Biden Administration will invest $1.2 billion to remove carbon from the air

The government of the president of the United States,Joe Biden, announced a million-dollar investment to launch the American carbon removal industry, which would control the country's greenhouse gas emissions.

Last Friday, the US Department of Energycommunicatedthat will allocate $1.2 billion to fund two new demonstration projects in Texas and Louisiana: the South Texas Direct Air Capture Center and the Cypress Project in Louisiana.

Direct capture facilities for carbon dioxide in the air are akin to huge vacuum cleaners that suck up the element, using chemicals to remove the greenhouse gas. Once extracted, CO2 is stored underground or used in industrial materials such as cement.

"These projects, the first of their size in the United States, represent the initial selections of the Regional Direct Air Capture Center (DAC) program funded by the President's Bipartisan Infrastructure Act, which aims to launch a national network of large-scale carbon removal facilities to address legacy carbon dioxide pollution," Secretary of State for Energy Jennifer Granholm told reporters.

These emissions into the atmosphere have fueled climate change and extreme weather events and endanger public health and ecosystems around the world.

Together, these projects are expected to remove more than 2 million metric tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from the atmosphere annually – an amount equivalent to the annual emissions of about 445,000 gasoline cars – and create 4,800 jobs. well-paying jobs in Texas and Louisiana.

Heannouncementwill be the largest investment in carbon removal engineering in history, with each facility removing about 250 times more carbon dioxide than the largest capture facility currently in operation.

Its development will help guide future investments by the public and private sectors and promote a new industry essential to tackling the climate crisis on a global scale.

"Reducing our carbon emissions alone will not reverse the growing effects of climate change; we also need to remove the CO2 we have already emitted into the atmosphere, something that almost all climate models make clear is essential to achieving a net global economy zero by 2050," Granholm said.

This investment is laying the foundations for a direct air capture industry crucial to addressing climate change.