A facility that will pull carbon out of the air and deposit it underground believes new incentives will allow it to do so by the megaton at the end of the decade.
The Project Bison direct air carbon capture machinery is capable of storing 5 million tons of CO2 underground in specially approved wells in Wyoming, and the company believes it makes up the first realistic and scalable business model for carbon capture.
The development is marked by improvements on the ideas of two other flagship projects, the Climeworks’ carbon capture facility in Iceland, and Carbon Engineering’s first large-scale project in Texas, backed by a number of airline companies and Occidental Petroleum, which has a target of 1 million metric tons per year.
President Biden’s recent Inflation Reduction Act contains strong tax incentives to invest in direct air capture of CO2, such that companies like CarbonCapture managed to raise big money from investors for their Project Bison facility in Wyoming.
In particular, the tax write-off for a ton of carbon stored underground has been raised to $180 from $45.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have advised that large-scale removal of carbon from the atmosphere is needed to prevent the severe climate disruptions to society.
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Project Bison is slated to be fully-operational by 2023 in a state that has long been a stronghold for fossil fuel industries.
Governor Mark Gordon told Reuters he has plans to make Wyoming a center of these kinds of technologies that can reduce the impact of fossil fuels in the state.
“We’re really trying to get ourselves positioned to be the place of first choice for industry as they emerge with new climate technologies,” he said.
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OK, 2 things –
How much carbon is there i WY to collect? All the cow farts? HHHMMMMM…
So, we collect all this CO2 and dump it in wells underground. CO2 os quite active/reactive in so many ways. What’s this CO2 going to do underground? What future issues & harm is going to be done here? Ah, yes, we can let our grandkids deal with it!
Brillient.
CO2 is not static. It doesn’t hover over the place it is created. It moves into the atmosphere and around the planet. This is, understandably, a major sticking point for world agreements when some countries are doing everything they can to curtail it, and others simply continue to generate more. There are also massive amounts of it already stored underground in permafrost, which is why melting around the world is such a concern. But I love that this is in Wyoming, probably the last place many would expect to find a climate change project. It would seem people everywhere are concerned, coming together and trying to address the problem. It may not be a perfect solution, but at least we’re beginning somewhere.