Photograph by Esperanza Moya / Trunk Archive
WORDS BY JASON P. DINH
On Iceland’s volcanic terrain, resting on rolling hills of verdant moss and shadowed by towering glaciers, sits a metal box, lifted off the ground by steel beams. Inside it are 96 whirring fans, funneling air through its filters, drowning out the muted crackling of the glacial melt in the distance.
Its name is Orca.
Owned and operated by the company Climeworks, Orca is drawing carbon dioxide (CO2) out of ambient air. It’s a concept called direct air capture, or DAC. In 2021, Orca became the world’s first large-scale DAC facility to open its doors.
No, Orca alone won’t save the world. It only removes 4,000 tons of CO2 each year. We emit 1,600 tons each second, so Orca accounts for just over two seconds out of a year’s emissions. But it’s a useful proof-of-concept. Experts say by midcentury, we’ll need to remove billions of tons—gigatons, as it’s often called—of carbon dioxide to stay below 2°C of warming. 4,000 tons is a crucial stepping stone to get there.
Still, the technology’s path forward is mired by oil and gas interests, staunch opposition, and a deep history of failure in related carbon-abating technology. Today, DAC sits in a scuffle between the fossil fuel lobby, skeptical scientists, and environmental activists.
Oil and gas companies have flaunted DAC as their saving grace. “We believe that our direct capture technology is going to be the technology that helps to preserve our industry over time,” said Vicki Hollub, CEO of Occidental Petroleum, at an oil and gas conference earlier this year. “This gives our industry a license to continue to operate for the 60, 70, 80 years that I think it’s going to be very much needed.”
In response, some scientists and environmentalists have condemned the technology as a greenwashing tactic to delay decarbonization. Their most glaring critiques are that DAC is small in scale, expensive, and energy intensive. “If you use fossil fuel energy to fire these things, gee, that’s pretty counterproductive,” said Dr. Jonathan Foley, an environmental scientist and executive director of Project Drawdown. “If you use renewable energy, you would’ve been better off sticking that renewable energy just onto the grid and not burned the coal and gas in the first place.”
“Let’s be honest, the decision to spend multi-billions of dollars on this technology was not a technical decision made by climate scientists or engineers. It was a political decision.”
Other scientists see a future where DAC could be a useful tool. After all, every scenario from the 6th IPCC Assessment Report that limits warming to 2°C assumes carbon removal. DAC could be one of several techniques used to clean up what we’ve already emitted and to zero out the hard-to-abate industries that are otherwise difficult to address, like aviation, steel-making, or cement manufacturing.
DAC could be valuable, said Dr. Sara Nawaz, an environmental social scientist at American University’s Institute for Carbon Removal Law and Policy, but the fossil fuel lobby’s claims of a get-out-of-jail-free card are stifling critical discussions. “A large part of why people talk past each other is that we’re talking about different things,” she said.
DAC is not, as Exxon CEO Darren Woods called it, a “holy grail.” But at the same time, it could be a good waste management tool that complements the larger movement towards decarbonization.
“We need to scale up research into this,” Nawaz said. “But we also need to keep it in the context of how it’s actually a really small slice of the broader pie of what needs to be done.”
Elida Castillo lives just north of Corpus Christi, Texas. As the program director for the Latino grassroots organizing group Chispa Texas, a program of the League of Conservation Voters, she closely tracks industry developments taking root around the Gulf Coast, from proposed hydrogen hubs to Tesla’s new lithium refinery. But even she was surprised to learn that a new DAC plant was being built in Kingsville, just 50 miles from her home. “There wasn’t really any community outreach,” she told me.
In August, the Department of Energy announced a $600 million award to fund the south Texas facility without meaningful discussions in their town. Castillo and her neighbors—a majority Latine community—are worried about the dangers of storing CO2 where they live, the risk of new pipelines getting built, and whether DAC is a good use of money in the first place. And there’s reason for distrust. After all, the DAC plant belongs to Occidental—the fifth-largest oil company in the U.S. and the second-largest donor to the U.S. oil and gas lobby. “You’re pretty much entrusting the bank robbers to guard the safe,” Castillo said.
