Key Points
There are a handful of demonstration-scale direct air capture (DAC) plants dotted across the globe, but the facilities planned in Louisiana and Texas are of a different scale: They aim to capture millions of tons of carbon dioxide each year, rather than the dozens of tons or less captured by existing systems...
The US has a few things going for it when it comes to DAC: It has the right kind of geological formations that can store carbon dioxide pumped underground, it has an oil and gas industry that knows a lot about drilling into that ground, and it has federal grants and subsidies for the carbon capture industry..
The projects in Louisiana and Texas are supported by up to $1.05 billion in Department of Energy (DOE) funds, and the projects will be eligible for tax credits of up to $180 per ton of carbon dioxide stored...
The Project 2025 Mandate for Leadership document proposes eliminating the DOEs Office for Clean Energy Demonstrations, which provides funds for DAC facilities and carbon capture projects, and also calls out the 45Q tax credit that supports DAC as well as carbon capture, usage, and storagefiltering and storing carbon dioxide emitted by power plants and heavy industry..
Sucking carbon out of the sky is not uncontroversialnot least because of the oil and gas industrys involvement in the sectorbut the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Changes Sixth Assessment Report says that using carbon dioxide removal to balance emissions from sectors like aviation and agriculture is unavoidable if we want to achieve net zero..
