If you just buried dollar bills it would make more sense. “We are going to pay an oil company to pump crap out of the ground and then pay them to put some back in – it’s plainly obvious this isn’t a climate solution,” said Jonathan Foley, executive director of Project Drawdown, which works on responses to the climate emergency. It’s a huge greenwashing exercise and we are falling for it Jonathan Foley of Project Drawdown While Occidental maintains that the CO 2 captured in Texas will be stored underground and used as a sort of carbon credit system for other companies to purchase, the company also touts itself as an exemplar of what it calls “net zero oil”, whereby removed CO 2 is injected into rock formations to dislodge gas and oil for further extraction. “This gives our industry a license to continue to operate for the 60, 70, 80 years that I think it’s going to be very much needed.” ![]() “We believe that our direct capture technology is going to be the technology that helps to preserve our industry over time,” Vicki Hollub, Occidental’s chief executive, told an industry conference in March. The Stratos project is ultimately owned by Occidental Petroleum, an American oil company that bought Carbon Engineering for $1.1bn last month and views carbon removal as a sort of future-proofing for its industry. Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Imagesīut some climate campaigners have argued that DAC is, at best, a costly irrelevance to the more pressing need to cut emissions and, at worst, a cynical ploy by the fossil fuel industry to maintain its polluting status quo. View image in fullscreen A large contactor draws in air at the Carbon Engineering pilot facility in Squamish, British Columbia, Canada. ![]() We need to address legacy emissions and direct air capture could play a big role in that.” People are already feeling the impacts of climate change. “There’s too much CO 2 in the atmosphere. “It’s an extraordinarily big moment for carbon removal right now and for direct air capture in particular,” said Erin Burns, executive director of Carbon180, a climate NGO that works on a range of different carbon-removal options. The commitments to remove such volumes of CO 2 is a step-change for a direct air capture industry still nascent, small-scale and unproven in its capacity to curb the worsening climate crisis, even as hope, and dollars, are ladled upon it. A further two hubs will be chosen by the federal government, as part of a $3.5bn effort to help create a market for carbon that will be “crucial to tackling climate change”, according to Jennifer Granholm, the US secretary of energy. This milestone was followed, in August, by Biden’s energy department announcing that two facilities – one a separate venture by Carbon Engineering, in the southern reaches of Texas – will be given $1.2bn to act as DAC “hubs” to help jumpstart the carbon-removal industry in the US while also purging more than 2m tons of CO 2 from the atmosphere between them. The team’s will to overcome is quiet, steady and unwavering.” ![]() “This time the Earth has some serious complications, and it needs the brightest minds,” Guetre said, adding that “that the world is watching and counting on us. The advent of the 65-acre (26-hectare) site, which will be marked by a vast network of pipes, buildings and fans to scrub CO 2 from the air and then inject it into underground rock formations, was solemnly likened to the Apollo 13 moon mission by Lori Guetre, vice-president of Carbon Engineering, the Canadian-founded company spearheading Stratos, during the groundbreaking.
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