In Louisiana, a new “direct air capture” hub that’s designed to pull 1 million tons of CO2 from the air each year just took the next step toward construction.
The U.S. Department of Energy awarded a $50 million contract to the hub, called Project Cypress. It’s the first of four DAC hubs that it plans to back in a $3.5 billion program. It’s one sign that the emerging DAC industry has reached an inflection point.
Heirloom, one of the partners on the project, launched the first commercial direct air capture plant in the U.S. last November, only a couple years after developing its technology in the lab. Climeworks, another partner, is now ramping up operations on another plant in rural Iceland that will be the largest CO2-sucking factory in the world. Other large plants will soon follow. (Both Heirloom and Climeworks are on Fast Company’s list of the Most Innovative Companies of 2024, along with Batelle, the science nonprofit coordinating the work on the new hub.)
Until just a few years ago, many experts in the space thought direct air capture tech might not really start scaling up until the 2030s. “This moment has arrived much quicker than a lot of people thought it would,” says Erin Burns, executive director of Carbon180, a nonprofit focused on carbon removal. In the U.S., a tax credit for the technology and $3.5 billion in new funding from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law are helping push it forward faster.
The technology is still expensive, costing hundreds of dollars per ton of captured CO2, plus an additional cost to permanently store the CO2 underground. But as companies move from pilot plants to large-scale facilities and learn how to optimize their processes, costs are likely to fall in the same way that they have for other climate tech like solar power. (Solar also faced skepticism about its high costs, and benefitted from a similar federal effort to help it scale up.)
Right now, some companies are buying carbon removal credits at steep costs to help DAC grow. Microsoft, for example, is an early customer of both Climeworks and Heirloom. Over the long term, though, Burns says it makes the most sense for the government to pay for direct air capture. The main goal should be to clean up legacy emissions—the 2 trillion tons of CO2, and counting, that humans have emitted since the Industrial Revolution.
The work could be funded by polluters in the same way that other cleanup projects have. Abandoned coal mines, for example, have been cleaned up by taxing coal production; oil and gas companies could theoretically be required to pay for DAC to remove old emissions. Selling carbon credits shouldn’t be the main source of funding, in part because it’s so critical for companies to focus on directly reducing emissions, though it can help deal with some especially hard-to-decarbonize industries.
Carbon removal is necessary at a massive scale—by some estimates, the world will need to pull up to 10 billion tons of CO2 from the atmosphere each year by the middle of the century. That can happen in part through nature (though climate change is making it harder for trees to store carbon). Multiple other new carbon removal approaches are also emerging, from spreading crushed rock on farm fields to to sinking “carbon buoys” in the ocean. But it seems likely that direct air capture will be a part of the solution, and we’ll soon see how works at scale.
Explore the full 2024 list of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies, 606 organizations that are reshaping industries and culture. We’ve selected the firms making the biggest impact across 58 categories, including advertising, artificial intelligence, design, sustainability, and more.
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