The US government has announced it will invest $1.2bn (£945m) in two direct air capture (DAC) projects to pull carbon dioxide from the air.
The two facilities will be located in Texas and Louisiana, and each aims to eliminate 1 million tons of carbon dioxide per year – the equivalent in total to the annual emissions of 445,000 gas-powered cars.
The Texas facility will be built by oil company Occidental Petroleum, while the Louisiana hub is being driven by applied science group Battelle in cooperation with technology developers Climeworks and Heirloom.
“Cutting back on our carbon emissions alone won’t reverse the growing impacts of climate change,” energy secretary Jennifer Granholm said in the statement. “We need to remove the CO2 we’ve already put in the atmosphere.”
Granholm described the DAC technology as “giant vacuums that can suck decades of old carbon pollution straight out of the sky”, which can then be trapped underground or used in things such...