The U.S. government is about to give what may prove a significant boost to the controversial carbon dioxide removal sector, according to a new report.
There are several existing or potential carbon dioxide removal (CDR) technologies out there, ranging from old-fashioned tree planting to capturing greenhouse gas from the air and storing the carbon underground. All come with big potential downsides, with many coming down to a lack of evidence that they can work affordably at scale—critics say CDR could be a distraction from renewable energy technologies that we know do work, like solar or wind, and they fear it could be used to excuse the continued burning of fossil fuels.
With last month having been the hottest on record, and with the United Nations declaring that “the era of global boiling has arrived,” it’s clear that task number one is to stop pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. However, especially as that isn’t going to happen overnight, we also need to urgently explore CDR as a mitigation option, and that’s what this program should help achieve.
According to Heatmap, the U.S. government will become the first in the world to pay for the removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, with the Department of Energy wielding tens of millions of dollars for the program. As with JPMorgan’s big CDR announcement back in May—the bank promised to buy over $200 million in CDR credits—the aim is to stimulate the scaling-up of such technologies by providing startups with major customers.
The government is already funding some CDR schemes by other means, but Heatmap notes that this procurement program would, for the first time, allow federal cash to flow to startups trying newer techniques, such as turning the carbon into rocks.
Separately, but remaining on the subject of innovation in the name of survival, scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have achieved “ignition” in a fusion-energy experiment for the second time—the first success came in December. This means they have now twice managed to get more energy out of the experiment than they put in.
We could still be decades away from seeing nuclear fusion (that isn’t taking place in the sun) becoming a reliable source of energy at scale, and that outcome may still never come to pass. But there’s certainly every reason to try. As with CDR, we are not talking about technologies that are likely to immediately rescue us from the chaos that’s unfolding. But, if they are proven to work at scale, they would certainly help us become a cleaner species down the line.
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David Meyer
