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Now we just need to know how well they work.
A new direct air capture facility built by the Alphabet-backed 280 Earth is officially plucking carbon dioxide from the surrounding air along the Columbia River in Oregon, the company announced on Monday. It’s the third-largest “direct air capture” plant operating in the United States and the latest entrant in the race to design the cheapest, most efficient machine to strip the heat-trapping gas from the atmosphere.
The small-scale demonstration project, which neighbors a Google data center in a city called The Dalles, is expected eventually to capture carbon at a rate of 500 tons per year. The two other U.S. facilities — Global Thermostat’s plant in Commerce City, Colorado, and Heirloom’s plant in Tracy, California — are both designed to capture 1,000 tons per year. All three came online in just the past 13 months. (There are also a handful of smaller facilities operating in the U.S. that capture 100 tons per year or less.)
The team that is now 280 Earth first began working on their direct air capture system inside X, the tech incubator at Google also known as the “Moonshot Factory.” They spun out into their own company in 2022, after four-and-a-half years of research and development. The name comes from 280 parts per million, the amount of carbon in the atmosphere before industrialization. Today we’ve reached nearly 420 parts per million. But if the world manages to reduce emissions nearly to zero, it may be possible to pull enough carbon out of the air to restore the atmosphere to levels closer to pre-industrial times.
In general, direct air capture technologies suck in ambient air and pass it through a special material called a sorbent that attracts CO2 molecules. They then use heat to remove the carbon from the sorbent so that it can be transported and safely stored underground.
280 Earth’s approach is unique in a few ways. To begin with, the company is using a “pelletized” sorbent — CEO John Pimental described it to me as a “half a piece of uncooked rice,” or the innards of a bean bag chair. The tiny pellets of sorbent flow through the system almost like water, resulting in some operational efficiency gains.
For the second step, the company plans to use waste heat from other industrial facilities like data centers to remove the captured carbon from the sorbent. Many data centers circulate cold water through their facilities for cooling, then send the hot water to a cooling tower where the heat is released into the atmosphere. 280 Earth can instead take that hot water and run it through a heat exchanger, sending the now-cooled water back to the data center. “It means their cooling tower needs to work less hard, it has less load on it,” said Pimental. “So it's an additional revenue source for our company to provide those cooling services to a neighbor.”
This waste heat can meet up to 80% of 280 Earth’s operational needs, reducing the amount of electricity the company buys. It’s also a win-win for the data center — 280 Earth’s process pulls water from the air in addition to carbon, and can supply that water to the data center, which in turn doesn’t have to rely as much on natural sources.
Direct air capture technology is often called “speculative” and “unproven.” But with an increasing number of deployments in the real world, it’s worth being more specific. These machines have proven to be able to separate carbon out of the air. The question is whether they can do so permanently, economically, and at a scale that will actually make a difference for climate change.
Although more plants are coming online every year, those questions are unlikely to be answered anytime soon. For example, it will be impossible to judge the efficiency claims made by 280 Earth or any other company until there is more public data — or any public data — about the energy these plants consume or what they cost to operate. Even the companies that are farthest along, like Climeworks, which has been operating a 4,000 metric ton per year commercial plant in Iceland since 2021 and just opened a 36,000-ton plant earlier this month, say that they are still testing the technology and therefore are not ready to share any stats that could be misinterpreted.
The potential to scale could also have less to do with the details of any one company’s technology and more to do with the ability to procure clean energy or to find somewhere to store the captured carbon.
Though 280 Earth is officially collecting CO2, the company doesn’t yet have anywhere to put it. Pimental told me the company plans to transport the gas by truck or rail to a carbon dioxide storage well, but it has not yet signed any agreements with well operators, and it’s unclear how long that could take. There are currently only a few operating carbon storage wells in the country, located in Illinois and North Dakota. But additional wells have been permitted in California, Indiana, and Wyoming, and many more are under review by the Environmental Protection Agency. Rather than sequester the carbon underground, the company could also sell it for industrial uses. Heirloom, for example, has an agreement with a company called CarbonCure to take the CO2 it captures and store it in concrete.
