Dive Brief:
- Occidental Petroleum’s carbon capture and sequestration subsidiary, 1PointFive, secured up to $500 million in funding from the U.S. Department of Energy for its direct air capture hub in South Texas, the company announced Thursday. The financing will be provided by the DOE’s Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations.
- The Kleberg County, Texas-based facility is currently able to remove 500,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide annually, a capacity Occidental said could be expanded to over one million metric tons per year going forward.
- DOE’s OCED has committed up to half a billion dollars for the facility, but the total award value could potentially increase to $650 million for the development of an expanded carbon removal network in South Texas, according to the energy company.
Dive Insight:
Once the carbon dioxide is captured from the atmosphere, it will be permanently stored deep underground in saline aquifers, or geological formations that consist of water permeable rocks saturated with salt water. Saline aquifers have been identified to have the largest storage potential of geologic formations for carbon dioxide, enough to store emissions “for at least a century,” according to an estimate from the Water Resources Research, a scientific journal published by the American Geophysical Union.
1PointFive said its South Texas hub has the overall capacity to remove 30 million metric tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere annually through direct air capture and can store up to three billion metric tons of the gas in saline formations.
In a 2022 report, the DOE said carbon removal technologies could help limit the pace of global warming, stressing that the “massive scale of negative emissions needed requires a suite of diverse [carbon dioxide removal] approaches.”
Occidental’s president and CEO Vicki Hollub echoed this in her statement last week.
“Large-scale direct air capture is one of the most important technologies that will help organizations and society achieve their net-zero goals,” Hollub said in the Sept 12. release.
The DOE funding comes a few months after Occidental announced it had secured a $550 million financing commitment from BlackRock, the nation’s largest asset manager, for its other industrial-scale direct air capture plant located in Ector County, Texas. The Stratos facility aims to capture up to 500,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide annually once operational in mid-2025, according to Occidental.
