The Brits have a colloquial term for cleaning up a mess with a vacuum cleaner. They call it “hoovering” from the famous Hoover brand, verbification of a proper noun (“xeroxing,” anyone?). Now, the U.S. government plans to spend billions of dollars in trying to vacuum carbon dioxide directly from the air, which they call “direct air capture” or DAC.
The Department of Energy Aug. 11 announced it is awarding $1.2 billion to two commercial-scale direct air capture facilities in Texas and Louisiana. DOE said the administration is trying to “kickstart a nationwide network of large-scale carbon removal sites to address legacy carbon dioxide pollution and complement rapid emissions reductions. These emissions are already in the atmosphere, fueling climate change and extreme weather and jeopardizing public health and ecosystems across the globe.”
Each of the selected projects fallsunder the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law’s program for regional DAC hubs. Each project is planned to capture some 1 million annual tonnes of CO2 from the air and store it underground. According to DOE, the award represents the “world’s largest investment in engineered carbon removal in history and each Hub will eventually remove more than 250 times more carbon dioxide than the largest DAC facility currently operating.”
The Louisiana $600 million award to Project Cypress (Calcasieu Parish) is managed by Virginia-based non-profit think tank Battelle, working with Climeworks Corp. on removal technology, and Heirloom Carbon Technologies, Inc. for underground storage technology. According to DOE, “The project is estimated to create approximately 2,300 jobs, with a goal to hire workers formerly employed by the fossil fuel industry for 10% of the overall workforce.”
The South Texas DAC Hub award in Kleberg County (on the King Ranch), also $600 million, goes to Occidental subsidiary 1Point5, working with Carbon Engineering Ltd. on carbon capture technology and Worley on storage. The project will store captured CO2 in a saltwater aquifer some 10,000 feet underground. On Aug. 15, Reuters reported that Oxy has purchased Carbon Engineering for $1.1 billion.
At the same time of the two commercial awards, DOE announced “19 additional projects selected for award negotiations that will support earlier stages of project development, including feasibility assessments and front-end engineering and design (FEED) studies.” Of those, “14 will enable early-stage efforts to explore the feasibility of a potential DAC Hub location, ownership structure, and business model” and five will conduct “front-end engineering and design (FEED) studies.”
All told, the administration plans to spend $3.5 billion on DAC projects, along with a $180/ton tax credit for reductions. Reuters observed, “The sums involved dwarf funding available in other regions, such as Britain which has pledged up to 100 million pounds ($124 million) for DAC research and development.”
As in other Biden administration big bets on carbon reduction technologies, DAC, in many minds, is dubious. The Washington Post’s report on the DOE award commented, “The technology, though, remains relatively untested. There are only a handful of direct air capture machines running worldwide at present, and the amount of emissions that they capture is negligible.”
In May, a United Nations panel wrote, ““Engineering-based removal activities are technologically and economically unproven, especially at scale, and pose unknown environmental and social risks. These activities do not contribute to sustainable development, are not suitable for implementation in the developing countries and do not contribute to reducing the global mitigation costs, and therefore do not serve any of the objectives of the Article 6.4 mechanism [an agreed mechanism to reduce carbon dioxide in the 2015 Paris accord on climate change].”
Some environmental groups are skeptical of direct air capture. The Center for Biological Diversity argues that DAC and other technologies the administration is pushing detract from what they view as the proper course for combating global warming: renewable energy. The group wrote in May, “Dangerous distractions–including carbon capture and sequestration, direct air capture, enhanced oil recovery, dirty hydrogen, socalled ‘advanced’ or ‘chemical recycling’ processes for plastics, and other technologies that perpetuate fossil fuels–and biomass and factory farm biogas, must be banned from coming online.”
Commenting on the DOE awards and Oxy’s purchase of Canada-based Carbon Engineering in Clean Technica, Michael Barnard wrote, “Carbon engineering was always a fig leaf for fossil fuel industry, now it’s owned outright by them. Claiming that we can vacuum CO2 out of the atmosphere to deal with the historical and annual problem is specious nonsense, and then using CO2 to pump more oil to add to the problem is adding insult to injury.”
A more staid, less hyperbolic critique, reported in Utility Dive, came from the Edison Electric Institute, the Washington lobbying group for the nation’s investor-owned electric utilities. EEI directed its views at the overall administration’s technology approach to climate policy, including power plant CO2 capture, hydrogen fuels, and direct air capture. The administration, said EEI, ““downplays the various infrastructure challenges to deploying these technologies, while overplaying the current state of deployment and demonstration of each technology.”
–Kennedy Maize
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