The Biden administration is betting on technology that sucks planet-warming carbon dioxide from the air, selecting the first winners of a $3.5 billion fund dedicated to developing the machines that scientists say will be needed to stop the worst effects of climate change.
The projects proposed by a subsidiary of Occidental Petroleum Corp. for Kleberg County, Texas, and for Climeworks AG, Battelle Memorial Institute, and Heirloom Carbon Technologies, Inc. for Calcasieu Parish, Louisiana, were selected for the first tranche of funding, up to $1.2 billion. , the Department of Energy said.
The technology is “essentially a giant vacuum that can suck decades-old carbon pollution straight out of the sky,” Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm told reporters. “If we deploy it at scale, this technology can help us make serious progress toward our net zero emissions goals.”
Once operational, the centers are expected to remove more than 2 million metric tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere a year, the equivalent of taking nearly half a million gasoline cars off the road, it said. said Granholm. Additional projects are expected to be announced next year, the Energy Department said.
In addition, the agency said it had selected 19 projects for smaller “award negotiations,” including a $3 million award for a direct aerial capture center (DAC) proposed by a division of Chevron USA Inc. in San Roman, California, and a prize of $12.50. million award for Wyoming Regional Direct Air Capture Center proposed by Carbon Capture Inc.
DAC involves using machines to remove CO2 from ambient air and store it using various techniques. The industry is young and still maturing. Swiss startup Climeworks operates the world’s largest DAC plant in Iceland, which is capable of capturing 4,000 tons of CO2 annually. This is equivalent to a few seconds of humanity’s carbon emissions.
The company is currently building a plant it says will be able to capture 36,000 tons of CO2 each year, and other startups are looking to build plants capable of capturing thousands of tons of the greenhouse gas from the air. Even with these efforts, the DAC remains expensive and requires a large amount of power.
The world will need DAC and other forms of carbon dioxide removal to increase rapidly in the coming decades. Almost all scenarios for limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, a goal set in the Paris Agreement, will require removing billions of tons of carbon from the atmosphere each year by mid-century, scientists say weather
A good benchmark to assess whether this is achievable will be if the industry can capture 1 million tonnes of CO2 per year by 2030. The market for these services could reach $1 trillion before the end of the 2030s , according to BloombergNEF research, if the world prioritizes. high quality carbon removal on offsets.
About 18 direct air capture projects are operating worldwide, but those announced by the Energy Department will become the first commercial-scale deployments in the U.S., said Sasha Stashwick, policy director at Carbon180. an organization focused on carbon removal policy. . The global funding represents a 400-fold increase in DAC capacity, he said.
“This is a big problem in the world of carbon removal,” Stashwick said. “This will be the largest deployment of carbon removal ever.”
To contact the authors of this story:
Ari Natter in Washington at anatter5@bloomberg.net
Brian Kahn in San Francisco at bkahn37@bloomberg.net