Regardless, 280 Earth company is aiming to scale up quickly and plans to build a new unit that can capture 5,000 tons of CO2 per year by 2025. Pimental told me that equipment procurement and permitting for that project are already underway. 280 Earth has not been awarded any government funding to date, but the company plans to compete to be one of the Department of Energy’s next direct air capture “hubs.”
Pimental told me he likes his odds. “I think we'll be in a very strong position because not many people have a 500 ton commercial demonstration facility up and running.”
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Ecolectro, a maker of electrolyzers, has a new manufacturing deal with Re:Build.
By all outward appearances, the green hydrogen industry is in a state of arrested development. The hype cycle of project announcements stemming from Biden-era policies crashed after those policies took too long to implement. A number of high profile clean hydrogen projects have fallen apart since the start of the year, and deep uncertainty remains about whether the Trump administration will go to bat for the industry or further cripple it.
The picture may not be as bleak as it seems, however. On Wednesday, the green hydrogen startup Ecolectro, which has been quietly developing its technology for more than a decade, came out with a new plan to bring the tech to market. The company announced a partnership with Re:Build Manufacturing, a sort of manufacturing incubator that helps startups optimize their products for U.S. fabrication, to build their first units, design their assembly lines, and eventually begin producing at a commercial scale in a Re:Build-owned factory.
“It is a lot for a startup to create a massive manufacturing facility that’s going to cost hundreds of millions of dollars when they’re pre-revenue,” Jon Gordon, Ecolectro’s chief commercial officer, told me. This contract manufacturing partnership with Re:Build is “massive,” he said, because it means Ecolectro doesn’t have to take on lots of debt to scale. (The companies did not disclose the size of the contract.)
The company expects to begin producing its first electrolyzer units — devices that split water into hydrogen and oxygen using electricity — at Re:Build’s industrial design and fabrication site in Rochester, New York, later this year. If all goes well, it will move production to Re:Build’s high-volume manufacturing facility in New Kensington, Pennsylvania next year.
The number one obstacle to scaling up the production and use of cleaner hydrogen, which could help cut emissions from fertilizer, aviation, steelmaking, and other heavy industries, is the high cost of producing it. Under the Biden administration, Congress passed a suite of policies designed to kick-start the industry, including an $8 billion grant program and a lucrative new tax credit. But Biden only got a small fraction of the grant money out the door, and did not finalize the rules for claiming the tax credit until January. Now, the Trump administration is considering terminating its agreements with some of the grant recipients, and Republicans in Congress might change or kill the tax credit.
Since the start of the year, a $500 million fuel plant in upstate New York, a $400 million manufacturing facility in Michigan, and a $500 million green steel factory in Mississippi, have been cancelled or indefinitely delayed.
The outlook is particularly bad for hydrogen made from water and electricity, often called “green” hydrogen, according to a recent BloombergNEF analysis. Trump’s tariffs could increase the cost of green hydrogen by 14%, or $1 per kilogram, based on tariff announcements as of April 8. More than 70% of the clean hydrogen volumes coming online between now and 2030 are what’s known as “blue” hydrogen, made using natural gas, with carbon capture to eliminate climate pollution. “Blue hydrogen has more demand than green hydrogen, not just because it’s cheaper to produce, but also because there’s a lot less uncertainty around it,” BloombergNEF analyst Payal Kaur said during a presentation at the research firm’s recent summit in New York City. Blue hydrogen companies can take advantage of a tax credit for carbon capture, which Congress is much less likely to scrap than the hydrogen tax credit.
