![]() If you just buried dollar bills it would make more sense. “We are going to pay an oil company to pump crap out of the ground and then pay them to put some back in – it’s plainly obvious this isn’t a climate solution,” said Jonathan Foley, executive director of Project Drawdown, which works on responses to the climate emergency. While Occidental maintains that the CO 2 captured in Texas will be stored underground and used as a sort of carbon credit system for other companies to purchase, the company also touts itself as an exemplar of what it calls “net zero oil,” whereby removed CO 2 is injected into rock formations to dislodge gas and oil for further extraction. “This gives our industry a license to continue to operate for the 60, 70, 80 years that I think it’s going to be very much needed.” “We believe that our direct capture technology is going to be the technology that helps to preserve our industry over time,” Vicki Hollub, Occidental’s chief executive, told an industry conference in March. The Stratos project is ultimately owned by Occidental Petroleum, an American oil company that bought Carbon Engineering for $1.1 billion last month and views carbon removal as a sort of future-proofing for its industry. We need to address legacy emissions and direct air capture could play a big role in that.”īut some climate campaigners have argued that DAC is, at best, a costly irrelevance to the more pressing need to cut emissions and, at worst, a cynical ploy by the fossil fuel industry to maintain its polluting status quo. People are already feeling the impacts of climate change. “There’s too much CO 2 in the atmosphere. “It’s an extraordinarily big moment for carbon removal right now and for direct air capture in particular,” said Erin Burns, executive director of Carbon180, a climate NGO that works on a range of different carbon-removal options. The commitments to remove such volumes of CO 2 is a step-change for a direct air capture industry still nascent, small-scale, and unproven in its capacity to curb the worsening climate crisis, even as hope, and dollars, are ladled upon it. A further two hubs will be chosen by the federal government, as part of a $3.5 billion effort to help create a market for carbon that will be “crucial to tackling climate change”, according to Jennifer Granholm, the US secretary of energy. ![]() ![]() This milestone was followed, in August, by President Joe Biden’s Department of Energy announcing that two facilities – one a separate venture by Carbon Engineering, in the southern reaches of Texas – will be given $1.2 billion to act as DAC “hubs” to help jumpstart the carbon-removal industry in the US while also purging more than 2 million tons of CO 2 from the atmosphere between them. “This time the Earth has some serious complications, and it needs the brightest minds,” Guetre said, adding that “that the world is watching and counting on us … The team’s will to overcome is quiet, steady, and unwavering.” The advent of the 65-acre (26-hectare) site, which will be marked by a vast network of pipes, buildings and fans to scrub CO 2 from the air and then inject it into underground rock formations, was solemnly likened to the Apollo 13 moon mission by Lori Guetre, vice-president of Carbon Engineering, the Canadian-founded company spearheading Stratos, during the groundbreaking. In June, ceremonial shovels were plunged into the dirt in Ector County, Texas, to mark the start of a $1 billion project called Stratos, which aims to remove 500,000 tons of CO 2 from the atmosphere a year once fully operational in 2025. Proponents of setting up enormous fans to gulp in huge amounts of air and remove planet-heating carbon from it, a process called direct air capture (DAC), are basking in their greatest breakthroughs yet in the US. The creators of the project have now been awarded funding from the Biden administration, even as critics attack the technology as a fossil fuel industry-backed distraction. Rising out of the arid scrubland of western Texas is the world’s largest project yet to remove excess carbon dioxide (CO 2) from the atmosphere, a quest that has been lauded as essential to help avert climate catastrophe. This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |