Biden administration to provide up to $1.2B for first direct air capture demos in Texas, Louisiana

Currently two sites in Texas and Louisiana intend to be the first commercial-scale direct air capture facilities in the United States – and as of last week, their efforts are being backed by up to $1.2 billion from the United States Department of Energy (DOE).

Recipients included the Project Cypress of Louisiana and South Texas DAC Hub. Cypress was pitched jointly by Battelle, Climeworks Corporation and Heirloom Carbon Technologies, Inc., while South Texas DAC was conceived by 1PointFive.

The Biden administration touted the facilities’ potential to form a critical new industry and remove major carbon emissions from the air, utilizing a process known as DAC to separate CO2 from the air for safe storage or conversion. Accordingly, both sites benefit from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law-funded Regional Direct Air Capture (DAC) Hubs program, which was created to jumpstart a nationwide network of large-scale carbon removal sites. In particular, this pair of projects is anticipated to remove more than 2 million metric tons of CO2 emissions annually, while providing 4,800 jobs.

“Cutting back on our carbon emissions alone won’t reverse the growing impacts of climate change; we also need to remove the CO2 that we’ve already put in the atmosphere—which nearly every climate model makes clear is essential to achieving a net-zero global economy by 2050,” U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm said. “With this once-in-a-generation investment made possible by President Biden’s Investing in America agenda, DOE is laying the foundation for a direct air capture industry crucial to tackling climate change—transforming local economies and delivering healthier communities along the way.”

The federal funding marks the largest investment to-date for engineered carbon removal anywhere on earth. If successful, each hub could theoretically remove more than 250 times more CO2 than the largest previous DAC facility could. This could be critical to ongoing efforts, given that the DOE estimates a net-zero emissions economy would require between 400 million and 1.8 billion metric tons of CO2 removed from the atmosphere and captured annually by 2050.

Cypress and South Texas are just the start, though. The DOE added that 19 additional DAC projects were selected for award negotiations to support earlier stages of project development, be they feasibility assessments or front-end engineering and design studies.