Dive Brief:
- The Department of Energy announced Friday it will invest up to a total of $1.2 billion in two direct air capture, or DAC, facilities, which will be the first commercial-scale hubs of their kind in the U.S.
- One DAC facility, Project Cypress, is being developed by Battelle in Louisiana’s Calcasieu Parish, and the other, South Texas DAC Hub, is being developed by Occidental subsidiary 1PointFive in Texas’s Kleberg County.
- Both aim to capture around 1 million metric tons of carbon dioxide annually and store it. “Each hub will eventually remove more than 250 times more carbon dioxide than the largest DAC facility currently operating,” DOE said.
Dive Insight:
During a press call about the investment, Department of Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said DAC facilities are “essentially giant vacuums that can suck decades of old carbon pollution straight out of the sky” and can help the U.S. make “serious headway” toward net zero goals.
The projects are intended to “link everything from capture, to processing, to deep underground storage, all in one seamless process,” and are expected to create around 4,800 jobs, Granholm said.
The projects mark the first time the U.S. has attempted to implement direct air capture on this scale. Previous pilot projects have had their performance questioned, due in part to how pricey and nascent the technology is.
Environmental groups have been particularly skeptical of carbon capture, with the Sierra Club’s Gulf Coast Campaign Representative Rebekah Hinojosa in 2022 calling the use of the technology to mitigate emissions from a planned Rio Bravo pipeline a “scam.”
In a release responding to DOE’s announcement, John Fleming, senior scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity’s Climate Law Institute, said, “Direct air capture is no miracle cure. It requires large amounts of energy, spurring more demand for the same fossil fuels that caused the climate crisis. Even if those problems can be solved, it’s years away from being deployed at scale.”
Fleming said the funding would be “better spent” on rooftop solar, residential weatherization, and EV deployment.
DOE’s release called the $1.2 billion commitment “the world’s largest investment in engineered carbon removal in history” and set a goal of helping to “inform future public and private sector investments and jumpstart a new industry.”
“President Biden's Investing in America agenda gave DOE tens of billions of dollars to fund clean energy demonstration projects, and these projects are going to help us prove out the potential of these next generation technologies so that we can add them to our climate crisis fighting arsenal,” Granholm said.
The readiness of this technology is a key question surrounding an Environmental Protection Agency proposal to cut carbon emissions from power plants using carbon capture and sequestration along with other emerging technologies such as “green” hydrogen.
In comments filed Tuesday, the Edison Electric Institute wrote that the EPA’s proposal “downplays the various infrastructure challenges to deploying these technologies, while overplaying the current state of deployment and demonstration of each technology.”
The South Texas DAC Hub will store captured CO2 in an “associated saline geologic CO2 storage site,” according to DOE, while Project Cypress will store the CO2 “permanently deep underground.”
Battelle aims to hire 2,300 people to work on Project Cypress, with 10% of the workforce being workers formerly employed by the fossil fuel industry. The company is partnering with DAC technology companies Climeworks and Heirloom to help develop the project, while Occidental is partnering with Carbon Engineering and Worley.
During the press call, Battelle CEO Lewis Von Thaer said the project will be powered by renewable energy, initially in the form of offsets purchased from the local utility. In the future, he said, the company hopes to build renewable energy projects and attach them to the facility in order to power it.
Occidental CEO Vicki Hollub said the South Texas DAC Hub will be solar powered. The company is building the facility on 106,000 of acres it has leased from the King Ranch, which covers 825,000 acres.
Neither company will use the CO2 the hubs extract for enhanced oil recovery, said DOE’s Deputy Director for the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations Kelly Cummins.
However, DOE’s main focus in funding these projects is to “make sure that the technology can scale at the commercial level,” Cummins said. As a result, the department has not placed terms on the funding that would restrict the companies’ revenue sources.
“We are encouraging the projects to have revenue streams that will help support the takeoff of this commercial technology, and the non-federal funding is at least 50% of the contribution to these projects,” Cummins said. “We want to make sure that these companies and these projects are financially viable in the long term.”
