![]() As these deals were being finalized, hundreds of environmental groups in the U.S. Orca will soon be joined by another mammoth project in Texas backed by Shopify, slated to go up in 2024, and Climeworks’ own sister project in Norway, announced in March. Academics and progressive environmentalists remain dubious that carbon removal is little more than a distraction, and give fossil fuel companies an excuse to keep emitting while distracting policymakers from meaningfully reducing emissions at their source. But critics say it’s a gamble, nonetheless. ![]() ![]() Investors believe DAC will grow more affordable as the market for it expands. Global leaders, including the Biden administration-and corporate entities-including Occidental Petroleum, Exxon, and Chevron-are striving to make this happen, as they continue to throw their support behind DAC as a climate solution. Carbon removal technologies will need to scale up exponentially, and extremely quickly, to remove the 100 to 1000 gigatons of CO2 from the atmosphere that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says is necessary by 2100 to minimize catastrophic climate change. As of 2020, only 15 DAC facilities existed worldwide, capturing 9,000 tons of CO2 per year. That’s the same amount of greenhouse gas emitted by around 870 cars each year, Quartz reported Tuesday (a minuscule fraction of the estimated 1 to 2 billion cars on the road worldwide today.)Įven so, the Orca’s power represents approximately 40 percent of existing DAC capacity worldwide-a figure indicative of the technology’s relative youth. But despite its size, the Climeworks project is only capable of removing less than 1 percent of the annual emissions of a single coal-fired power plant, according to E&E News. Orca falls into this category, technically: It’s powered by energy from a nearby geothermal power plant, which pulls heat from stores deep underground (crucially, this energy source is renewable, but not emission-free). In a 2020 literature review that found as much, researcher June Sekera notes that the only carbon capture method that could meaningfully reduce atmospheric greenhouse gases is direct air capture powered by renewable energy sources, like solar panels or wind turbines. “We have this massive technology option, but it’s behind a curtain.”Ĭarbon capture facilities also require electricity to run, and have, on the whole, been found to contribute more to atmospheric CO2 levels than they remove. “What we really need in the short run is just knowledge,” Hanna said. Ryan Hanna, a scientist at the University of California, San Diego’s Center for Energy Research, told E&E News on Tuesday that he isn’t sure if DAC “is going to be the most cost-effective way to remove CO2 from the atmosphere in the long run.” (A recent study of 263 CCS plants undertaken between 19 found that most of them flopped or failed.)ĭAC projects like Orca have been called into question for the same reason. The carbon that’s removed from these plants is frequently drilled into old oil wells to simulate further production-and the technology fails more often than not. DAC proposes to slow climate change by sucking greenhouse gasses like CO2 directly from the atmosphere, DAC has splintered environmentalists, some of whom laud it as a potential savior, while others call it as a costly, risky distraction from meaningful emissions distractions.ĭAC is relatively young, and builds on slightly more mature point-source carbon capture technologies, like carbon capture and sequestration (CCS), which removes carbon dioxide directly at the source, as it’s emitted from power plants, which critics say does little more than justify extending the life of dying fossil fuel facilities. ![]() Their process is proprietary, but it’s part of a broader form of carbon capture called direct air capture (DAC), a method of geoengineering that’s become controversial in recent years for its dubious efficacy and practicality. ![]()
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