Joe Biden’s government has bet $1.2 billion on it
The government biden is betting big on giant voids to capture carbon from the atmosphere as a climate solution, announcing it will help fuel two huge projects in Texas and Louisiana that will be a global testbed for the new technology.
Action positions WE as a leader in efforts to mitigate emissions, by installing heavy and expensive machines that aim to remove greenhouse gas emissions greenhouse effect from the atmosphere and bury them underground. The Texas project, led by Occidental Petroleum Corp., also known as Oxy, is already ranked as one of the world’s largest “direct air capture” experiments.
However, the technology remains relatively untested. Only half a dozen direct air capture machines are in operation in the world today, and the amount of emissions captured by them is negligible. A United Nations panel rocked the fledgling carbon removal industry in May with a report that warned that vacuum cleaners “are technologically and economically unproven, particularly on a large scale, and pose unknown environmental and social risks.”
However, many prominent climate scientists and environmental economists no longer see carbon voids as a secondary technology diverting attention away from reducing emissions created by the use of fossil fuels and other catalysts for global warming. As temperatures rise and the prospects of meeting climate change goals fade, a consensus has emerged among organizations such as the International Energy Agency that technology for vacuuming emissions from the air will be an important building block for curb global warming.
The Biden administration plans to grant a total of $3.5 billion to run air capture hubs across the country. There are at least 11 projects contesting the capital injection.
The Occidental-backed South Texas hub, according to the oil company’s announcement, has leased about 42,000 acres south of the city of Corpus Christi, an area famous for oil, gas and petrochemical facilities on the Gulf Coast, for carry out the direct air capture project. The lease, according to Occidental, will allow for the removal and storage of up to 30 million tons of carbon dioxide annually. Large polluters in the vicinity of the project looking for options to reduce their carbon footprint will eventually be able to purchase credits from Occidental and its partners to offset emissions.
Occidental announced last year that it plans to use carbon voids to develop “net zero carbon oil,” a “fuel option that no longer adds CO2 to the atmosphere,” according to the company. Such ambitions worry environmental groups, who fear direct air capture and other carbon removal projects will be used by oil companies to prolong the extraction and use of fossil fuels. The carbon dioxide that direct air capture machines will draw from the atmosphere can be used to extract oil. Through a process called enhanced oil recovery, compressed carbon dioxide is pumped underground to push the oil to the surface.
Government officials said the projects supported by the funds will not be used for greater oil recovery.
The Louisiana hub, called Project Cypress, is led by Battelle, the largest independent non-profit applied science and technology organization in the world. Among the company’s partners is Climeworks, which operates one of the largest direct air capture units in the world, located in Iceland. But this unit, which captures just 4,000 tons of carbon dioxide a year, would be dwarfed by Project Cypress.
According to the International Energy Agency, there are at least 130 direct air capture plants under planning worldwide./THE WASHINGTON POST
Source: Terra
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