Can Direct Air Capture Deliver?

Abstract

Carbon removal is one, if not the, hottest topic in today’s battle over correcting the global course of climate change, and direct air capture (DAC) is the current darling of the carbon removal space. DAC works to gather CO2 directly from the atmosphere with an engineered system, like how trees absorb CO2 for photosynthesis, only faster and with a smaller, but manmade, overall footprint. Popular systems use chemical reactions to extract CO2 from the captured air. Once captured, the CO2 is compressed and stored in geological formations deep in the ground, or in some cases, used to produce low-carbon-intensity products like diesel or aviation fuel. The rest of the captured air is returned to the atmosphere. The Biden administration has put its weight behind the expansion of DAC facilities in the US. The recent Inflation Reduction Act included tax credits for DAC CO2 as well as broadening the eligibility of qualified DAC facilities. It decreases the amount of CO2 capture requirements from 100,000 tonnes per year to just 1,000. In addition, the US Department of Energy (DOE) recently awarded up to $1.2 billion for a pair of DAC facilities in Texas and Louisiana. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm called the award a “once-in-a-generation investment.” When announced in August 2023, it was the world’s largest investment in engineered carbon removal. The projects—Battelle’s Project Cypress and 1PointFive’s South Texas DAC hub—are expected to eventually remove greater than 250 times more CO2 than the largest DAC facility currently operating. The US government isn’t the only entity putting their money where their mouth is when it comes to DAC. Some of the most active investors read like a who’s who of the tech industry. Microsoft has signed on to use Climeworks services and agreed to purchase up to 315,000 metric tons of CO2 removal from Heirloom Carbon Technologies. Climeworks operates a DAC plant in Iceland. It is one of the biggest globally, capturing and storing 36,000 mtpa of CO2. Both Climeworks and Heirloom are partners in Project Cypress. Climeworks’ estimated $12-million Orca plant came online in September 2021 and is due to capture 4,000 tonnes of CO2 from the air every year—equivalent to the emissions from about 870 cars. The captured CO2 is then mixed with water and injected into basalt rock 1 km underground, where it slowly turns into a solid carbonate mineral over a 2-year period. Amazon is purchasing 250,000 metric tons of carbon removal credits over a 10-year period from 1PointFive’s $1-billion Stratos DAC project in Ector County, Texas, and investing in CarbonCapture Inc. The DAC investment is part of Amazon’s Climate Pledge to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2040. In April, online payment firm Stripe teamed up with Google parent Alphabet, Facebook parent Meta, Shopify, and McKinsey to launch an initiative called Frontier, which plans to purchase $925 million worth of carbon removal by 2030 from carbon removal companies in an effort to advance research and development efforts and lower costs.