Elected officials convened just outside of California’s Bay Area Thursday to celebrate the launch of the first commercial direct air capture facility in the United States. Though the facility hasn’t been powered on just yet, it’ll soon begin extracting carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and storing it underground on behalf of executives who feel guilty about their companies’ greenhouse gas emissions.
The facility, owned by Heirloom Carbon Technologies, leverages limestone’s intrinsic carbon-capturing abilities to reduce the gas’s effect on climate change. Limestone and carbon bind naturally in the wild, but Heirloom’s technology allows a single quantity of limestone to capture carbon several times over. The facility starts by heating limestone in a kiln powered by renewable energy. This strips the limestone of its carbon dioxide, leaving behind carbon-hungry calcium oxide. As the calcium oxide absorbs carbon from the atmosphere, Heirloom pumps the sequestered carbon into deep geological reservoirs, where it sits indefinitely. This cycle occurs repeatedly, allowing limestone to capture and store a projected 1,000 tons of carbon dioxide per year.
At that rate, Heirloom’s carbon-capturing work might feel a bit like emptying a flooding boat with a bucket. After all, the US alone emits more than 6.6 billion tons of carbon dioxide per year. But Heirloom’s facilities aren’t meant to serve as be-all end-all solutions to climate change.
“Carbon removal technologies will not only play a supporting role in the transition from fossil to renewable energy (via carbon utilization) but can also help to offset emissions from hard-to-abate sectors, such as steel and cement industries, and provide a means to remove legacy CO2 emissions,” the company’s whitepaper reads. “Additionally, carbon removal may offer a path towards climate justice as it could enable countries, corporations, and entities that have contributed the most to climate change to repay their climate ‘debt.’’
Indeed, Heirloom’s facility—and any plants it launches in the future—will allow other companies to purchase “CO2 removal credits” to mitigate their own impact on the climate. Credits of this nature are controversial, with critics accusing the companies that offer them of misleading buyers just to capitalize on climate change. Nonetheless, Heirloom will soon begin selling carbon-capture bragging rights and aims to boil the price down to $100 per ton by 2035.
