The US Has Big, New Plans To Pull CO2 Out of the Air
Despite the efforts of delegates at this month's climate summit in Glasgow, the world is still careening toward potentially catastrophic levels of global warming. Now, some countries and corporations are turning to new technologies to pull carbon out of the air. From a report: Today, the US Department of Energy (DOE) announced a bold new plan to make those technologies, called carbon dioxide removal (CDR) technologies, cost-effective and scalable with the launch of a new "Carbon Negative Shot" initiative. Through this initiative, the agency seeks to bring the cost of CDR down dramatically this decade -- to less than $100 a ton -- so that it can be deployed at a big enough scale to remove "gigatons," or billions of tons, of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. That is a hell of a lot of CO2 pollution. Sequestering one gigaton of carbon dioxide would amount to removing the pollution of about 250 million vehicles -- the US's entire light-duty fleet -- in one year, according to the DOE. With CDR technologies still in pretty early stages of development, there are significant hurdles to overcome before the DOE can do so. CDR is a suite of strategies aimed at drawing down CO2 to keep it from trapping heat in the atmosphere. Nature can do some of that for us -- trees and plants pull CO2 out of the air. There's also "direct air capture" technology that mimics that process using carbon-sucking machines, but it has yet to be deployed at a large scale.
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