It’s not just in Kingsville. Occidental has gone all-in on DAC. In August, the oil company acquired its longtime technological partner, Carbon Engineering, for $1.1 billion; they plan to deploy 100 large-scale DAC plants by 2035. That includes their west Texas facility, Stratos, which will open in 2025. There, they’re using the removed carbon dioxide to pump more fuel out of the ground—a method called enhanced oil recovery. They even market it with a dubious name: net-zero oil.
And now, Occidental has a seat at the table for COP28—this year’s flagship climate conference currently happening in the petrostate United Arab Emirates (UAE).
Hollub, the company’s CEO, is a registered guest of the host country. Occidental’s executive vice president, Saamir Elshihabi, is COP28’s energy transition lead. They have the close ear of COP28 president Sultan Al Jaber, who is also CEO of Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (Adnoc) and is allegedly using the conference to broker new oil deals.
The industry holds a vice grip over the event, and DAC is their trojan horse. In October, Occidental and Adnoc announced a joint DAC venture in the UAE. Additionally, according to a whistleblower, the consulting firm McKinsey, whose clientele includes ExxonMobil and Aramco, advised COP leadership to lower decarbonization goals and make up the difference with carbon dioxide removal technology.
Foley of Project Drawdown said we should be wary of fossil fuel companies using DAC as a smokescreen for continued emissions. Their claims are built on the back of carbon capture and storage, which “has been a total freaking disaster.” And at best, he said, DAC is trading seconds of emissions for decades of PR talking points. “It’s not just worthless. It’s counterproductive.”
Despite his opposition, he admits he might be wrong, and he hopes that at COP, leaders from government, industry, and nonprofits who believe in the technology can reclaim the narrative. In his view, they must establish principles on how the technology should be used and can never be used. “If we allow fossil fuels to capture this technology for their own benefit, we’ve burned the vast majority of its real potential,” he said.
“Communities can and should be asking for a lot more. Because the world is watching.”
Some companies have certainly taken steps toward establishing industry guardrails. Climeworks said they won’t use CO2 for enhanced oil recovery, and Heirloom, who recently opened the first commercial DAC plant in the U.S., committed to a set of “principles that guard against exploitative behavior,” including disavowing fossil fuel expansion and ensuring union jobs.
But Celina Scott-Buechler, a DAC researcher at Stanford University and senior resident fellow at Data for Progress, urges them to go even further: to give communities ownership and decision-making power over the plants. That’s the core idea of CALDAC, an initiative Scott-Buechler is working on to pilot a community-owned, environmentally just DAC hub in California’s Central Valley.
If the community in Kingsville, Texas had ownership and decision-making power, Castillo is certain they would have stopped Occidental’s DAC facility. Living in the shadows of dirty industry, they’re used to bearing the burden of billionaires and broken promises. Her neighbors have vocally opposed the project in public forums, she said, and the few who supported it were industry profiteers.
Community ownership sounds like a pipe dream, but it’s not. Scott-Buechler recently pitched the idea to DAC industry leaders at a town hall for Project Cypress, a new collaboration between Heirloom and Climeworks in Louisiana. To her surprise, they didn’t call it a line in the sand. “It’s not just a radical thing out of left field, but it’s a really viable way to build an industry,” she said. To her, community support is just as important as technological feasibility. “Communities can and should be asking for a lot more. Because the world is watching.”
As environmental justice advocates and progressive policymakers set new norms for the nascent industry, DAC is already booming.
Last year, Climeworks started building their second site in Iceland: Mammoth. At full capacity, it will be able to remove 36,000 tons of CO2 each year—an order of magnitude improvement over Orca. The company is also exploring opportunities in Kenya and Canada. They’re on track, they say, to remove megatons by 2030 and gigatons by 2050.
Competing technologies are emerging through the markets, too. At Heirloom’s California plant, for example, they heat limestone powder using renewable energy, which splits it into calcium oxide and carbon dioxide. They pack the CO2 into concrete where it’s permanently stored. Then, the calcium oxide acts like a sponge, soaking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere for the cycle to repeat.
Still, the technologies remain prohibitively expensive. To be economically viable, experts say it has to cost less than $100 to remove a ton of CO2—right now, estimates exceed $600 per ton.
Foley doesn’t see a substantial price drop for DAC any time soon. “Big concrete box solutions tend not to have learning curves like iPhones,” he said. “It’s just fans.”
