Climework's Orca facility, by comparison, is only capable of removing 4,000 tons per year. Climeworks is also developing DAC plants in southwest Louisiana - one of two large DAC hubs selected by DOE.įor any of those engineering-stage projects to win DOE backing as one of the last two hubs required by 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law, they would need to present a technologically and economically viable plan to initially capture at least 50,000 metric tons of CO2 per year and eventually scale up to 1 million tons of annual removal capacity. Winning applicants include the oil company California Resources Corp., the carbon utilization firm Twelve and the Swiss DAC firm Climeworks, which operates the world's largest - and only - commercial DAC facility in Iceland. The handful of projects in the engineering stage of development are aiming to build DAC hubs in California, North Dakota, Alabama, Wyoming and the Southwest's Four Corners region. The so-called FEED studies will focus on the technical requirements of the projects and seek to estimate their overall costs. Those are intended to examine potential hub locations, ownership structures, business models, carbon storage or usage options, and technology partners.īut five more advanced proposals won between $10.2 million and $12.5 million for front-end engineering design work. Most of the winning DAC hub proposals were awarded $3 million or less to help fund early stage feasibility studies. The agency also promised to spend nearly $100 million to help advance 19 other DAC hub proposals in varying states of development. They could also use the concentrated CO2 to make products like concrete and carbon-neutral plastics or fuels.ĭOE has tentatively committed to spending roughly $1 billion to defray the costs of constructing two of four congressionally mandated DAC hubs. “How are you solving - or at least covering up - the challenges you have going forward towards scale?” he said of the potential applicants.ĭevelopment teams that got the most money in the first round “have been able to demonstrate to the government that they’ve got a better plan to deal with costs and to deal with the scale-up, or they have enticing technology,” Findlay added.ĭAC plants use fans, filters, piping and power to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and store it underground. The most important factor DOE will consider next time is probably “readiness,” said Peter Findlay, the director of carbon capture economics at the research firm Wood Mackenzie. Proposals that nabbed the biggest awards during the first funding round in August probably have a leg up on future DAC hub prizes, industry observers say, but technological advancements could result in some surprising winners. So which companies and communities are most likely to be chosen for the remaining DAC hubs - and the billions of dollars DOE has set aside to help develop them?
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