How Oil and Tech Giants Came to Rule a Vital Climate Industry
startups is called direct-air capture. It employs vacuum-like devices and fans to suck in air, pull out the carbon and bury it underground. The process is a man-made variation of what trees do every day.
It differs from carbon capture, which grabs carbon from smokestacks. This effort is considered easier because those emissions are far denser with carbon than the open air. The Energy Department money, which is a record investment in the sector and the largest from a government, is designed to create an industry that is seen as vital to limiting climate change.
Even the most optimistic scenarios of the transition away from fossil fuels don’t forecast sufficient emissions progress without removing some of what is there already and mitigating unavoidable emissions in the future. “We have to get these projects up and running so there’s a commercial wave that follows them," said David Crane, the Energy Department’s undersecretary for infrastructure. He previously was chief executive of power-generation company NRG.
If funded and completed, the two carbon-removal hubs would remove roughly 1 million metric tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere annually and store it underground. That amount is equivalent to the annual emissions of about 220,000 gasoline-powered cars, which is a fraction of what is needed overall to limit climate change. Each project would be roughly 250 times bigger than the only direct-air capture facility currently in commercial operation.
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