Feds Spending $1.2 Billion To Remove CO2 From The Air

This week’s Current Climate, which every Saturday brings you the latest news about the business of sustainability. Sign up to get it in your inbox every week.

Contents

The Big Read Discoveries And Innovations The Big Transportation Story Sustainability Deals Of The Week What Else We’re Reading This Week

On Friday, the Department of Energy announced that it was spending up to $1.2 billion to accelerate the development of two direct air capture hubs, one in Texas and one in Louisiana. These facilities actually capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere directly, where it can then either be sequestered or used as chemical feedstock to manufacture other products such as concrete. The two hubs, once completed, are expected to remove over 2 million metric tons of carbon dioxide every year.

The Texas project, called the “South Texas DAC Hub” will be built by Occidental subsidiary 1PointFive in collaboration with Worley and Carbon Engineering. In Louisiana, “Project Cypress” will be built by Battelle along with its partners Climeworks Corporation and Heirloom Carbon Technologies (which was cofounded by Forbes 30 Under 30 alum Noah McQueen.) The $1.2 billion being invested in these projects is a little under half of what was allotted to the DOE by the Inflation Reduction Act, and the agency says it expects to award the remainder to other to be announced air capture projects in 2024.

Read more about these projects in this story from our colleague Irene Benedicto.

The Big Read

Iron And Rust Could Be The Secret To Storing Clean Power For Days

Form Energy, led by a former Tesla executive and backed by Bill Gates’s Breakthrough Energy Ventures, sees iron and rust as a low-cost solution to storing surplus energy from renewable energy generation for several days so it can be deployed as needed. That’s far longer than the 4-6 hours that lithium-ion storage can provide for a fraction of the cost. The company is building its first factory in West Virginia and aims to start delivering products in 2025.

Discoveries And Innovations

New research finds that Antarctica is facing an uncertain future on oceanic, atmospheric, and ecological levels as climate change causes bouts of extreme weather on the southernmost continent.

After a summer of many U.S. cities breaking their heat record, the Biden administration is creating a new federal system to track heat-related illness nationwide,

NOAA has raised the likelihood of an above-average Atlantic hurricane season from 30% to 60% due to warming ocean temperatures and the ongoing El Niño weather pattern increasing the odds of strong storms.

The Big Transportation Story

Waymo And Cruise Get Permits For Full-Day Robotaxi For Money In SF, LA, Silicon Valley

Robotaxi developers Waymo and Cruise claim their technology can improve traffic safety and help reduce carbon and tailpipe pollution as they intend to deploy fleets of battery-powered rideshare vehicles. They now have a chance to make good on those promises as a California regulator has given a greenlight to both companies to expand operations in the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles after a contentious public hearing this week.

Sustainability Deals Of The Week

Solar Production: Solar power manufacturer Maxeon announced that it will be building a new manufacturing facility in New Mexico, backed by an over $1 billion investment. The company expects to break ground in 2024 and begin manufacturing in 2025.

Microplastics: U.K.-based startup Matter, which aims to develop solutions for capturing and recycling microplastics, announced it has raised a $10 million series A round led by S2G Ventures.

Fusion Lasers: Colorado State University announced it’s partnering with Marvel Fusion to build a $150 million facility geared towards research and development of high-powered lasers that could be used for nuclear fusion.

Biomaterials: Nature Coatings, which aims to take waste products and sustainably turn them into useful chemical products, announced it has raised a $2.5 million seed round led by Regnerational.VC and The 22 Fund.