Oldham agrees that building more plants will be the key to driving costs, noting that Carbon Engineering will see huge declines just from its first plant to its second. If done carefully, that process could potentially produce “carbon neutral” fuels, which at least don’t add more emissions to the atmosphere than were removed. Much of the carbon dioxide captured at that facility, however, will be used for what’s known as enhanced oil recovery: the gas will be injected underground to free up additional oil from petroleum wells in the Permian Basin. Construction is likely to start on that plant early next year, and it’s expected to begin operation in 2024. ![]() It will also begin as a half-million-ton-a-year plant with the potential to reach a million. The expected capacity of the Scotland plant is essentially the same as that of Carbon Engineering’s other full-sized facility, planned for Texas. Only a handful of other small-scale plants have been built around the world. ![]() Even the low end would far exceed the otherwise largest European facility under way, Climeworks’ Orca facility in Iceland, slated to remove 4,000 tons annually. The companies initially expect to build a facility capable of capturing 500,000 tons annually but could eventually double the scale given market demand. The proposed direct-air-capture plant could leverage the same infrastructure for its carbon dioxide storage, Oldham says. The project would also repurpose existing oil and gas infrastructure on the northeast tip of Scotland to transport the carbon dioxide, which would be injected into sites below the seabed. The plan is to produce hydrogen from natural gas extracted from the North Sea, while capturing the emissions released in the process. The plant will likely be located near the so-called Acorn project developed by Scotland-based Storegga’s subsidiary, Pale Blue Dot Energy. The government has begun providing millions of dollars to develop a variety of technical approaches to help it hit those targets, including about $350,000 to the Carbon Engineering and Storegga effort, dubbed Project Dreamcatcher. The United Kingdom has set a plan to zero out its emissions by 2050 that will require millions of tons of carbon dioxide removal to balance out the emissions sources likely to still be producing pollution. “A few hundred million invested in buying down the cost could tell whether this is a good or bad assumption,” he said in an email. ![]() Lackner says the key question is whether their study applied the right learning curves from successful technologies like solar-where costs dropped by roughly a factor of 10 as scale increased 1,000-fold-or if direct air capture falls into a rarer category of technologies where greater learning doesn’t rapidly drive down costs. ![]() Getting direct-air capture to that point may require total federal subsidies of $50 million to $2 billion, to cover the difference between the actual costs and market rates for commodity carbon dioxide. That's based on the "learning rates” of successful technologies, or how rapidly costs declined as their manufacturing capacity grew. Specifically, the study estimates that the direct-air-capture industry will need to grow by a factor of a little more than 300 in order to achieve costs of $100 a ton. What it will take to get to that $100 threshold is building a whole bunch of plants, Azarabadi and Lackner found. In 2019, the Swiss direct-air-capture company Climeworks said its costs were around $500 to $600 per ton. But the best guess is that the sector is nowhere near that level today.
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