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Plus how it’s different from carbon capture — and, while we’re at it, carbon offsets.
The science is still out — but some of the industry’s key players are moving ahead regardless.
Wind and solar are out. Clean, firm power is in.
Especially with carbon capture tax incentives on the verge of disappearing, perhaps At One Ventures founder Tom Chi is onto something.
The House budget bill may have kept the 45Q tax credit, but nixing transferability makes it decidedly less useful.
Direct air capture isn’t doing everything its advocates promised — yet. That doesn’t make it a scam.
Two events last week thrust direct air capture carbon removal into the spotlight — one promising, though controversial for some, the other mendacious and ill-informed.
On Friday, Occidental announced a potential $500 million joint venture investment from Adnoc’s XRG, the lower-carbon investment wing for the United Arab Emirates state-run oil company in Oxy’s South Texas DAC Hub project. The facility is part of the $3.5 billion federal DAC hubs program created through the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. Although the DAC hubs program has strong bipartisan support, it has faced relative uncertainty under the new administration, calling into question American leadership on the future of the industry.
Earlier in the week, Climeworks, another major DAC hubs award winner, announced a reduction in force, due in part to “pending clarity for our next plant in the U.S.” Coupled with this news, a sensationalized exposé by Icelandic news outlet Heimildin detailed challenges with the first two Climeworks facilities, including commentary that called both the company and the technology a “scam” and the “Theranos of the energy industry.”
DAC has never been entirely welcome among climate advocates. To a certain extent, its critics are right: The process of pulling carbon directly out of the ambient air and storing it permanently underground is both energy- and capital-intensive, and it has obvious utility for the oil and gas industry, which has seized on DAC’s potential to erase past emissions as a way to argue that the transition away from fossil energy isn’t actually necessary.
But these critics start to lose the thread when they call the technology a “fig leaf” for oil and gas or an “expensive, dangerous distraction,” and most egregiously when they point to the lack of actual carbon dioxide removed using the technology as an argument against future deployments.
There is a scientific consensus behind the need for carbon dioxide removal that these critiques dance around. As the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change lays out in its most recent scientific report, “CDR is required to limit warming to 1.5 [degrees Celsius],” and is “part of all modeled scenarios that limit warming to 2 [degrees] by 2100.” Even when critics recognize the need for permanent CDR, they frequently fail to provide any plausible pathway to gigaton scale. The fact is that DAC doesn’t have an established, liquid market, like electricity, steel, cement, or any other commodity. That any one DAC business is struggling as it attempts to scale is not an indictment of the company, but rather an illustration of the challenge it is taking on to commercialize a first-of-a-kind technologies that naturally has first-of-a-kind issues while also building a brand new market for the crucial climate service it provides. Don’t hate the player, hate the game.
The commercial model for the nascent CDR industry is largely the sale of carbon removal credits for delivery in future years. This isn’t unique to CDR — it’s even analogous to the power purchase agreements that scaled renewable energy. Futures contracts are standard practice, and certainly not indicative of a “scam.”
DAC’s high energy needs are frequently cited as a reason for concern among skeptics. As the Princeton Net Zero America study notes, however, the total energy needed to reduce emissions in a net-zero system without DAC increases because we would need more power to produce e-fuels. (Jesse Jenkins, one of the leaders of the Net Zero America study, is also a co-host of Heatmap’s Shift Key podcast.) This criticism also fails to take into account the reduction in energy intensity that companies are already achieving by various means. That group includes Climeworks, which has introduced more efficient sorbents; Heirloom, which is working on deploying passive mineralization; and Holocene, which was recently acquired by Oxy and employs the low regeneration temperature solvents.
The costs and efficiency of DAC today, just like the cost and efficiency of solar 20 years ago, are likely to improve significantly in the future as the technology and market become more efficient and reliable. Early DAC deployments may have a relatively high cost now, but even today, DAC is cost-competitive with emissions mitigation in aviation.
The industry currently stands at a precipice. Will DAC cross the chasm from pilot facilities to meaningful deployment? Or fall off the hype wagon into the dustbin of cool ideas that were always 10 years away? Beneath the innuendo and false claims, the reporting from Reykjavik shows what everyone in DAC knew — that it has a messy, non-linear path to scale. That does not disprove the argument that it is also a necessary technology that is not only valuable to remove emissions, but also is drawing billions in investment, and driving local economic development.
And there is plenty of good news. The XRG joint venture with Adnoc shows that a sophisticated strategic investor views American DAC as promising. (The local South Texas community is excited, too.) The Oxy Stratos facility in West Texas has already brought thousands of new construction jobs, and will bring hundreds of more permanent jobs to the heart of oil country — a new industry to make use of their unique and valuable skill sets. Project Bantam, a multi-modal operation that was the largest in the U.S. when it launched last summer, is operating in Oklahoma.
The Heimildin story was written to be a salacious takedown, and DAC opponents wasted no time in saying, “We told you so.” The issue with that reaction is the story isn’t unique to Climeworks, or even to DAC. The same story could have been written 20 years ago about solar and batteries. It could be written tomorrow about advanced geothermal or long-duration energy storage. It is the boring, mundane outcome of trying to build a difficult technology with the policy and business hand we are dealt.
