The Biden administration is investing $1.2 billion in projects to take carbon out of the air

CNN
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On Friday, the Biden administration will announce its first major investment in Starting a carbon removal industry in the United States – something energy experts say is key to controlling the country’s greenhouse emissions.

Direct air removal projects They’re like giant vacuum cleaners that suck carbon dioxide out of the air, using chemicals to remove greenhouse gases. Once removed, the carbon dioxide is stored underground, or used in industrial materials such as cement. On Friday, the US Department of Energy will announce that it is spending $1.2 billion to fund two new pilot projects in Texas and Louisiana – the South Texas Direct Air Capture Center and the Cypress project in Louisiana.

“These two projects will directly build regional air detention centers,” US Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm told reporters. “This means they will connect everything from capture to processing to deep underground storage, all into one seamless operation.”

Granholm said the projects are expected to remove more than 2 million metric tons of carbon dioxide from the air annually once they are operational — the equivalent of taking nearly 500,000 gas-powered cars off the road.

The machines are built to speed up the natural carbon removal that trees, swamps, and oceans do—which isn’t happening fast enough to capture fossil fuel emissions on the scale that humans emit.

These will be the first direct aerial capture projects of this scale in the United States and “will be the largest in the world,” senior White House adviser Mitch Landrieu told reporters.

Another project in Iceland which opened in 2021 removes about 10 metric tons of carbon dioxide per day, which is roughly the same amount of carbon emitted by 800 cars per day. At the time, the operator of this project, Climeworks, said it was the largest in the world.

Direct air capture projects in the US alone could increase global capacity for this technology by 400 times, said Sascha Stachwick, director of policy at Carbon180 — an independent nonprofit focused on decarbonization.

“The industry is very young right now,” Stashwick told CNN. “These are supposed to be the first commercial deployments on a mega-ton scale. It’s a very, very big deal.”

Although it’s not yet clear what the hubs will ultimately do with the carbon once it’s extracted, Energy Department officials said neither hub will use captured carbon dioxide for boost oil recovery — a method in which carbon is injected into the ground to release more fuel. oil.

It’s important to follow this, Stashwick said, and Carbon180 advocates for carbon to be stored safely and permanently underground or used in building materials such as cement.

“We think it’s really critical for general acceptance,” Stashwick said. “This is really the first exposure of the direct air capture industry in the United States. It will be many people’s first introduction to air removal technology.”

Another issue is how to operate the hubs to ensure that carbon removal does not add more emissions to the atmosphere. Representatives from Louisiana project owner Patel said they will power the center with clean energy purchased from local utilities, but they have plans to power the facilities with renewable energy in the future.