The United States announced Friday that it will invest $1.2 billion in two projects to capture CO2 directly from the atmosphere, which the US government says is the largest investment ever in this technology, which aims to combat global warming, but remains criticized by some. experts This ad illustrates the great bet that the Joe Biden government has made on this still marginal technology.
“Reducing our emissions alone will not reverse the growing consequences of climate change; we must also remove the CO2 we have already emitted into the atmosphere,” US Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said in a statement. It is “the largest investment in carbon removal technology in history,” the ministry said.
The two projects, located in Texas and Louisiana, are the first of this scale in the United States. Each one aims to eliminate one million tons of CO2 per year, in total the equivalent of the annual emissions of 445,000 cars. The capacity of each project will be 250 times more CO2 than the largest capture site currently in operation, according to the US Department. The largest plant to date is in Iceland, and is operated by Swiss company Climeworks , with an annual capacity to capture 4,000 tons of CO2 from the air.
Louisiana and Texas
Climeworks will participate, with the organizations Battelle and Heirloom, in the project in Louisiana, called the Cypress project, which will store the captured CO2 underground. Construction is expected to start by the end of the year, according to a press release from the three partners. The Texas project will be led by the US company Occidental and other partners, including Carbon Engineering. In the future, it could be developed to achieve up to 30 million tons of CO2 eliminated per year, according to a press release from Occidental.
“The basement rocks of Louisiana and Texas are sedimentary rocks, very different from the Icelandic basalts, but quite viable for storing CO2,” Hélène Pilorgé, a research associate at the University of Pennsylvania who studies carbon sequestration, told AFP. . The two projects should create 4,800 jobs, the US Department estimates.
These government investments are funded under a major infrastructure law passed in 2021. The Department of Energy previously announced plans to invest in four total projects, worth $3.5 billion. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), more than 130 atmospheric carbon capture projects are in various stages of development and 18 sites are already operational around the world.
Capturing carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere is one of the methods now deemed necessary by the UN’s International Panel of Climate Experts (IPCC) to combat global warming. But this technology also has its detractors, who worry that it is a pretext to continue emitting greenhouse gases, instead of switching more quickly to clean energy.
a lot of electricity
“Direct air capture requires a lot of electricity to extract CO2 from the air and compress it,” Mark Jacobson, a professor at Stanford University, told AFP. “Even in the best of scenarios, where electricity comes from renewables, therefore it is not used to replace electricity from fossil fuels, such as coal or gas,” he added. According to him, it is a “fossil industry subterfuge” that will only “delay” the fight against climate change.
These direct air capture (DAC) techniques, also called carbon dioxide removal (EDC), therefore focus on the CO2 already present in the atmosphere. They differ from carbon capture and storage (CCS) systems at the source, in factory smokestacks, for example, which prevent additional emissions. The Joe Biden government announced in May a plan to reduce CO2 emissions from gas and coal power plants, focusing in particular on this second technique.
Capturing carbon from the air is the most expensive, because the CO2 is more diluted there than in factory discharges. To achieve the carbon neutrality goal promised by Joe Biden for the United States by 2050, the Department of Energy estimates that it will be necessary to both capture and remove between 400 million and 1.8 billion tons of CO2 per year. Considerably more than the two million projects announced on Friday.
Source: BFM TV
