![]() ![]() The facility, a coal-fired power plant, was equipped with technology to extract and trap the greenhouse gases before they escaped from smokestacks. Bush and Barack Obama poured over $1 billion into FutureGen, which was intended as a demonstration project to capture carbon and sequester it. ![]() Occidental and Battelle, in addition to being funded by the government, would be eligible for the tax credits.Ĭritics are concerned that the government’s foray into untested carbon capture technology could collapse, as it has before. To help new technologies get off the ground, the government is offering tax credits worth $180 for every ton of carbon pollution that is captured and stored by pumping it underground or into rocks, for example. The technologies are still in their relatively early stage, but we’re going to need a lot of them, and we have to get going,” “There is no scenario for meeting our climate goals that does not involve both the phaseout of fossil fuels and carbon dioxide removal on a massive scale. “This summer’s horrible climate-related events, including today’s destruction of Maui, show the levels of greenhouse gas emissions are already too high,” said Michael Gerrard, an environmental law expert at Columbia University. ![]() That’s why some experts say that new technologies like direct air capture could be helpful. Biden’s goals, analysts say that the federal government and the states must use other tools, like tougher regulations, to cut emissions. Those are the goals that scientists say polluting countries must achieve if the planet is to stave off the worst effects of climate change. Biden’s plan to cut the country’s greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030 and to stop adding them to the atmosphere altogether by 2050. ![]() Oil and gas companies say that the costs will fall and that the processes will improve in the coming years.īut several analyses have shown that government subsidies will not be enough to meet Mr. Gore noted that the current cost of direct air capture technology was extraordinarily high and that the process required so much energy that it would make more sense to prevent carbon emissions in the first place rather than try to clean them up after the fact. “That gives them a license to continue producing more and more oil and gas.” “It’s useful to give them an excuse for not ever stopping oil,” he said. In a TED Talk last month, former Vice President Al Gore gave a blistering critique of direct air capture technology, calling its use a “moral hazard” that would enable fossil fuel producers to continue to pollute. Oil and gas companies lobbied for the direct air capture money to be included in the law, arguing that the world could continue to burn fossil fuels if it had a way to clean up their planet-warming pollution.īut many scientists are skeptical, and environmental advocates have criticized the approach. Friday’s announcement covered the first two. The 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law included $3.5 billion to fund the construction of four commercial-scale direct air capture plants. Granholm said on a telephone call with reporters on Thursday. “These projects are going to help us prove out the potential of these next-generation technologies so that we can add them to our climate crisis fighting arsenal, and one of those technologies includes direct air capture, which is essentially giant vacuums that can suck decades of old carbon pollution straight out of the sky,” Ms. The federal government and the companies will equally split the cost of building the facilities. Occidental Petroleum will build one of the plants in Kleberg County, Texas, and Battelle, a nonprofit research organization, will build the other in Calcasieu Parish on the Louisiana coast. Jennifer Granholm, the energy secretary, announced Friday that her agency would fund two pilot projects that would deploy the disputed technology, known as direct air capture. The Biden administration will spend $1.2 billion to help build the nation’s first two commercial-scale plants to vacuum carbon dioxide pollution from the atmosphere, a nascent technology that some scientists say could be a breakthrough in the fight against global warming, but that others fear is an extravagant boondoggle. ![]()
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