Advancing Equitable Deployment of Regional DAC Hubs
By Celina Scott-Buechler, Julia Jeanty, Catherine Fraser, Grace Adcox, and Charlotte Scott
In November 2021, President Joe Biden signed the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), allocating an unprecedented amount of funding for improving the nation’s infrastructure and ensuring historic investments to protect the country against the detrimental effects of anthropogenic climate change. Among other investments, IIJA set aside $3.5 billion to create four regional direct air capture (DAC) hubs to aid in carbon dioxide removal (CDR) — drawing past carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions out of the atmosphere for permanent storage.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Sixth Assessment Report suggests that decarbonization is no longer sufficient for meeting the Paris Climate Agreement’s goal of keeping global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. This means that removing past emissions from the atmosphere is now crucial to achieving international climate goals so long as it doesn’t detract from the path toward deep, multisectoral decarbonization. Unlike carbon capture and storage (CCS), which attempts to prevent CO2 emissions from entering the atmosphere from point-source emissions like power plants, CDR takes legacy emissions out of open air. This means that CDR works to clean up emissions that have already been put in the atmosphere through activities like fossil fuel combustion, although removing past emissions must be paired with the rapid phaseout of fossil fuel use in the first place.
DAC is one approach to carbon dioxide removal, in most cases relying on large fans to push air through a filter that is able to capture CO2 molecules. Once the filter is full, the CO2 is extracted and either injected deep underground, turned into rock, or used to create long-lasting building materials. IIJA specifies that each DAC hub must be able to remove at least 1 million tons of CO2 per year. The “hub” concept implies proximity between the point of CO2 capture and its storage or utilization site, with a transportation network connecting the two. It is estimated that powering each DAC hub will require between 0.4 and 34 km2 of land to produce the necessary 270-280 megawatts (MW) of electricity and heat. Given the large land and energy requirements, and the scale of upfront financial investment, DAC should be sited with social and economic considerations in mind.
Under IIJA, the Department of Energy (DOE) must prioritize project applications for areas with economic reliance on the fossil fuel industry and economic opportunity zones, along with proximity to low-carbon electricity and CO2 storage opportunities. Given DOE’s mandate to prioritize applications for economic opportunity zones, which are areas identified by the IRS where developers are offered tax benefits to “spur economic growth and job creation in low-income communities,” it is likely that some or all of the sites will have large shares of Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) populations, along with those of lower socioeconomic status (SES). The U.S. has a long history of unjust infrastructure siting in environmental justice communities, which are too often excluded from industrial decision-making processes that directly affect them. While DAC hubs can provide global benefits — such as reduced atmospheric CO2 concentrations and associated impacts of climate repair — it is important to consider how these hubs might be able to contribute to a broader movement of centering the voices and needs of marginalized and low SES communities in the development of large-scale infrastructure projects.
Despite the importance of community buy-in, little public opinion research exists on what voters and specific communities think about DAC, and CDR more broadly. Data for Progress worked to fill this gap by conducting community workshops across the country in partnership with local community- based organizations and researchers at Stanford University. Our early efforts to support community- first climate infrastructure on the ground focuses on DAC hubs given their climate potential, the scale of recent federal investment, and the DOE’s intention to grant funds for implementation this year. In this work, we are looking to set a new precedent for project development, particularly the development of climate innovation projects, by engaging communities before projects begin in a meaningful and iterative way.
A key point of the workshops is asking community members for their perspectives directly, rather than assuming what they want or believe. During our workshops, we give community members the opportunity to voice their ideas about local benefits and points of contention surrounding a prospective DAC hub in their community, compensating them for their time and expertise, and amplifying their perspectives to decision-makers in our post-workshop engagement. We also invite environmental justice and environmental organizations to attend, as these are often the groups that are most engaged in — and thus best informed on — local climate issues. In addition to providing information about potential benefits and risks of DAC, we aim to equip communities with information on how to negotiate infrastructural development more broadly to meet their needs. In particular, we present information on community benefits agreements (CBAs), which have allowed communities to negotiate with developers to ensure project benefits are shared equitably. As legally binding agreements, CBAs can benefit both the community and the project developer by clearly defining expectations and timelines for engagement.
To date, we have conducted four community DAC workshops, in East Houston, Texas; Beaver County, Pennsylvania; Bakersfield, California; and Rock Springs, Wyoming. Our goal was not to convince participants to support the development of a DAC hub, but rather to understand community needs, concerns, and support or opposition for a potential DAC hub in their community, and then to amplify these findings in decision-making processes. After being provided an overview of DAC hubs, including potential opportunities and risks, participants broke up into small groups to discuss what a DAC hub might look like in their community, what their preferences for such a project would be, how they think their community would respond, and how they might use a CBA to negotiate local benefits like jobs, social services, and improvements to infrastructure like roads and sanitation, among others.
In addition to collecting a combination of qualitative and quantitative data through the four workshops, we supplemented our findings with a national survey to assess Americans’ attitudes toward DAC and climate infrastructure developments. High-level methodology and results for both of these components are detailed in this memo, complemented by an academic article currently in preprint. In the sections to come, we explore community histories and insights for DAC deployment. While these are only snapshots of vibrant, complex communities, we hope they are able to shed light on the kinds of concerns and opportunities that diverse communities may identify in DAC.