own, because there’s little commercial value in it, particularly when the end use of the carbon is burying it underground. But the approaches vary widely in terms of reliability, durability, scalability, environmental dangers, technical risks, and costs. Researchers and startups are exploring a wide variety of potential ways to dramatically increase carbon removal, including engineering plants that suck up more CO 2, spreading carbon dioxide–trapping minerals in our soils and seas, and burying or sinking biomass. It would take 10,000 DAC hubs with the capacity of the ones funded on Friday to reach it. But by some estimates, nations may have to collectively pull down some 10 billion tons a year by midcentury to have a good shot at keeping the planet from warming beyond 2 ☌. How much the world will need to remove will depend on how much more we add, and how the climate responds. And that’s all on top of radical cuts in greenhouse-gas emissions. Given how much carbon dioxide the world has already pumped into the atmosphere, a growing body of research finds that nations may need to draw down billions of tons of carbon dioxide per year to keep climate change in check. It is distinct from, but often confused with, carbon-capture technology that prevents emissions from leaving a power plant or industrial facility. Direct-air-capture plants generally rely on large fans to draw in ambient air and then trap carbon dioxide molecules using liquid solvents or solid sorbents. ![]()
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