The U.S. Department of Energy will spend $1.2 billion in Louisiana and Texas to create Regional Direct Air Capture Hubs, an effort expected to create 2,300 jobs in the Pelican State.
Project Cypress, to be located in Calcasieu Parish, will work in coordination with Climeworks Corporation and Heirloom Carbon Technologies to remove more than 1 million metric tons of existing CO2 from the atmosphere each year and store it underground.
The project would be one of two initial commercial-scale sites that the Biden administration wants to grow into a nationwide network of direct air capture facilities to address legacy pollution. The second site, the South Texas DAC Hub, is slated for Kleberg County.
The $1.2 billion in federal funding for the projects represents the largest investment in engineered carbon removal to date, with each hub expected to remove more than 250 times more carbon dioxide than the largest facility currently in operation, according to the Department of Energy.
In total, both projects are expected to remove 2 million metric tons of CO2, equivalent to the annual emissions of roughly 450,000 gasoline vehicles. The DOE cites estimates that the Biden administration's plan to reach net-zero emissions will require between 400 million and 1.8 billion metric tons of CO2 removed from the atmosphere annually by 2050.
"Cutting back on our carbon emissions alone won't reverse the growing impacts of climate change; we also need to remove the CO2 that we've already put in the atmosphere—which nearly every climate model makes clear is essential to achieving a net-zero global economy by 2050," said U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm.
Gov. John Bel Edwards contends the state's "talented energy workforce and embrace of lower carbon technologies make us the perfect fit for innovative projects like this Direct Air Capture Hub."
