Charting a Path to Just Direct Air Capture Hubs

By Celina Scott-Buechler and Simone H. Stewart, Ph.D.

Last month, significant portions of the Democrats’ climate agenda made their way to the White House and were signed into law after decades of stagnation on domestic climate efforts. The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) invests a landmark $369 billion to scale clean energy production, create new clean energy technologies and jobs in America, and reduce pollution in overburdened communities. As many have pointed out, the IRA is nowhere near a perfect bill. But it does make significant strides toward decarbonizing some of the nation’s most emissions-intensive sectors: energy production, transportation, and heating and cooling. As agencies begin to direct federal dollars toward Congress’ chosen climate efforts, however, another equally pressing threat must be addressed: environmental injustice. As environmental justice advocates have made clear, the U.S. cannot afford to tackle the climate crisis without also tackling the country’s long-standing legacy of racist pollution, siting injustices, and undelivered promises to workers and marginalized communities. Rather, the recent influx of funding for climate via both the IRA and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) passed late last year presents an opportunity to ensure even the most vulnerable among us are ushered into a future where climate solutions improve the state of our planet as well as the prosperity and health of our communities.

The bill is projected to get the U.S. back on track to meet its international climate commitments. Even so, after years of political inaction on the climate crisis, decarbonization alone is no longer enough to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius. Meeting this goal, as laid out in the international Paris Climate Agreement, increasingly requires the use of carbon dioxide removal (CDR): taking past emissions out of the atmosphere and storing them indefinitely. To be clear, CDR is no replacement for aggressive decarbonization — we still have to focus the majority of our efforts on rapidly deploying renewable energy, using less carbon-intensive building materials, shrinking the footprint of our food systems, and rapidly phasing out fossil fuels. But we’ll also need to work to clean up legacy carbon pollution already in the atmosphere, and our ways of doing so are still in the early stages of development and deployment. This means that government support will be critical to the development of cost-effective CDR, and government leadership will be critical to ensuring that CDR is a tool to help rectify carbon pollution injustices of the past.

One CDR approach in particular has gained significant attention in Congress: direct air capture (DAC), which filters carbon dioxide out of the air using large fans. The IIJA demonstrated just how interested Congress is in advancing this technology, allocating $3.5 billion to develop DAC in “regional hubs” across the country. Not only is this the largest government investment in DAC in the world, it’s also the largest for any kind of CDR. For an underdeveloped climate tool, this is a big deal.

But how the Department of Energy (DOE) chooses to roll out these DAC hubs, and which projects it chooses to fund, may be more than just a question of how much or little the technology can be advanced with government funding; it may well be a question of whether the public, and especially local communities, will accept CDR projects at all. With only four large-scale DAC facilities in existence today in countries like Iceland and Switzerland, where climate and clean energy technologies are already being deployed at scale, most of the world has very little experience with DAC. The world will be watching as the U.S. adds four more, doubling the global total. With additional incentives in the IRA, DAC is likely to expand beyond these four additional projects, so it will be important to watch what precedent DOE sets with the hubs.