Renewable energy supply: a bottleneck for the direct air capture industry

Project Bison, the largest direct air capture (DAC) facility in the U.S., has been cancelled by CarbonCapture Inc. The removals start-up announced it would pause its planned Wyoming facility due to the inability to secure sufficient clean energy, with competition from other energy-intensive industries like data centres and cryptocurrency mining cited as a significant challenge. This decision has raised concerns about the viability of the DAC industry and its dependence on clean power. The project, developed with storage partner Frontier Carbon Solutions and supported by a USD 12.5 million investment from the US Department of Energy (DOE), aimed to remove 5 million tCO2e annually. The project had already sold more than 185,000 tonnes of CDR to buyers, including Microsoft and Amazon.

Introduction The urgency to mitigate climate change has pushed carbon removal technologies like Direct Air Capture with Carbon Storage (DACCS) into the spotlight. While these technologies hold immense potential for helping achieve net zero by 2050, there …