INSIGHT by the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL)
As our window to prevent catastrophic climate impacts narrows, technological fixes like direct air capture (DAC) are gaining dangerous momentum. While pulling pollution out of the atmosphere might sound like a good idea, DAC and other carbon capture schemes are unproven, expensive, and may actually accelerate climate change.
Direct Air Capture: Big Oil’s Latest Smokescreen underscores that DAC will do more harm than good by perpetuating the lifespan of fossil fuel infrastructure and diverting resources away from more effective and proven climate solutions.
〉The brief takes a closer look at US oil giant Oxy’s plans to make DAC the technology that will preserve the fossil fuel industry for decades to come, a proposal that has caught the attention of many, including COP28 President Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber.
〉The brief exposes problematic ties between Al Jaber and Oxy, and warns that DAC is a dangerous distraction that props up the fossil fuel industry on the public’s dime.
〉The brief concludes that governments must focus attention, public funds, and the little time we have on safe, proven, and readily available solutions, including scaling up renewable energies.
Direct Air Capture: Big Oil’s Latest Smokescreen underscores that DAC will do more harm than good by perpetuating the lifespan of fossil fuel infrastructure and diverting resources away from more effective and proven climate solutions.
| Key messages
〉Direct air capture (DAC) is an energ y- and emissions-intensive technology, unproven at scale, that aims to vacuum carbon dioxide directly from the ambient air. It is one of many purported technofixes capturing headlines in the run-up to this year’s global climate talks (COP28).
〉Much of the captured carbon from DAC is intended for a process called enhanced oil recovery (EOR), which injects CO2 into a depleted well, forcing hardto-reach oil reserves to the surface to be burned, thereby adding more carbon to the atmosphere, rather than removing it.
〉US oil and chemicals company Oxy is one of the biggest proponents of DAC, claiming the technology is a key to prolonging fossil fuel industry operations for decades into the future.
〉Oxy’s DAC poster child, Stratos, would add around 350,000 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions to the atmosphere if it uses all the captured carbon for EOR. Though Oxy markets the technology as a climate solution, annual emissions from this project could equal those of 77,000 cars.
〉This year’s COP28 president, Sultan Al Jaber, is lending a veneer of legitimacy to DAC and has brought an Oxy executive onto the COP28 leadership team, all while a deal has been announced between his company, the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC), and Oxy to develop DAC projects.
〉According to a United States Department of Energy analysis, Oxy’s DAC technology under construction in the US will remove only 39 percent of the CO2 it promises to capture from the atmosphere. The same analysis concludes that no combination of DAC and EOR oil production comes close to actually sequestering more carbon from the atmosphere than is emitted in the whole process.
〉The carbon credits Oxy is planning to sell appear to outweigh its plants’ real capture capacity, and will be used to justify continued pollution and increased oil production.
〉The size of DAC projects to date is insignificant from a global climate perspective, with a total projected capacity to capture only 0.01 percent of today’s annual global energy emissions by 2030. Implementing DAC on climate-relevant scales would require such vast amounts of toxic chemicals and water, on top of its energy use, that it would pose massive risks to communities and ecosystems.
〉The push for DAC is largely being bankrolled by public funds. Oxy’s first DAC plant will receive around USD100 million per year in tax breaks and subsidies. Oxy’s giant vacuum appears to be better built to suck up subsidies than carbon.
〉If deployed, DAC will do much more harm than good by perpetuating the lifespan of fossil fuel infrastructure and diverting resources away from far more effective and proven climate solutions like renewable energies and energy efficiency
Explore the report
Direct Air Capture: Big Oil’s Latest Smokescreen
| about
Since 1989, CIEL has used the power of law to protect the environment, promote human rights, and ensure a just and sustainable society.
With offices in Washington, DC, and Geneva, Switzerland, CIEL’s team of attorneys, policy experts, and support staff works to provide legal counsel and advocacy, policy research, and capacity building across our three program areas: Climate & Energy, Environmental Health, and People, Land, & Resources.
| All opinions expressed are those of the author and/or quoted sources. investESG.eu is an independent and neutral platform dedicated to generating debate around ESG investing topics.
