The US energy department has announced it is awarding up to $1.2bn to two projects to directly remove carbon dioxide from the air, a fledgling technology that some climate experts worry will distract and undermine efforts to phase out fossil fuels.
The process, known as direct air capture, does not yet exist on a meaningful scale, and the move was being seen as the US government taking a big bet coming after July was confirmed as the hottest month ever recorded on Earth.
Countries are not cutting planet-heating emissions enough to avoid disastrous global warming of 2C, or more, above pre-industrial times. This shortfall means that planting forests and developing machines that can suck carbon directly from the air will be required to remove billions of tons of greenhouse gases, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
But Hoesung Lee, chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, recently warned that carbon capture was “no free lunch” and that countries should be wary. The most recent IPCC report was published in March and warned it was “now or never” to take action on emissions with the world on the brink of irrevocable damage.
Reacting to the news of the US investments by the Biden administration on Friday, some experts were worried the technology was being used as a “fig leaf” by the fossil fuel industry.
The projects selected for energy department backing are Project Cypress, which will be built in Calcasieu parish, Louisiana, and the South Texas DAC Hub, which is planned for Kleberg county, Texas.
Jennifer Granholm, the energy secretary, talked up the potential of the technology in a press conference call. “If we deploy this at scale, this technology can help us make serious headway toward our net-zero emissions goals while we are still focused on deploying more clean energy at the same time,” she said.
Shannon Boettcher, professor of chemistry at the University of Oregon, said direct air capture technologies are not yet cost effective, but are worth some investment in research and development.
Claire Nelson, a postdoctoral research scientist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory said moving away from fossil fuels and producing the things we need without emissions are the most important ways to address the climate crisis.
But the scale of change needed makes direct air capture necessary as another tool. “In order to have direct air capture ready at the scale we need it by 2050, we need to invest in it today,” she said.
However other experts said the investments were a mistake.
“This money could be so much better spent on actual climate solutions that would be cutting emissions from the get go,” said Jonathan Foley, executive director of Project Drawdown, a group that publicizes climate solutions. He cited energy efficiency and lowering emissions from agriculture, transportation, electricity generation as better approaches.
“What worries me and a lot of other climate scientists is that it potentially creates a fig leaf for the fossil fuel industry … the idea that we can keep burning stuff and remove it later,” Foley added.
The Biden administration delivered a historic climate bill last August though the president’s record on the climate has been undercut by his aggressive giveaway of oil and gas drilling leases on public land, including the controversial Willow oil project in Alaska.
