By Joseph Guzman. Courtesy of The Hill.
A pair of climate tech companies is set to break ground on what will become the world’s largest carbon capture and storage project to help industries meet their net-zero goals and slow down the Earth’s rapidly warming climate.
The direct air capture facility will be made up of large arrays of modules about the size of 40-foot shipping containers equipped with “reactors,” which essentially act as filters that absorb CO2 from the air. Once the filters are saturated, they are heated up and the carbon is extracted from the modules and pumped deep underground in saline aquifers for permanent storage.
The first phase is scheduled for 2023 and 2024, and Carbon Capture Inc., which manufactures the modules, is expected to start removing about 12,000 tons of CO2 each year. This amount will scale up capacity to about 200,000 tons by 2026, and by 2030, operations will ramp up to remove 5 million tons of atmospheric CO2 each year, which amounts to roughly the emissions from 1 million gas-powered vehicles driven in a year.