Gordon is intimately familiar with hydrogen’s cost impediments. He came to Ecolectro after four years as co-founder of Universal Hydrogen, a startup building hydrogen-powered planes that shut down last summer after burning through its cash and failing to raise more. By the end, Gordon had become a hydrogen skeptic, he told me. The company had customers interested in its planes, but clean hydrogen fuel was too expensive at $15 to $20 per kilogram. It needed to come in under $2.50 to compete with jet fuel. “Regional aviation customers weren’t going to spend 10 times the ticket price just to fly zero emissions,” he said. “It wasn’t clear to me, and I don’t think it was clear to our prospective investors, how the cost of hydrogen was going to be reduced.” Now, he’s convinced that Ecolectro’s new chemistry is the answer.
Ecolectro started in a lab at Cornell University, where its cofounder and chief science officer Kristina Hugar was doing her PhD research. Hugar developed a new material, a polymer “anion exchange membrane,” that had potential to significantly lower the cost of electrolyzers. Many of the companies making electrolyzers use designs that require expensive and supply-constrained metals like iridium and titanium. Hugar’s membrane makes it possible to use low-cost nickel and steel instead.
The company’s “stack,” the sandwich of an anode, membrane, and cathode that makes up the core of the electrolyzer, costs at least 50% less than the “proton exchange membrane” versions on the market today, according to Gordon. In lab tests, it has achieved more than 70% efficiency, meaning that more than 70% of the electrical energy going into the system is converted into usable chemical energy stored in hydrogen. The industry average is around 61%, according to the Department of Energy.
In addition to using cheaper materials, the company is focused on building electrolyzers that customers can install on-site to eliminate the cost of transporting the fuel. Its first customer was Liberty New York Gas, a natural gas company in Massena, New York, which installed a small, 10-kilowatt electrolyzer in a shipping container directly outside its office as part of a pilot project. Like many natural gas companies, Liberty is testing blending small amounts of hydrogen into its system — in this case, directly into the heating systems it uses in the office building — to evaluate it as an option for lowering emissions across its customer base. The equipment draws electricity from the local electric grid, which, in that region, mostly comes from low-cost hydroelectric power plants.
Taking into account the expected manufacturing cost for a commercial-scale electrolyzer, Ecolectro says that a project paying the same low price for water and power as Liberty would be able to produce hydrogen for less than $2.50 per kilogram — even without subsidies. Through its partnership with Re:Build, the company will produce electrolyzers in the 250- to 500-kilowatt range, as well as in the 1- to 5-megawatt range. It will be announcing a larger 250-kilowatt pilot project later this year, Gordon said.
All of this sounded promising, but what I really wanted to know is who Ecolectro thought its customers were going to be. Demand for clean hydrogen, or the lack thereof, is perhaps the biggest challenge the industry faces to scaling, after cost. Of the roughly 13 million to 15 million tons of clean hydrogen production announced to come online between now and 2030, companies only have offtake agreements for about 2.5 million tons, according to Kaur of BNEF. Most of those agreements are also non-binding, meaning they may not even happen.
Gordon tied companies’ struggle with offtake to their business models of building big, expensive, facilities in remote areas, meaning the hydrogen has to be transported long distances to customers. He said that when he was with Universal Hydrogen, he tried negotiating offtake agreements with some of these big projects, but they were asking customers to commit to 20-year contracts — and to figure out the delivery on their own.
“Right now, where we see the industry is that people want less hydrogen than that,” he said. “So we make it much easier for the customer to adopt by leasing them this unit. They don’t have to pay some enormous capex, and then it’s on site and it’s producing a fair amount of hydrogen for them to engage in pilot studies of blending, or refining, or whatever they’re going to use it for.”
He expects most of the demand to come from industrial customers that already use hydrogen, like fertilizer companies and refineries, that want to switch to a cleaner version of the fuel, or hydrogen-curious companies that want to experiment with blending it into their natural gas burners to reduce their emissions. Demand will also be geographically-limited to places like New York, Washington State, and Texas, that have low-cost electricity available, he said. “I think the opportunity is big, and it’s here, but only if you’re using a product like ours.”
