DAC Dying? (“corporate theater wrapped in a green ribbon”)
By Robert Bradley Jr. -- May 22, 2025
“The economics are even more dismal…. Without the 45Q credit, few if any [Direct Air Capture projects] would be viable. As a reminder, the … Republican House bill working its way through Congress cuts IRA incentives for a raft of technologies, but leaves 45Q for carbon capture alone.” (- Michael Barnard, below)
An article in CleanTechnica by Michael Barnard, “Climeworks DAC & Fiscal Collapse & The Brutal Reality Of Pulling Carbon From The Sky“, documents the failure of another anti-CO2 program. The article begins:
In 2024, Climeworks’ direct air capture (DAC) Mammoth plant in Iceland captured just 105 tonnes of carbon dioxide. That’s not per day, not per week, that’s total, across the year. For context, that’s less than the annual tailpipe emissions from a dozen long-haul trucks, or roughly one-thousandth of what the company said the plant was built to remove. In mid 2025, the company began laying off a minimum of 10% of its ~500 staff. For a firm that raised over $800 million in equity and subsidies, hailed as a pioneer of direct air capture, the numbers are sobering. But they are not surprising. They are merely the inevitable result of colliding hopeful techno-optimism with the brutal constraints of physics, economics, and scale.
Barnard then revisits the hyperbole that surrounds so many government-enabled projects.
DAC has always promised a seductive narrative: the ability to suck carbon out of the sky, store it underground, and buy ourselves a climate mulligan. It promised to clean up after fossil fuels without requiring too many lifestyle changes. It was a technology that said yes — to oil companies, to airlines, to governments slow-walking their emissions policies….
https://www.masterresource.org/carbon-capture-and-storage-ccs/dac-death-corporate-theater-green-ribbon/
