In April, the world’s first commercial-scale direct air capture (DAC) plant was unveiled in Notrees, Texas. DAC pulls carbon dioxide from the air and concentrates it so it can be used for certain things such as adding bubbles to drinks. The plant is expected to capture 500,000 tons of CO2 annually in two years when it is fully built, and unlike carbon stored in plants, the CO2 can be sequestered indefinitely. Companies would pay the Notrees Plant to sequester their carbon emissions per stashed ton, causing carbon capture technology to become a real industry. Many similar companies, such as Climeworks and Global Thermostat are attracting capital, while other companies are using carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology to pull CO2 emissions from power plants and industrial processes before they are released into the air. Exxonmobil recently announced its new low-carbon division which intends to provide customers in industries like steel and cement with decarbonization services, and that by 2050, this global sector could earn annual revenues of $6 trillion. The IPCC believes that emissions reductions aren’t enough to prevent warming from climbing above pre-industrial levels, “negative emissions” like DAC are essential. Carbon capture technology has only recently become technically feasible, for many years, similar projects were possible but the cost of sequestering the carbon was extremely high (DAC was $600 per ton of CO2 in 2011). The cost of DAC sequestration per ton for the Notrees Plant is estimated to be between $94 and $232 and CCS is about $50 per ton at Canadian start-up Svante. Energy consultancy firm Wood Mackenzie predicts the carbon capture, utilization, and storage field (CCUS) could attract investments totaling $150BN throughout the decade and that CCUS capacity could be seven times greater by 2030. Government action to force carbon polluters to pay fees to companies that capture CO2 would be an effective way to promote this industry, but for DAC to be profitable, taxes would have to be higher than the EU’s current carbon price. Many believe that initially, carbon removal will be a costly endeavor, but as public support increases, it can become profitable, similar to how waste management was developed decades ago. The United States has poured hundreds of billions of dollars into promoting the carbon removal industry; the Inflation Reduction Act includes the provision of an enhanced tax credit that gives up to $85 per ton of permanently stored CO2 and $60 per ton of CO2 for oil recovery that also sequesters carbon. Tech companies are also starting to join the sector; Microsoft has announced that they will purchase 2.7M tons of carbon captured over the next ten years from Orsted’s biomass-burning power plants that an association by Shell, Equinor, and TotalEnergy pumps underneath the North Sea. A new firm funded by Alphabet, Meta, Stripe, and Shopify has announced a $53M deal with Charm Industrial that between 2024 and 2030 will capture 112,000 tons of CO2 by converting agriculture waste into an oil product that is stored underground. One of the biggest signs that this sector is taking off is that the oil industry has joined; Occidental is interested in DAC and ExxonMobil plans to spend $17BN in the next four years on lower-emissions investments like CCS. Critics say that the oil industry’s interest in this technology is to improve their reputations to consumers while continuing to pump crude oil, but their large budgets and investments are helpful to fuel the pathway to achieve negative emissions and capture carbon at the source.

https://www.economist.com/business/2023/05/21/can-carbon-removal-become-a-trillion-dollar-business