A direct air capture (DAC) firm backed with subsidies from the federal government opened its first facility in California on Thursday, according to The New York Times.
Heirloom Carbon, which aims to remove one billion tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by 2035, opened the facility to considerable fanfare, with Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm reportedly planning a visit to mark the occasion, according to the NYT.
The company is poised to receive massive subsidies from the federal government to suck up carbon from the atmosphere and repurpose it by sealing it permanently into concrete.
The facility that opened Thursday, located in Tracy, California, is capable of absorbing a maximum of about 1,000 tons of carbon dioxide each year, which is equivalent to the exhaust generated by about 200 cars annually, according to the NYT.
The company has already agreed to a deal with Microsoft to remove 315,000 tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, which could be worth more than $56 million worth of $180-per-ton tax credits made available by the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), President Joe Biden’s signature climate bill, according to the NYT.
Heirloom has not publicized its costs, but many experts approximate that DAC costs between $600 and $1,000 per ton; the company aims to eventually have its costs land at about $100 per ton.
Heirloom pledged in October that it would refuse any investment from oil and gas firms or deploy its technology in ways that further enable the use of fossil fuels.
Two months prior, in August, the Energy Department announced that Heirloom was one of the companies it had chosen to receive some of the $1.2 billion of taxpayer money it is shelling out to stimulate DAC projects.
However, DAC is still an unproven technology at scale, and some reports suggest that it may not be the climate solution that some in the Biden administration believe it to be.
Past attempts to develop carbon capture and storage facilities have failed. [According to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists,] nearly 90% of the proposed carbon capture capacity in the global power sector failed at the implementation stage or was suspended earlier than scheduled.
DAC may emit more carbon dioxide than it captures while relying on toxic chemicals, according to a January report from Food and Water Watch, a climate-focused nonprofit group that advocates for green policies.
DAC technology is also more costly per ton of removed carbon dioxide than other emissions mitigation techniques, largely because of the energy-intensive process of separating carbon dioxide from ambient air using chemical products, according to a May 2022 report from the World Resources Institute, a group that seeks to “fundamentally transform the world’s food, land and water,” according to its website.
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Now if only we had a way to harness all the Hot Air then Gore and DiCaprio would serve a good purpose rather then all that mindless banter we get from them and those pests from Greenpeace, NRDC Just Stop Oil and the rest of those Eco-Nazis
Direct air capture of carbon dioxide DAC is one of the most exciting prospects to come out of the inflation reduction act (IRA). We are fortunate that the federal government under the direction of the ERRC has decided to proceed full speed in this direction. No other activity will waste more money in a shorter period of time with nothing gained than DAC. I am told that Heirloom Carbon has overcome one of the most difficult aspects of DAC, that is how to discriminate between natural carbon dioxide and carbon dioxide from vehicle tailpipe emissions. During the process, they are able to tag natural carbon dioxide an N-tag, while adding an M-tag to man-made carbon dioxide. A high-tech algorithm driven diversion valve, recognizes the tags and shunts the natural carbon monoxide into the ocean. Calculations now indicate that storing CO2 in concrete will result in the net annual saving of one car per every thousand tons of carbon dioxide captured. The Brandon administration recognizes the contribution of ERRC, otherwise known as the Excavate, Refill and Repeat Committee for their historic. innovative waste of billions of taxpayer dollars!
Someone is profiting off this whole scam and its not just the Eco-Freaks and Trial Lawyers
Removing CO2 from the air is nothing new since we have been doing it on our nuclear subs for decades. The subs I served on in the 1970s had CO burners (similar to catalytic converters) to remove carbon monoxide from the air, converting it to CO2. We then had a CO2 scrubber to remove excess carbon dioxide from our air and the bubble it overboard. But scaling it to actually make any kind of dent in the CO2 (not carbon as the article states) in the atmosphere is likely going to be very difficult but this company doesn’t care. It’s just the latest version of Solyndra, sucking up taxpayer money, enriching those at the top, before going belly up.
The climate change movement is loaded with very, very stupid ideas. Of these, direct air capture has to be among the worst if not the worst. We can start with the fact that additional carbon dioxide has a minimum impact because we are beyond its saturation point for warming. Carbon dioxide has had a positive impact by greening the earth and increase crop yields. If there were a reason to capture carbon dioxide, plants would be the best means of doing so. Direct air capture has great costs for negligible impacts. The Tracy California facility removes 1,000 tons a year. Depending on the information source, China is increasing its emissions by 10 to 20 million tons a year. The only possible motivation for such a facility is to make those operators rich.