American Military News by Patrick Tucker 12/17/2019
Efforts to suck greenhouse gases from the atmosphere would get a boost from the House version of the 2020 defense authorization bill, which requires the Defense Department and other federal agencies to create a program to turn carbon in the air and seas into fuel or other products of military use.
Dubbed the Direct Air Capture and Blue Carbon Removal Technology Program, the effort would seek to “develop and demonstrate technologies that capture carbon dioxide from seawater and the air to reuse such carbon dioxide to create products for military uses.â€
Small-scale carbon capture has existed for decades as part of industrial processes and as a means to boost fuel production. In 1999, researchers at Los Alamos National Lab proposed to scale up the technology to help reduce global carbon pollution and thus slow climate change. Initially, progress was slow. In 2003, the cost of extracting from the atmosphere one ton of carbon — about the amount produced by burning 100 gallons of gasoline — was more than $600. But technology is changing the calculation every day as new practices come on board to reduce the cost of capture and to actually do something with the captured carbon.
More:
https://americanmilitarynews.com/2019/12/house-defense-bill-mandates-carbon-capture-program-for-the-military/
