The Department of Energy (DOE) just launched a new $3.5 billion program to remove and store carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The program focuses on developing four ‘hubs’ across the country focused on direct air capture, the technology that removes CO2 from the air.
Each of the hubs must ultimately be able to capture and store at least one million tons of CO2. That is a huge effort. Currently, all direct air capture facilities in the world only have the capacity to capture approximately 0.01 million tons of CO2.
Today, the DOE filed a letter of intent — sort of an official “heads-up” — stating that they will make a funding announcement related to those hubs “in the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2022.” At that point, companies can apply for funds to develop projects that “contribute to the development” of those hubs. Funding will come from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law passed last year and expected to be deployed between 2022 and 2026. The Biden administration is billing this effort as part of its plan to cut United States greenhouse gas emissions by at least 50 percent this decade compared to 2005 pollution levels.
To be eligible for funding, projects must meet certain criteria. They must be able to permanently store the CO2 instead of using it in products such as soft drinks. This ensures that the greenhouse gas is not released back into the atmosphere quickly. The DOE also blocks any projects that would use the captured CO2 to produce more fossil fuels. That rules out the oil and gas industry’s “enhanced oil recovery,” a technique that shoots captured carbon dioxide into the ground to force hard-to-reach oil reserves.
The exact locations of the hubs have not yet been decided, but the government hopes that by lumping different projects together into hubs, they can save costs and scale up quickly. Ideally, several facilities could share the same infrastructure, i.e. pipelines to transport the captured CO2 to a location where it can be stored nearby.
The plan is to locate at least two of the hubs in “economically distressed communities in regions of the United States with high coal, oil or natural gas resources.” However, some advocates of communities already surrounded by many polluting facilities are wary of carbon removal projects that burden them with even more industrial infrastructure. The DOE said in its announcement it would consult communities that could be potentially affected.
The DOE is also looking for regions with other types of heavily polluting industry. While this funding round excludes similar technologies that scrub CO2 from flue emissions rather than from the ambient air, it may also be possible for these different technologies to be co-located to share the same pipelines to cut costs. And since the oil and gas industry has experience in laying pipelines, including for CO2, it can be useful to have that expertise nearby when constructing these hubs.
Taking all this into consideration, it seems that the Gulf Coast could be a prime candidate for such hubs as it has a long history with oil, gas and petrochemicals. In addition, there is already speculation that oil and gas companies are monitoring the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico as a place to deposit captured CO2. We’ll likely learn more about the project in the funding announcement later this year.
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