The government of the President of the United States, Joe Bidenannounced a million-dollar investment to launch the US carbon removal industry, which would control the country’s greenhouse gas emissions.
Last Friday, the US Department of Energy. communicated which will allocate $1.2 billion to finance two new demonstration projects in Texas and Louisiana: the South Texas Direct Air Capture Center and the Cypress Project in Louisiana.
Direct airborne carbon dioxide capture facilities are akin to huge vacuum cleaners that suck up the element, using chemicals to remove the greenhouse gas. Once extracted, the CO2 is stored underground or used in industrial materials such as cement.
“These projects, the first of this scale in the United States, represent the initial selections of the Regional Direct Air Capture Centers (DAC) program funded by the President’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Act, the goal of which is to launch a national network of large-scale carbon removal facilities to address legacy carbon dioxide pollution,” Secretary of State for Energy Jennifer Granholm told reporters.
These emissions into the atmosphere have fueled climate change and extreme weather events and endanger public health and ecosystems around the world.
Together, these projects are expected to remove more than 2 million metric tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from the atmosphere each year – an amount equivalent to the annual emissions of about 445,000 gasoline-powered cars – and create 4,800 jobs. well-paying jobs in Texas and Louisiana.
He advertisement It will involve the largest investment in carbon removal engineering in history, and each facility will remove about 250 times more carbon dioxide than the largest capture facility currently in operation.
Its development will help guide future investment by the public and private sectors and boost a new industry essential to address the climate crisis on a global scale.
“Cutting our carbon emissions alone won’t reverse the growing effects of climate change; we also need to remove the CO2 we’ve already emitted into the atmosphere, something almost all climate models make clear is essential to achieving a net global economy. zero by 2050,” Granholm said.
This investment is laying the foundation for a direct air capture industry crucial to addressing climate change.
