Another Climate Pipe Dream: Capturing Carbon Out of Thin Air

Most policies designed to reduce carbon emissions have focused on reducing reliance on fossil fuels, primarily through state and federal mandates, including requirements to increase reliance on wind and solar power, replace oil and gas furnaces and water heaters with electric heat pumps, and force automobile manufacturers to sell electric vehicles that most consumers don’t want. These mandate “sticks” have all been accompanied by subsidy “carrots,” paid for by taxpayers and ratepayers.

Many of the subsidies were increased under the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. But the largest subsidy of all was entirely new: A payment of up to $180 per metric ton to capture carbon dioxide, literally out of thin air, and thereby mitigate climate change by reducing the atmospheric concentration of CO₂. The carbon dioxide captured by Direct Air Capture (DAC) could then be reused, for example, in enhanced oil recovery, or permanently buried underground.

A U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) report issued at the end of the Biden Administration estimated that the U.S. would need to remove between 100 million metric tons and 2 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide using Direct Air Capture technology to address climate change.

In essence, DAC involves large fans that draw outdoor air through liquid or solid media that capture CO2, remove it via chemical processes, and then compress it for transport and either use or sequester it. There are several dozen small DAC facilities in operation, mostly in Europe. The goal of DAC advocates is to build large-scale facilities, each capable of extracting 1 million metric tons of CO₂ each year. Two companies, ClimeWorks and Carbon Engineering, have commercialized different technologies for DAC. Currently, the only large-scale facility is under construction by Occidental Petroleum in the Permian Basin of Texas. That facility, called Stratos, is designed to capture up to 500,000 metric tons of CO₂ annually, which will be injected into the company’s oil wells to enhance crude oil production.