US Wants to Reduce Billions of Tons of CO2 Emission in the Air: Will it Work?

Global carbon emission reduction may help mitigate the effects of climate change, but they may not be enough.

According to a report from The Verge, the US Department of Energy (DOE) disclosed ambitious new plans to speed the development of carbon capture technology in an attempt to reverse the tide amid catastrophic scientific forecasts.

The DOE's Goal: Removing CO2 From the Atmosphere

The program, named "Carbon Negative Shot," intends to scale carbon dioxide removal (CDR) technologies and make them cost-effective.

The program, which was publicized on the website of the US Department of Energy, intends to reduce the cost of CDR to less than $100 per ton. As a result, it may be used to remove billions of tons of CO2 from the atmosphere without being unreasonably costly.

According to the US Department of Energy, eliminating a billion tons of carbon dioxide - or a gigaton - would be comparable to reducing the pollution produced by about 250 million automobiles in a year.

To achieve this high target, the DOE will need to dramatically enhance technology compared to current - and planned - carbon removal facilities. This year, Iceland built the world's biggest direct air capture facility, known as Orca. It can now extract 4,000 tons of CO2 per year, which is far less than the estimates indicated for the new initiative.

According to the two companies, another facility under development in Scotland as part of a partnership with UK energy transition company Storegga Geotechnologies and Canadian carbon capture technology firm Carbon Engineering, would absorb up to 1 million tons of CO2 per year.

Cutting Emissions is not Enough

All of this is due to the fact that the most recent forecasts indicate that we are rapidly running out of time to avoid the worst impacts of climate change. For example, the IPCC's most recent assessment on climate change noted that the Earth is surpassing 125,000-year heat records.

Carbon capture technology, according to some experts, will need to work hand-in-hand with measures aimed at drastically lowering carbon emissions.

To attain net-zero emissions, there is need to do more than simply cut our emissions: there is need to actively remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere or balance its impacts, the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) recently stated on its website.

Challenges the DOE is Facing

The enormous amount of power needed to remove such massive volumes of CO2 from the atmosphere is one issue the DOE encounters with its project.

Carbon removal technology, if not correctly managed, may potentially aggravate the issue they were supposed to solve.

As a result, the DOE reveals in its statement that it wants to make sure that emissions emitted during the operation and construction of the removal technology are accounted for. That is only one of the obstacles it must overcome in order to make the technology practicable at the huge scale necessary.

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