On coal mines, Energy Star, and the EV tax credit
Current conditions: Storms continue to roll through North Texas today, where a home caught fire from a lightning strike earlier this week • Warm, dry days ahead may hinder hotshot crews’ attempts to contain the 1,500-acre Sawlog fire, burning about 40 miles west of Butte, Montana• Severe thunderstorms could move through Rome today on the first day of the papal conclave.
The International Energy Agency published its annual Global Methane Tracker report on Wednesday morning, finding that over 120 million tons of the potent greenhouse gas were emitted by oil, gas, and coal in 2024, close to the record high in 2019. In particular, the research found that coal mines were the second-largest energy sector methane emitter after oil, at 40 million tons — about equivalent to India’s annual carbon dioxide emissions. Abandoned coal mines alone emitted nearly 5 million tons of methane, more than abandoned oil and gas wells at 3 million tons.
“Coal, one of the biggest methane culprits, is still being ignored,” Sabina Assan, the methane analyst at the energy think tank Ember, said in a statement. “There are cost-effective technologies available today, so this is a low-hanging fruit of tackling methane.” Per the IEA report, about 70% of all annual methane emissions from the energy sector “could be avoided with existing technologies,” and “a significant share of abatement measures could pay for themselves within a year.” Around 35 million tons of total methane emissions from fossil fuels “could be avoided at no net cost, based on average energy prices in 2024,” the report goes on. Read the full findings here.
Opportunities to reduce methane emissions in the energy sector, 2024
IEA
The Environmental Protection Agency told staff this week that the division that oversees the Energy Star efficiency certification program for home appliances will be eliminated as part of the Trump administration’s ongoing cuts and reorganization, The Washington Post reports. The Energy Star program, which was created under President George H.W. Bush, has, in the past three decades, helped Americans save more than $500 billion in energy costs by directing them to more efficient appliances, as well as prevented an estimated 4 billion metric tons of greenhouse gas from entering the atmosphere since 1992, according to the government’s numbers. Almost 90% of Americans recognize its blue logo on sight, per The New York Times.
President Trump, however, has taken a personal interest in what he believes are poorly performing shower heads, dishwashers, and other appliances (although, as we’ve fact-checked here at Heatmap, many of his opinions on the issue are outdated or misplaced). In a letter on Tuesday, a large coalition of industry groups including the Air-Conditioning, Heating, and Refrigeration Institute, the Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce wrote to EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin in defense of Energy Star, arguing it is “an example of an effective non-regulatory program and partnership between the government and the private sector. Eliminating it will not serve the American people.”
House Speaker Mike Johnson suggested that the electric vehicle tax credit may be on its last legs, according to an interview he gave Bloomberg on Tuesday. “I think there is a better chance we kill it than save it,” Johnson said. “But we’ll see how it comes out.” He estimated that House Republicans would reveal their plan for the tax credits later this week. Still, as Bloomberg notes, a potential hangup may be that “many EV factories have been built or are under construction in GOP districts.”
As we’ve covered at Heatmap, President Trump flirted with ending the $7,500 tax credit for EVs throughout his campaign, a move that would mark “a significant setback to the American auto industry’s attempts to make the transition to electric vehicles,” my colleague Robinson Meyer writes. That holds true for all EV makers, including Tesla, the world’s most valuable auto company. However, its CEO, Elon Musk — who holds an influential position within the government — has said he supports the end of the tax credit “because Tesla has more experience building EVs than any other company, [and] it would suffer least from the subsidy’s disappearance.”
Constellation Energy Corp. held its quarterly earnings call on Tuesday, announcing that its operating revenue rose more than 10% in the first three months of the year compared to 2024, beating expectations. Shares climbed 12% after the call, with Chief Executive Officer Joe Dominguez confirming that Constellation’s pending purchase of natural gas and geothermal energy firm Calpine is on track to be completed by the end of the year, and that the nuclear power utility is “working hard to meet the power needs of customers nationwide, including powering the new AI products that Americans increasingly are using in their daily lives and that businesses and government are using to provide better products and services.”
