On Thursday, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced the latest program stemming from the bipartisan infrastructure financing package adopted last year. In this case, the money is going to promote the development of a technology that we will almost certainly need, but which is currently underdeveloped: the capture of carbon dioxide from the air and its stable storage. The infrastructure law earmarked $3.5 billion for direct air capture, and the DOE plans to use that to fund four facilities across the US.
Direct air catch suffers a bit from a catch-22. Most scenarios for limiting warming by the end of the century assume that we will emit enough carbon dioxide in the coming decades to exceed our climate targets and therefore have to remove some of it from the atmosphere. This would necessitate the development of direct air capture technologies. But right now there is no way to fund the operation of a facility to do the capture, so the technology remains immature and its economics is poorly understood.
The DOE’s funding has the potential to change that. It has a total of $3.5 billion to spend from 2022 to 2026. It plans to use that to fund four carbon capture and storage centers across the US, each with the ability to permanently store one million tons of carbon dioxide. year.
The funding covers the entire process: the facility that removes and concentrates the carbon dioxide; any pipeline or transportation hardware needed to get to where it will be used or stored; and all the equipment needed to do the storage. Funding is agnostic about the method used for capture and storage, stating that chemical capture, biomass removal, and ocean sequestration are all options.
The entire project will be subject to a life cycle assessment to determine the actual take-up potential of projects. This includes all materials and energy required to build and operate the facility, any emissions from land use change and the duration of carbon dioxide storage. If, for example, use is made of underground storage, then leakage from the storage area will be examined. Likewise, the efficiency of capture via chemical reactions must be monitored and the life of the product must be taken into account when incorporated into a product.
The current call for proposals will fund projects at the same time as feasibility studies are carried out and permits obtained; another competitive evaluation will take place before things move to the design and construction phase. The DOE says projects will be evaluated based on statistics, including estimated costs per tonne of CO2 handled, overall throughput and potential for long-term employment. Location will also be an important factor. The DOE would like two to be placed in regions that currently produce fossil fuels, all of them to be placed in areas with high geological carbon storage potential, and the four to be spread across different regions of the country.
Current plans are to start construction in 2026 and work in 2029. Obviously, problems could arise in the intervening years due to a change of management. But once the sites are chosen, these projects are likely to find defenders in Congress, making it harder to shut them down.
Once built, the biggest challenge will be the factory operations. Carbon capture makes much more climate sense when paired with renewable energy, but the DOE doesn’t seem to take that into account when evaluating these proposals. And the direct air capture economy remains problematic. Different combinations of carbon loads, materials produced by chemical reactions with CO2, and a desire for high-quality carbon offsets can all help tip the balance sheet toward profitability. But so far, none of these have emerged on a large enough scale to fund multiple high-capacity projects like this one.