The road to DAC at scale will be scattered with bumps, failed projects, and folded companies. We should be cheering these folks on, not taking shots from the cheap, increasingly warm seats.
Congratulations to Mati Carbon, an enhanced rock weathering startup that works with farmers in India.
Mati Carbon, a startup that spreads rock dust on small farms in India to increase the land’s ability to suck carbon from the air, was awarded the $50 million grand prize in the Carbon Removal XPRIZE contest on Wednesday.
More than 1,000 teams initially registered for the four year-long competition, which Elon Musk bankrolled in 2021. The goal was to challenge scientists and entrepreneurs to scale new solutions to remove the carbon already blanketing the planet.
To win, entrants had to demonstrate that they’d removed at least 1,000 tons of CO2 from the atmosphere during the final year of the contest, and that the carbon would be locked away for at least 100 years. They also had to make the case to the judges that they had a viable path to scale up their operations to remove a billion tons per year in the future.
The three runners up include NetZero, a French biochar company, Vaulted Deep, which takes carbon-rich waste streams (including sewage) and turns them into a slurry that can be injected underground, and UNDO, which is advancing a similar solution to Mati Carbon but on larger farms in Scotland and Canada.
If you’ve been following the growth of the carbon removal industry, you may notice that none of the winners is building a big contraption to pull carbon from the air, also known as direct air capture. The tech has become a sort of industry poster child due to the public successes of companies like Climeworks and the U.S. federal government pouring billions into direct air capture hubs.
But the engineering, permitting, and construction challenges of direct air capture are more difficult to overcome on a tight timeframe than with other methods. While XPRIZE entrants could pick from many potential carbon removal approaches, and there were some direct air capture teams in the mix, the contest’s rules ultimately favored low-tech solutions that could be deployed quickly.
The winners are more “logistically oriented,” Mike Leitch, XPRIZE’s senior technical lead, told me, meaning their main challenges are sourcing and moving around large volumes of material like rocks, biomass, and waste.
Mati Carbon and UNDO, for example, take a naturally occurring, abundant type of rock called basalt, crush it up, and spread it on farmland — a process known as enhanced rock weathering. In doing so, they are speeding up the natural process by which carbon dioxide and water combine in the atmosphere, fall to earth as rain, and react with minerals, breaking them down and transforming the carbon into a form that can’t easily be released. Basalt is a particularly reactive rock, and crushing it into a fine powder makes it even more reactive. Applying it to farms — where there is already a lot of carbon dissolved in water present in the soil — also speeds the process. It’s a win-win for farmers, since basalt is rich in nutrients like calcium, magnesium, and potassium that plants use to grow.
Measuring precisely how much carbon enhanced rock weathering removes from the atmosphere is more difficult than with a direct air capture plant, but it’s easier to do a lot more of it in a shorter amount of time.
“The thing that knocked out the vast majority of the teams was the deadlines,” Leitch said. Only seven of the 20 finalist teams surpassed the 1,000-ton threshold. In the end, the judges recognized the skewed results and decided to award two $1 million “XFACTOR” prizes to Project Hajar, a partnership to build a direct air capture plant in Oman, and a company called Planetary, which is depositing crushed minerals in the ocean to help it absorb more carbon from the atmosphere.
“We know that we need a diverse portfolio of carbon removal solutions, because they all have different strengths and weaknesses,” Nikki Batchelor, the executive director of the contest, told me. “They have land and water and energy implications, and so we can’t be all in on just one of them, because we’re probably going to run into global limiters for any one of those categories.”
Mati Carbon’s founder and CEO, Shantanu Agarwal, told me he plans to use the prize money to bring enhanced rock weathering to farmers throughout the Global South. “When you get some money, you start dreaming big, right?” he said. “Our objective is 100 million farmers and a gigaton of carbon removal.”
Agarwal started his carbon removal career working on direct air capture and co-founded a company called Sustaera to develop the tech. But he started to realize the energy requirements were going to be a significant challenge and began to doubt it could be a solution in the near term. Around the same time, he had the opportunity to tour smallholder farms in rural India and learned about their vulnerability to drought. He was aware of enhanced rock weathering and thought it might be a way to help these farmers remain viable, as it improves the soil’s ability to retain moisture. Today, Mati Carbon is wholly owned by a nonprofit and shares the revenue it brings in from selling carbon removal credits with its partner farmers.
Leading companies in the enhanced rock weathering field, including Mati, tackle the challenge of measuring how much carbon they have removed by taking tons and tons of soil samples before and after spreading the rocks, and tracking changes in its chemistry. But the science behind calculating the results is still evolving — there are different ideas about how to interpret the changes, and how to model what happens to the carbon down the road.
For the purposes of identifying a winner for the contest, XPRIZE relied on third party experts to verify the carbon claims made by the teams. So it’s important to add a caveat that the claims made by Mati and other companies are subject to the experiences and opinions of the scientists who verified them, Erin Burns, the executive director of the carbon removal advocacy nonprofit Carbon180, told me. “This isn’t settled science, there are ongoing debates,” she said. But she added that she hoped contests like the XPRIZE would help the field reach consensus.
