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American Airlines Is Buying Carbon Removal on the Cheap

The most notable part of the airline’s deal with Graphyte is the price.

An American airplane.
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American Airlines will purchase carbon credits from a biomass-based carbon-removal startup in a deal that could reshape how corporate emitters offset their emissions, The Wall Street Journalreports. The startup, Graphyte, collects carbon dioxide-absorbent agricultural byproducts such as rice hulls, tree bark, and sawdust, compresses it into bricks, then seals and buries it. Its first project, in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, plans to begin manufacturing and burying the bricks by July.

What’s particularly notable about Graphyte’s deal with American Airlines is the price. American will pay Graphyte $100 per metric ton — as opposed to the $675 charged on average by Graphyte’s competitors in direct air capture, a process that typically involves massive fans that suck carbon from the atmosphere. Industry experts and analysts consider the $100 mark the threshold at which carbon removal could become a scalable, economically viable tool in the fight against climate change. As Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo recently noted, the direct air capture firm Climeworks hopes to get its price down to $100 to $300 per ton by 2050 at the earliest.

Unfortunately, Graphyte’s deal with American will only remove 10,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide, a tiny fraction of the 35 million metric tons that the airline emitted in 2022. So while the partnership is welcome, the scale of the task ahead — for Graphyte and the many other startups rushing into the carbon removal space — is dizzying. As Chris Rivest of Breakthrough Energy Ventures, the Bill Gates-backed VC firm that is funding Graphyte, told the Post, “We’ve bet the future of our planet on our ability to remove CO2 from the air … Pretty much every IPCC scenario that has a livable planet involves us pulling like 5 to 10 gigatons of CO2 out of the air by mid- to late-century.” Five to 10 gigatons — we’re going to need a lot of sawdust.

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Sparks

The Country’s Largest Power Markets Are Getting More Gas

Three companies are joining forces to add at least a gigawatt of new generation by 2029. The question is whether they can actually do it.

Natural gas pipelines.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Two of the biggest electricity markets in the country — the 13-state PJM Interconnection, which spans the Mid-Atlantic and the Midwest, and ERCOT, which covers nearly all of Texas — want more natural gas. Both are projecting immense increases in electricity demand thanks to data centers and electrification. And both have had bouts of market weirdness and dysfunction, with ERCOT experiencing spiky prices and even blackouts during extreme weather and PJM making enormous payouts largely to gas and coal operators to lock in their “capacity,” i.e. their ability to provide power when most needed.

Now a trio of companies, including the independent power producer NRG, the turbine manufacturer GE Vernova, and a subsidiary of the construction firm Kiewit Corporation, are teaming up with a plan to bring gas-powered plants to PJM and ERCOT, the companies announced today.

The three companies said that the new joint venture “will work to advance four projects totaling over 5 gigawatts” of natural gas combined cycle plants to the two power markets, with over a gigawatt coming by 2029. The companies said that they could eventually build 10 to 15 gigawatts “and expand to other areas across the U.S.”

So far, PJM and Texas’ call for new gas has been more widely heard than answered. The power producer Calpine said last year that it would look into developing more gas in PJM, but actual investment announcements have been scarce, although at least one gas plant scheduled to close has said it would stay open.

So far, across the country, planned new additions to the grid are still overwhelmingly solar and battery storage, according to the Energy Information Administration, whose data shows some 63 gigawatts of planned capacity scheduled to be added this year, with more than half being solar and over 80% being storage.

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An Emergency Trump-Coded Appeal to Save the Hydrogen Tax Credit

Featuring China, fossil fuels, and data centers.

The Capitol.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

As Republicans in Congress go hunting for ways to slash spending to carry out President Trump’s agenda, more than 100 energy businesses, trade groups, and advocacy organizations sent a letter to key House and Senate leaders on Tuesday requesting that one particular line item be spared: the hydrogen tax credit.

The tax credit “will serve as a catalyst to propel the United States to global energy dominance,” the letter argues, “while advancing American competitiveness in energy technologies that our adversaries are actively pursuing.” The Fuel Cell and Hydrogen Energy Association organized the letter, which features signatures from the American Petroleum Institute, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Clean Energy Buyers Association, and numerous hydrogen, industrial gas, and chemical companies, among many others. Three out of the seven regional clean hydrogen hubs — the Mid-Atlantic, Heartland, and Pacific Northwest hubs — are also listed.

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Why Your Car Insurance Bill Is Making Renewables More Expensive

Core inflation is up, meaning that interest rates are unlikely to go down anytime soon.

Wind turbines being built.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

The Fed on Wednesday issued a report showing substantial increases in the price of eggs, used cars, and auto insurance — data that could spell bad news for the renewables economy.

Though some of those factors had already been widely reported on, the overall rise in prices exceeded analysts’ expectations. With overall inflation still elevated — reaching an annual rate of 3%, while “core” inflation, stripping out food and energy, rose to 3.3%, after an unexpectedly sharp 0.4% jump in January alone — any prospect of substantial interest rate cuts from the Federal Reserve has dwindled even further.

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