Merritt Dailey, a DAC researcher at Arizona State University’s Center for Negative Carbon Emissions, is more optimistic. Fans represent just five to 10% of the costs, she said. A substantial price drop is possible later in the process, for example, when heating the filters to detach CO2. Other emerging techniques don’t use fans at all—like Heirloom’s limestone or passively moving air with wind. “This is an engineering problem—not a physics problem—and one we are well able to tackle,” Dailey said.
The U.S. recently invested $3.5 billion towards new DAC hubs, and Dailey thinks that amount fits the bill. Although she wishes that the government subsidies featured fewer fossil fuel entities, there are three or four operators that, in her view, are commercially ready. Banking them with billions of dollars from the government “de-risks” the first-of-their-kind projects which could make it less scary for banks to fund future ventures.
Foley, on the other hand, thinks that the billion-dollar price tag is too high for an industry he views as worthless at the moment. He doesn’t want to stop research and development into DAC. He just wishes we spent billions building tried and true solutions, leaving tens or hundreds of millions for developing new technologies for the future. “Let’s be honest, the decision to spend multi-billions of dollars on this technology was not a technical decision made by climate scientists or engineers. Not at all,” he said. “It was a political decision.”
Foley thinks that DAC will never work at any meaningful scale. Still, he hopes he’s proven wrong. “If they can do this, that would be awesome,” he said. “There are smart people doing good things… And their worst enemy is the people who are trying to subvert this technology for something it’s not really for.”
Fancy gadgets aren’t the only way to remove carbon dioxide from the air; plants do it as they photosynthesize. In fact, today’s most efficient and affordable carbon removal solutions are nature-based, through initiatives like reforestation or afforestation. Still, they have shortcomings, too.
For starters, Dailey said it’s challenging to know how much carbon a forest absorbs, and it’s even harder to know that the trees a customer pays to be planted wouldn’t have been planted otherwise—what they call additionality.
Forests also use huge swaths of land. Nawaz said that large-scale afforestation would cause moral dilemmas, like whether land should be used for new forests or for food.
To make matters worse, the CO2 stored in nature isn’t durable or permanent. Once trees die, they release their carbon. A portion of our emissions stay in the atmosphere for thousands of years; on average, a tree contains it for a maximum of 300 to 400 years before dying. “It’s not a one-to-one offset,” Dailey said.
It’s true that carbon removal can never replace decarbonization; that right now, it is being used as a billion-dollar fig leaf for Big Oil; that even at scale, it represents a tiny sliver of what needs to be done.
Now, new hybrid solutions are blurring the line between engineered and nature-based, reaping the benefits of both while avoiding the pitfalls. For example, the company Graphyte announced last month that it can turn plant waste, like wood chips or rice hulls, into carbon-rich bricks that can be buried deep underground. Like nature-based techniques, plants remove CO2. But like engineered methods, it’s stored durably and permanently underground. Graphyte claims their method costs around $100 per ton—the goalpost for economic viability—but there are still concerns about the company’s scalability.
With so many new initiatives, and some blatant greenwashing, it’s intuitive to decry them all as unequivocally bad, Nawaz and Scott-Buechler write in a forthcoming report. However, they continue, good and bad aren’t a matter of the technology, but the social systems used to implement them. Scott-Buechler believes carbon dioxide removal will play an important, albeit small, role in climate action, and she sees a path where it aligns with climate justice.
To set us on the right path, Nawaz said we need research aimed with surgical precision. “Anyone who’s funding this kind of work has a lot of power to determine how it’s done,” she said. “It sends a strong message when you fund Occidental.”
Paving a just road for a technology already sullied by dirty industry requires holding multiple truths at once. It’s true that carbon removal can never replace decarbonization; that right now, it is being used as a billion-dollar fig leaf for Big Oil; that even at scale, it represents a tiny sliver of what needs to be done.
It’s also true that DAC is useful when thought of as waste management. If it works, it could help us get past the finish line—to account for industries that are otherwise hard to decarbonize and to clean up what we’ve already polluted.
We’re not currently on a just and responsible path, the forthcoming report declares. That might not even be the most likely scenario. But it’s possible, and to Nawaz, pursuing that dream is a hopeful way to work in climate change. Carbon removal can promote progressive values, but, we can’t be naive, she said. We need to know where money is going, who benefits, and who bears the burden. As Nawaz put it, “The devil is in the details.”
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The Hijack and Reclamation of Direct Air Capture
