Department of Energy investing billions in air carbon capture

The U.S. Department of Energy recently announced it will use roughly $3.5 billion from President Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to invest in air carbon capture projects.

If the U.S. is to hit its 2050 net-zero carbon emissions goals, the DOE believes these efforts are a crucial step to getting there.

“When we think about the ways to reduce our emissions, there’s the reduction side, and more recently there has been a focus on carbon capture. This is a signal to the market that the government is going to back investments in this area,” said Danny Gomez, managing director of financial and emerging markets at FreightWaves. 

In this newer net-zero approach, rather than only focusing on reducing the amount of carbon emissions industries are individually producing, the air carbon capture method removes CO2 out of the atmosphere and then uses chemicals to store the gas in places underground or in products like concrete. 

“Everyone is trying to put tools into the toolbox, so to speak. This is just one of the ways we can think about introducing technology to pull carbon out of the air and putting it back into retired oil and gas wells — creating a life cycle for the carbon,” he said. 

Gomez said the four facilities across the U.S., where carbon capture will take place, will show the steps the U.S. is taking that could increase energy independence over time. It is said that eeach of these facilities will be capable of removing over a million tons of CO2 per year.

“A lot of this is helping around nearshoring or onshoring our resources and creating more independence when it relates to energy or potentially other resources we might need from other countries,” he said. At the end of the day, what we need to be focused on is reducing our reliance on hydrocarbons and creating an economy that doesn’t rely on those.” 

The advances we have seen over the past 5-10 years with electric vehicles have been exciting, however, it is important to note that EVs alone won’t get companies to their net-zero goals. Exploring and supporting solutions and other technologies which help corporations reduce or offset emissions is important along the journey to net-zero.