JAKARTA - The US Department of Energy launched a program to fund four large-scale projects across the country that can remove carbon dioxide from the air, on Thursday, May 19. They are investing $3.5 billion in nascent technology, which the Joe Biden Administration says is needed to meet its target of achieving net zero emissions by the middle of this century.
The agency released an official notice saying it would fund a $3.5 billion program created by the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Act that would create four regional direct air capture centers to spur widespread deployment of carbon dioxide transport and storage technology and infrastructure.
The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a report last month saying the world will need "carbon dioxide removal" technologies, from planting trees that absorb carbon to grow, to expensive technologies to suck carbon dioxide straight out of the air to meet global goals to curb climate change.
"The latest climate report from the United Nations makes it clear that removing legacy carbon pollution from the air through direct air capture and storing it safely is a critical weapon in our fight against the climate crisis," said US Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, as quoted by Reuters.
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Carbon removal technologies have received great attention and investment in recent months. There are three major direct air capture projects, under development and which have emerged in North America and Europe but they only suck small amounts of CO2 from the air at present.
Earlier this year, tech companies Google, Shopify, Meta and Stripe launched a $1 billion fund that will buy carbon removal credits over the next decade as a way to encourage rapid deployment of the technology.
World conglomerate Elon Musk last year offered $100 million in prize money to inventors for developing new carbon removal technologies.
The DOE says that by the middle of this century, carbon removal needs to be done on a gigaton scale, meaning it should be able to absorb the equivalent emissions of the roughly 250 million vehicles driven in one year.
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