DOE Announces Regional Direct Air Capture Demonstrations

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) recently announced up to $1.2 billion in support under the Regional Direct Air Capture (DAC) Hubs program for two new commercial-scale direct air capture facilities in Texas and Louisiana. The new sites, funded by the bipartisan 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, are expected to remove more than two million metric tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions each year from the atmosphere—an amount equivalent to the annual emissions from roughly 445,000 gasoline-powered cars—and create almost 5,000 jobs.

According to DOE estimates, reaching the Administration’s goals for a net-zero emissions economy will require between 400 million and 1.8 billion metric tons of CO2 to be removed from the atmosphere and captured from emissions sources annually by 2050. The two new DAC hubs are the first such projects in the United States:
 

• Project Cypress (Calcasieu Parish, LA): Battelle, in coordination with Climeworks Corporation and Heirloom Carbon Technologies, Inc., aims to capture more than 1 million metric tons of existing CO2 from the atmosphere each year and store it permanently deep underground. This hub intends to rely on Gulf Coast Sequestration for offtake and geologic storage of captured atmospheric CO2.
• South Texas DAC Hub (Kleberg County, TX): 1PointFive, a subsidiary of Occidental, and its partners, Carbon Engineering Ltd. and Worley, seek to develop and demonstrate a DAC facility designed to remove up to 1 million metric tons of CO2 annually with an associated saline geologic CO2 storage site.

 For more information on the DOE’s carbon management activities, visit here.