But as my colleague Matthew Zeitlin reported, Dominguez also threw some “lukewarm water on the most aggressive load growth projections,” telling investors that “it’s not hard to conclude that the headlines are inflated.” As Matthew points out, Dominguez also has some reason to downplay expectations, including that “there needs to be massive investment in new power plants,” which could affect the value of Constellation’s existing generation fleet.
The Rockefeller Foundation aims to phase out 60 coal-fired power plants by 2030 by using revenue from carbon credits to cover the costs of closures, the Financial Times reports. The team working on the initiative has identified 1,000 plants in developing countries that would be eligible for the program under its methodology.
Rob and Jesse go deep on the electricity machine.
Last week, more than 50 million people across mainland Spain and Portugal suffered a blackout that lasted more than 10 hours and shuttered stores, halted trains, and dealt more than $1 billion in economic damage. At least eight deaths have been attributed to the power outage.
Almost immediately, some commentators blamed the blackout on the large share of renewables on the Iberian peninsula’s power grid. Are they right? How does the number of big, heavy, spinning objects on the grid affect grid operators’ ability to keep the lights on?
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Jesse and Rob dive into what may have caused the Iberian blackout — as well as how grid operators manage supply and demand, voltage and frequency, and renewables and thermal resources, and operate the continent-spanning machine that is the power grid. Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap, and Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You can also add the show’s RSS feed to your podcast app to follow us directly.
Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Robinson Meyer: So a number of people started saying, oh, this was actually caused because there wasn’t enough inertia on the grid — that Spain kind of flew too close to the sun, let’s say, and had too many instantaneous resources that are metered by inverters and not by these large mechanical generators attached to its grid. Some issue happened and it wasn’t able to maintain the frequency of its grid as needed. How likely do you think that is?
Jesse Jenkins: So I don’t think it’s plausible as the precipitating event, the initial thing that started to drive the grid towards collapse. I would say it did contribute once the Iberian grid disconnected from France.
So let me break that down: When Spain and Portugal are connected to the rest of the continental European grid, there’s an enormous amount of inertia in that system because it doesn’t actually matter what’s going on just in Spain. They’re connected to this continen- scale grid, and so as the frequency drops there, it drops a little bit in France, and it drops a little bit in Latvia and all the generators across Europe are contributing to that balance. So there was a surplus of inertia across Europe at the time.
Once the system in Iberia disconnected from France, though, now it’s operating on its own as an actual island, and there it has very little inertia because the system operator only scheduled a couple thousand megawatts of conventional thermal units of gas power plants and nuclear. And so it had a very high penetration on the peninsula of non-inertia-based resources like solar and wind. And so whatever is happening up to that point, once the grid disconnected, it certainly lacked enough inertia to recover at that point from the kind of cascading events. But it doesn’t seem like a lack of inertia contributed to the initial precipitating event.
Something — we don’t know what yet — caused two generators to simultaneously disconnect. And we know that we’ve observed oscillation in the frequency, meaning something happened to disturb the frequency in Spain before all this happened. And we don’t know exactly what that disturbance was.
There could have been a lot of different things. It could have been a sudden surge of wind or solar generation. That’s possible. It could have been something going wrong with the control system that manages the automatic response to changes in frequency — they were measuring the wrong thing, and they started to speed up or slow down, or something went wrong. That happened in the past, in the case of a generator in Florida that turned on and tried to synchronize with the grid and got its controls wrong, and that causes caused oscillations of the frequency that propagated all through the Eastern Interconnection — as far away as North Dakota, which is like 2,000 miles away, you know? So these things happen. Sometimes thermal generators screw up.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.