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Jun 17, 2022

Carbon Engineering-Occidental Petroleum Partnership to Build 70 to 135 Direct Air Capture Plants by 2035

Posted by in categories: engineering, sustainability

We’ll need thousands of these direct air capture plants or their equivalents from industry and nature to reduce atmospheric CO2.


Direct Air Capture, also known as DAC, is one of a number of carbon capture technologies seen as a way to mitigate the worst impacts of global warming. The technology harvests carbon dioxide (CO2) from ambient air. It is not an add-on to a coal-fired or natural-gas thermal power plant, but rather a standalone solution to removing CO2 from the atmosphere for the purpose of permanently sequestering it underground.

A leader in this form of carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) is Carbon Engineering, a Canadian-based company whose demonstration plant sits in Squamish, British Columbia. Bill Gates is an investor. And now Occidental Petroleum through its subsidiary 1PointFive has entered into a partnership to build and deploy a minimum of 70 or as many as 135 DAC plants like the one seen in the picture above by 2035.

Each facility will have the capacity to remove a megaton of CO2 from the atmosphere annually. The methodology uses a tower structure containing an array of giant fans which pull in air that then passes over a solution containing potassium hydroxide which attracts and binds the CO2 to it. Once captured the CO2 can then be compressed and shipped by pipeline to a sequestering site. And although a megaton sounds like a lot of CO2, it really is not.

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