DOE commits $1.2 billion to advance direct air capture projects
Emissions

DOE commits $1.2 billion to advance direct air capture projects

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced up to $1.2 billion to advance the development of two commercial-scale direct air capture facilities in Texas and Louisiana.

According to DOE, this will be the world’s largest investment in engineered carbon removal in history.

Together, these projects are expected to remove more than 2 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions each year from the atmosphere.

The two projects are the first to be selected from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law-funded Regional Direct Air Capture (DAC) Hubs program, which aims to kickstart a network of large-scale carbon removal sites.

Their development will help inform future public and private sector investments and jumpstart a new industry critical to addressing the climate crisis on a global scale.

“Cutting back on our carbon emissions alone won’t reverse the growing impacts of climate change; we also need to remove the CO2 that we’ve already put in the atmosphere—which nearly every climate model makes clear is essential to achieving a net-zero global economy by 2050,” said U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm.

“With this once-in-a-generation investment…DOE is laying the foundation for a direct air capture industry crucial to tackling climate change—transforming local economies and delivering healthier communities along the way.”

The two DAC projects selected by DOE include:

  • Project Cypress (Calcasieu Parish, LA): Battelle, in coordination with Climeworks Corporation and Heirloom Carbon Technologies, Inc., aims to capture more than 1 million metric tons of existing CO2 from the atmosphere each year and store it permanently deep underground. This hub intends to rely on Gulf Coast Sequestration for offtake and geologic storage of captured atmospheric CO2.
  • South Texas DAC Hub (Kleberg County, TX): 1PointFive, a subsidiary of Occidental, and its partners, Carbon Engineering Ltd. and Worley, plan to develop and demonstrate a DAC facility designed to remove up to 1 million metric tons of CO2 annually with an associated saline geologic CO2 storage site.

DOE will now begin hosting community briefings to engage with local stakeholders in Texas and Louisiana.

To assess the viability of future DAC Hub demonstrations, DOE also announced 19 additional projects selected for award negotiations that will support earlier stages of project development, including feasibility assessments and front-end engineering and design (FEED) studies.

DOE intends to issue additional funding opportunity announcements in the coming years to fully implement the Regional DAC Hubs mandate from Congress.

Direct air capture

Direct air capture (DAC) technologies extract CO2 directly from the atmosphere at any location after which the carbon can be stored in geological foundations or used in a variety of applications.

DAC is unlike carbon capture which is usually carried out at the point of emissions.

According to the International Energy Agency, DAC is significantly more expensive than carbon capture and is a highly energy-intensive process. A great deal of land and water are also required for DAC projects.

Globally, twenty-seven DAC plants have been commissioned to date, capturing almost 0.01 Mt CO2/year. Plans for at least 130 DAC facilities are now at various stages of development.

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