In humanity’s urgent quest to arrest global heating, achieving net-zero emissions of carbon dioxide may no longer, on its own, be enough. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the temperature targets set in the Paris climate accord of 2015 are unlikely to be reached without the widespread application of carbon capture and storage (CCS) as well.
While carbon removal (and offsetting) is already a familiar idea through afforestation, with newly planted trees storing carbon, there has also been research into filtering carbon directly out of the air through chemical processes. So far, these processes have proved prohibitively expensive, though recently, in the U.S., United Airlines announced a multimillion-dollar investment in 1PointFive, a company that is licensing direct air capture technology from the startup Carbon Engineering. A single air capture facility could potentially suck in as much carbon as 40 million trees. The carbon would then be stored underground by oil giant Occidental Petroleum, the major partner behind 1PointFive.
A more widespread and fully developed method than direct air capture is to retrieve carbon from power stations as soon as it is burned, followed either by storage underground or by using the carbon to enhance oil and gas recovery. It is far easier (and about 10 times cheaper) to filter out carbon at a power source than it is to capture it directly from the air.
Nevertheless, some environmentalists oppose carbon capture precisely because, they believe, it assists the heavy-emission industries it is designed to make less dangerous.
