The U.S. invests $1.2 billion in vacuums to remove carbon from the sky

The Biden Administration announced Friday that it will invest $1.2 billion to build the nation’s first commercial-size plants to vacuum carbon dioxide pollution from the sky—and help make a dent in the 2.5 trillion metric tons (and counting) of carbon dioxide that humans have put into the atmosphere, which is contributing to climate change. 

The two plants will be built in Kleberg County, Texas, and Calcasieu Parish on the coast of Louisiana. The plants are being built in partnership with oil company Occidental Petroleum—which is building the Texas plant—and Battelle Memorial Institute, a nonprofit research organization, which is buiding the Louisiana location. According to the New York Times, the companies will equally split the cost of building the facilities with the government.

Money for the project comes from the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure deal, which included $3.5 billion to fund four of the air-capture plants. These are the first two of those plants.

The project is similar to a pilot program already underway in Iceland. In 2021, a startup called Climeworks opened the plant, which pulls in outside air and filters it, capturing the CO2 so it can be pumped underground where it is turned into stone.

The startup first began using a version of the technology in Switzerland in 2017. It has previously sold the CO2 to a bottling plant, where it was used to make sparkling water. The Iceland plant was the first of its kind to eliminate carbon dioxide permanently. There are also a number of other startups working on technologies to help remove carbon from the atmosphere, from robotic seaweed arms to kiln-heated limestone.

The process of vacuuming carbon from the air is an expensive one. In 2019, when the Iceland plant was being built, executives expected the cost to be between $500 and $600 per ton of carbon. There’s hope with the U.S. government’s investment in the technology that the price of the process can ultimately be lowered.

Some environmental activists caution against relying solely on carbon-capture plants to solve the climate crisis. As the Times article notes, former Vice President Al Gore recently called the technology a “moral hazard” because he argues that it gives fossil fuel producers license to continue to produce more oil and gas and to continue to pollute the environment. Given the cost of the process, he thinks it would be more advantageous to prevent the carbon emissions in the first place rather than clean them up after the fact. Others, however, believe the technology is critical in the fight against climate change.

So far, 30 similar carbon-capture plants have been commissioned to be built worldwide, but the Texas and Louisiana plants would be the largest facilities in the world.

The Department of Energy estimates that the two plants together will be capable of removing more than 2 million metric tons of CO2 from the atmosphere each year—the equivalent of taking 500,000 gasoline-powered cars off the road. No official date has been announced for when the plants will be operational.