A Chevron drilling rig designed to assist in carbon capture.Yi-Chin Lee/Houston Chronicle/Getty Images
This story was originally published by WIRED and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Over the past few years, the United States has become the go-to location for companies seeking to suck carbon dioxide out of the sky. There are a handful of demonstration-scale direct air capture (DAC) plants dotted across the globe, but the facilities planned in Louisiana and Texas are of a different scale: They aim to capture millions of tons of carbon dioxide each year, rather than the dozens of tons or less captured by existing systems.
The US has a few things going for it when it comes to DAC: It has the right kind of geological formations that can store carbon dioxide pumped underground, it has an oil and gas industry that knows a lot about drilling into that ground, and it has federal grants and subsidies for the carbon capture industry. The projects in Louisiana and Texas are supported by up to $1.05 billion in Department of Energy (DOE) funds, and the projects will be eligible for tax credits of up to $180 per ton of carbon dioxide stored.
“It’s quite clear that the United States is the leader in policy to support this nascent sector,” says Jason Hochman, executive director at the Direct Air Capture Coalition, a nonprofit that works to accelerate the deployment of DAC technology. “At the same time, it’s nowhere near where it needs to be to get on track—to the scale we need to get to net zero.”
The Heritage Foundation doesn’t just doubt the carbon removal industry—it is openly skeptical about climate change
But support for carbon storage is far from guaranteed. Project 2025, the nearly thousand-page Heritage Foundation policy blueprint for a second Trump presidency, would dramatically roll back policies that support the DAC industry and carbon capture more generally. The Project 2025 Mandate for Leadership document proposes eliminating the DOE’s Office for Clean Energy........