US President Biden set to bet billions on tech that sucks carbon out of the air

WASHINGTON – The Biden administration is throwing its weight behind technology that sucks planet-warming carbon dioxide out of the air, and is poised to announce as soon as Friday the first winners of a US$3.5 billion (S$4.7 billion) fund dedicated to developing the machines scientists say will be needed to stop the worst effects of climate change.

Projects proposed by Occidental Petroleum Corporation in Texas and Swiss start-up Climeworks in Louisiana are front-runners for the first tranche of funding, about US$1.2 billion, according to people familiar with the matter. 

The Energy Department and Climeworks declined to comment. Occidental did not respond to a request for comment. 

Direct air capture (DAC) involves using machines to pull CO2 out of the ambient air and store it using a variety of techniques. The industry is young and still maturing. Climeworks operates the largest DAC plant in the world in Iceland, which is able to capture 4,000 tonnes of CO2 annually. That is equivalent to a few seconds of humanity’s carbon emissions.

The company is currently building a plant that it says will be capable of capturing 36,000 tonnes of CO2 each year, and other start-ups are looking to build plants capable of grabbing thousands of tonnes of the greenhouse gas from the air. Even with these efforts, DAC remains costly and requires a large amount of energy.

The world will need DAC as well as other forms of carbon dioxide removal to scale up rapidly in the coming decades. Nearly every scenario to limit global warming to 1.5 deg C, a target set under the Paris Agreement, will require removing billions of tonnes of carbon from the atmosphere each year by mid-century, climate scientists say. 

A good milepost to gauge whether that is achievable will be if the industry can capture one million tonnes of CO2 a year by 2030. The market for those services could reach US$1 trillion before the end of the 2030s, according to BloombergNEF, if the world prioritises high-quality carbon removal over offsets.

BloombergNEF is a leading provider of primary research and analysis on the trends driving the transition to a lower-carbon economy. 

About 18 direct air capture projects are operating around the world, but the ones being announced by the Energy Department will become the first commercial-scale deployment in the US, said Ms Sasha Stashwick, director of policy for Carbon180, an organisation focused on carbon removal policy.

The overall funding represents a 400-factor increase in DAC capacity, she said. 

“This is a really big deal in the world of carbon removal,” Ms Stashwick said. “This is going to be the largest deployment of carbon removal ever.” BLOOMBERG