📰 Carbon Engineering's Tech Will Suck Carbon From the Sky

"It's not enough to slash greenhouse gas emissions," warns a new article in IEEE Spectrum (shared by schwit1). "Experts say we need direct-air capture of atmospheric carbon." West Texas is a hydrocarbon hot spot, with thousands of wells pumping millions of barrels of oil and billions of cubic feet of natural gas from the Permian Basin. When burned, all that oil and gas will release vast amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. A new facility there aims to do the opposite. Rows of giant fans spread across a flat, arid field will pull carbon dioxide from the air and then pump it deep underground. When completed, the project could capture 1 million metric tons of carbon dioxide per year, doing the air-scrubbing work of some 40 million trees. Canadian firm Carbon Engineering is designing and building this "direct-air capture" facility with 1PointFive, a joint venture between a subsidiary of Occidental Petroleum Corp. and the private equity firm Rusheen Capital Management. Carbon Engineering will devote much of 2021 to front-end engineering and design work in Texas, with construction slated to start the following year and operations by 2024, the partners say. The project is the biggest of its kind in the world and will likely cost hundreds of millions of dollars to develop. Carbon Engineering is among a handful of companies with major direct-air capture developments underway this year. Zurich-based Climeworks is expanding across Europe, while Dublin's Silicon Kingdom Holdings plans to install its first CO2-breathing "mechanical tree" in Arizona. Global Thermostat, headquartered in New York City, has three new projects in the works. All the companies say they intend to curb the high cost of capturing carbon by optimizing technology, reducing energy use, and scaling up operations.

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