The Department of Energy has announced projects in Texas and Louisiana will receive $1.2 billion for "direct air capture" plants. The plants will aim to remove carbon dioxide emissions from the air.
The plant in Texas will be in Kleberg County, south of Corpus Christi. DOE says the project will remove one million metric tons of CO2 each year and contain a CO2 storage site.
DOE says the project will create about 2,500 jobs in construction, maintenance and operations.
“Cutting back on our carbon emissions alone won’t reverse the growing impacts of climate change; we also need to remove the CO2 that we’ve already put in the atmosphere—which nearly every climate model makes clear is essential to achieving a net-zero global economy by 2050. With this once-in-a-generation investment made possible by President Biden’s Investing in America agenda, DOE is laying the foundation for a direct air capture industry crucial to tackling climate change—transforming local economies and delivering healthier communities along the way," U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm wrote in a statement Friday morning.
The Department of Energy says direct air capture separates CO2 from the air and then stores it "safely and permanently stored deep underground or converted into useful carbon-containing products like concrete that prevent its release back into the atmosphere."
The projects in Kleberg County and Louisiana will be funded through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.
DOE has also announced it will negotiate to support earlier stages of two other direct air capture projects with ties to Texas.
The agency says General Electric would use a grant to conduct a study for a direct air capture hub in Houston. DOE says the hub would use a renewable power source.
Fervo Energy, a renewable energy firm based in Houston, would use a grant to study the feasibility of a direct air capture plant in southwest Utah.
"Fervo’s geothermal and carbon sequestration exploration and resource characterization activities suggest that there is more than 10 gigawatts of high-quality, economically exploitable geothermal resources available in southwest Utah, which could translate into a storage potential of up to 100 million tons of CO2 annually," Fervo wrote in a pitch provided by the Department of Energy.
DOE says it is negotiating with a total of 19 projects. The agency says those negotiations are ongoing but do not constitute a commitment to award funding.
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