Think of it as a vacuum cleaner in the sky..The US government is touting landmark spending to suck carbon dioxide, literally from the air, in a move that puts it firmly at the forefront of the race to net-zero..Where Canada is moving to punitive taxation and disincentives to oil production, the US Department of Energy announced it’s putting up US$1.2 billion to build two massive direct-air capture facilities in Texas and Louisiana..In fact, the technology was developed in Canada by Vancouver-based Carbon Engineering, which has a demonstration plant in Squamish..The DOE projects are the largest of their kind in the US — and indeed, the world — and represent the initial selections under the Biden administration’s trillion-dollar Infrastructure Law.. Carbon captureDirect air capture. .“If we deploy this at scale, this technology can help us make serious headway toward our net zero emissions goals while we are still focused on deploying more clean energy at the same time,” Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said in a conference call..In a news release, the DOE said the program “aims to kickstart a nationwide network of large-scale carbon removal sites to address legacy carbon dioxide pollution and complement rapid emissions reductions.”.Together, these projects are expected to remove more than 2 million metric tons of carbon emissions each year from the atmosphere—an amount equivalent to half a million gasoline-powered cars — and store it underground. They would create about 4,800 jobs in Texas and Louisiana, which are both major oil and gas producing states..“Today’s announcement will be the world’s largest investment in engineered carbon removal in history,” it added..The US government estimates that between 400 million and 1.8 billion metric tons of CO2 — about three times more than Canada’s annual emissions — will need to be removed from the atmosphere and captured from emissions sources annually by 2050. .The DOE said merely reducing emissions won’t get the US to net-zero. Instead, widespread deployment of direct air capture and other technologies that actually remove emissions are “key to reinforcing America’s global competitiveness in the zero-carbon economy of the future.” .Nonetheless, environmentalists were skeptical, calling direct air capture “a fig leaf for the fossil fuel industry.”.“This money could be so much better spent on actual climate solutions that would be cutting emissions from the get go,” said Jonathan Foley, Executive Director of Project Drawdown told the American Press. .“What worries me and a lot of other climate scientists is...the idea that we can keep burning stuff and remove it later.”
Think of it as a vacuum cleaner in the sky..The US government is touting landmark spending to suck carbon dioxide, literally from the air, in a move that puts it firmly at the forefront of the race to net-zero..Where Canada is moving to punitive taxation and disincentives to oil production, the US Department of Energy announced it’s putting up US$1.2 billion to build two massive direct-air capture facilities in Texas and Louisiana..In fact, the technology was developed in Canada by Vancouver-based Carbon Engineering, which has a demonstration plant in Squamish..The DOE projects are the largest of their kind in the US — and indeed, the world — and represent the initial selections under the Biden administration’s trillion-dollar Infrastructure Law.. Carbon captureDirect air capture. .“If we deploy this at scale, this technology can help us make serious headway toward our net zero emissions goals while we are still focused on deploying more clean energy at the same time,” Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said in a conference call..In a news release, the DOE said the program “aims to kickstart a nationwide network of large-scale carbon removal sites to address legacy carbon dioxide pollution and complement rapid emissions reductions.”.Together, these projects are expected to remove more than 2 million metric tons of carbon emissions each year from the atmosphere—an amount equivalent to half a million gasoline-powered cars — and store it underground. They would create about 4,800 jobs in Texas and Louisiana, which are both major oil and gas producing states..“Today’s announcement will be the world’s largest investment in engineered carbon removal in history,” it added..The US government estimates that between 400 million and 1.8 billion metric tons of CO2 — about three times more than Canada’s annual emissions — will need to be removed from the atmosphere and captured from emissions sources annually by 2050. .The DOE said merely reducing emissions won’t get the US to net-zero. Instead, widespread deployment of direct air capture and other technologies that actually remove emissions are “key to reinforcing America’s global competitiveness in the zero-carbon economy of the future.” .Nonetheless, environmentalists were skeptical, calling direct air capture “a fig leaf for the fossil fuel industry.”.“This money could be so much better spent on actual climate solutions that would be cutting emissions from the get go,” said Jonathan Foley, Executive Director of Project Drawdown told the American Press. .“What worries me and a lot of other climate scientists is...the idea that we can keep burning stuff and remove it later.”
