For the bargain price of $130 billion per year, the US can achieve the President’s carbon removal target with currently available technology. The question is where should this technology be deployed for maximum effect and economy? The US is not the largest carbon emitting nation, and our carbon emissions have declined. Further, we all live in the same atmosphere. Reducing carbon emissions in the US won’t matter globally if other nations, notably China and India, continue to increase their carbon emissions.
Rather than lower our GDP (by spending money that would have to be borrowed from overseas or funded by taxpayers) to achieve little or no benefit to US air quality, perhaps our government should sell or license the technology to China and India. This would be a win-win solution. It would remove carbon emissions at the source, and it would also reduce our trade deficit.
Biden’s carbon removal target would cost $130B/year with today’s tech – DOE lab EXTRA
Tuesday, December 12, 2023 2:05 PM CT
By Siri Hedreen
Commodity Insights
The US government has the technology it needs to vacuum 1 billion metric tons of CO2 from the atmosphere each year, but the annual price will be $130 billion, according to a Dec. 11 report.
The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory concluded the effort would involve a dramatic scale-up of a variety of carbon removal strategies, including those that use naturally occurring processes, like photosynthesis, as well as engineering to pull CO2 from the air.
The 351-page analysis comes after the Biden administration set a goal in 2022 to scale carbon removal in the US to one gigaton, or 1 billion metric tons, of CO2 annually by midcentury. The target is part of a broader strategy, alongside emissions reduction measures such as renewable energy deployment, to fully decarbonize the US economy by 2050.
While the lab concluded that target was achievable with existing technologies, the report estimated that the effort would cost the equivalent of 0.5% of current US GDP.
“This report shows that to achieve the billion-ton scale of carbon dioxide removal needed by 2050 to achieve net-zero goals, the United States must use all removal methods available — oceans, forests, cropland soils, biomass and minerals and chemicals through direct air capture — to make it happen,” Jennifer Wilcox, the US Energy Department’s principal deputy assistant secretary for fossil energy and carbon management, said in a Dec. 11 statement.
By scaling up carbon removal activities, the US would also create about 440,000 jobs, the DOE lab said in its report.
The DOE is trying to lower the cost of “durable” carbon removal, in which the CO2 is stored for long periods of time, to less than $100 per metric ton of CO2 by the 2030s. In August, the DOE awarded $1.2 billion in funding from the bipartisan infrastructure law of 2021 for the commercial deployment of direct air capture, a technology that removes CO2 from ambient air. Once captured, the CO2 can be stored permanently underground.
The report placed the cost of direct air capture, based on current technology and constraints, between $200 and $250 per metric ton. Another form of durable removal that involves producing biomass and capturing and burying its emissions could be scaled to a net cost of less than $100 per metric ton, the report said.
Other carbon removal strategies, such as reforestation or soil management, are already being deployed cheaply and at a much wider scale than direct air capture. However, such strategies require greater land use, and eventually that CO2 is released back into the atmosphere.
“The land management options represent a prime opportunity for near-term, soil-based CO2 removal while we invest in some of the long-term, technology-driven [carbon dioxide removal] solutions,” Allegra Mayer, a Lawrence Livermore scientist and co-author of the report, said in a statement.
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