Plans to support four large-scale, regional direct air capture hubs with $3.5bn have been unveiled by the US Department of Energy (DOE) as it looks to support President Joe Biden’s goal of achieving a net-zero economy by 2050.
The US DOE of Thursday (19th May) unveiled the effort that will capture and store carbon dioxide (CO2) pollution directly from the air to help address the impacts of climate change, create well paid jobs and pave the way for a cleaner future.
This comes as the DOE predicts that, by mid-century, CO2 removal technologies will need to be deployed at the gigatonne scale in order to meet set targets. To put this in perspective, one gigatonne of subsurface sequestered CO2 is equivalent to the annual emissions from the US light-duty vehicle fleet—the equivalent of approximately 250 million vehicles driven in one year.
Carbon capture technologies have been a talking point for the US Government for quite some time now. In July last year (2021), the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) delivered a carbon capture, utilisation and sequestration (CCUS) report to Congress to support President Biden’s goal of net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.
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