Washington: Administration of US President Joe Biden on Friday set a goal to reduce the cost of releasing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, as part of the US plan to set up the economy in 2050.
The negative carbon energy department of energy tries to cut costs.
Carbon removal to $ 100 per ton at the end of the decade, either through direct water capture (DAC) or help forests and other natural systems capture and store gas.
This is the “Earthshot” of the three departments, which is intended to help achieve Biden’s climate goals, by encouraging innovation in the heaviest technology to crack.
The first two set goals are reduced the cost of green hydrogen and long-level long-term utility battery storage from renewable energy.
“We have to poison the atmosphere, we have to improve and cure the earth and the only way to do it is to remove carbon dioxide permanently,” Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said while introducing the initiative in COP26 UN climate negotiations in Glasgow, Scotland.
In Iceland, Swiss Startup Lecture AG in September opened the largest factory in the world to suck carbon dioxide from the air and pump underground where it finally became a stone, one of 15 global DAC plants.
But costs can reach $ 600 per ton and plants now only remove a number of carbon which is equivalent to which is emitted by 2,000 cars.
Fatih Birol, Head of the International Energy Agency based in Paris, praised the initiative as an example of how the government can help drive the cost of technology that cannot be done by the energy market.
“We need the government to press the innovation magic button,” he said.
Jennifer Wilcox, the Head of the DOE of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management Office, said that using a natural system to remove carbon must go beyond obstacles, such as ensuring forest or agricultural fires in the future not only return carbon back to the atmosphere.
“The part of this work will define what metric (located) to monitor and verify storage on a long-term scale” for a natural-based approach, Wilcox said.
The negative carbon initiative will be funded through an annual appropriation of the Department of Energy.
In addition, bipartisan infrastructure bills have around $ 3.5 billion in incentives for DAC demonstration projects.
The bill has passed the US Senate and that the House of Representatives can choose it immediately after Friday.
Carbon Engineering, a Canadian-based company, plans to open the DAC factory in West Texas in 2024.
Microsoft, Occidental and Billionaire Elon Musk and Bill Gates all have invested in DAC.
Lucas Joppa, Microsoft’s main environment head, said the carbon removal market needed significantly mature and the new US price target could cause “learning by doing”.
Fred Krupp, President of the Nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund said, “We do not know which technology will succeed, frankly we do not know whether they will work, but we also have to invest and try to get prices below $ 100.”