Inspenet, August 14, 2023.
The Biden administration plans to announce its first significant investment to boost the US carbon capture industry, a move energy experts say is critical to reining in the country’s emissions that contribute to global warming.
Capture projects are similar to huge suction devices that extract carbon dioxide from the air using chemicals to separate the greenhouse gas. Once captured, CO₂ is stored underground or used in industrial processes , such as cement production.
Investment in carbon capture projects
The US Department of Energy will announce a $1.2 billion investment to support two new demonstration projects in Texas and Louisiana: the South Texas Direct Air Capture Center and the Cypress Project in Louisiana.
“These two projects are going to build these regional direct air capture centers,” US Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm told reporters. “That means they’re going to tie everything from capture to processing to deep underground storage, all in one continuous process.”
Secretary Granholm stated that these projects are anticipated to have the capacity to remove more than 2 million metric tons of carbon dioxide from the air each year once they become operational, which would be the equivalent of taking approximately 500,000 gasoline-powered cars off the road. .
The machines are being built to amplify the natural carbon removal action already performed by trees, wetlands and oceans. This natural action is not happening fast enough to capture fossil fuel emissions at the scale that humans are emitting.
Senior White House adviser Mitch Landrieu told the media that these direct air capture projects will be the first of this magnitude in the United States and will also be the largest worldwide.
A similar project in Iceland, opening in 2021, currently removes about 10 metric tons of CO₂ daily , roughly the same amount of carbon emitted by 800 cars in a day. At the time, the operating entity of that project, Climeworks, indicated that it was the largest project of its kind in the world.
According to Sasha Stashwick, who serves as Director of Policy at Carbon180, an independent nonprofit focused on carbon removal, direct air capture projects in the United States could increase the global capacity of this technology by up to 400 times.
“The industry is very fledgling right now,” Stashwick told CNN. “These are intended to be the first commercial-scale deployments on the mega-tonne scale. It’s a very, very important issue.”
Where will the captured carbon go?
Although it has not yet been precisely defined how the amounts of carbon captured by these centers will be used, the representatives of the Department of Energy affirmed that none of them will use the CO₂ obtained to improve the extraction of oil through the carbon injection technique in the subsoil, which is intended to increase oil production.
Stashwick underlined the importance of maintaining this direction, noting that Carbon180 has been active in advocating for the safe and permanent storage of carbon underground or its use in the creation of building materials, such as cement.
“We think it’s really critical for public acceptance,” Stashwick said. “This is really the debut of the direct air capture industry in the US. It’s going to be many people’s first introduction to air removal technology.”
An additional issue is how to power these centers so that carbon removal does not create additional emissions into the atmosphere. Spokesmen for Battelle, the entity that owns the project in Louisiana, indicated that they will initially supply the center with clean energy purchased from the local power company, although they have plans to supply the facilities with renewable energy sources at a later time.
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