The US Department of Energy announced on August 11 that it is going to fund with $1.2 billion the development of two hubs that will remove CO2 from the air and store it underground.
This funding is going to be split into about $1.1 billion that will be spent on the CO2 removal plants’ development and another $100 million, which will be allocated to 19 feasibility and design studies for earlier-stage hub projects.
Furthermore, this technology aims at removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere using direct air capture (DAC) machines.
As for the hubs, the first one will be the South Texas Direct Air Capture Hub, located in Kleberg County, Texas and the second one, named Project Cypress, in Louisiana.
It is worth mentioning that this funding is the first part of a $3.5 billion total grant allocated under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law for the development of at least four such projects.
The two hubs together are expected to remove and then store underground about two million metric tons of CO2 from the atmosphere each year, which is equivalent to 500,000 cars, naming both of them the largest in the world.
However, although this is a great leap forward in removing CO2 from the atmosphere, criticism of the technology exists. More specifically, Al Gore stated in a TED Talk last month that the technology is currently too expensive to be used commercially as well as how it requires tremendous amounts of energy, so that it would make more sense to focus on preventing carbon emissions.
Also, removing CO2 from the atmosphere is currently scheduled to enable fossil fuel production and its use for some additional decades.
More specifically, it is estimated that meeting current climate goals would require the removal of 10 billion tons per year, which at current prices would cost more than $1 trillion annually.
So far, there have been about thirty such plants commissioned worldwide, and the DAC technology’s efficiency has greatly improved.
Sources: edition.cnn.com, www.technologyreview.com, www.nytimes.com, www.reuters.com
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