President Joe Biden’s administration is planning to spend $1.2 billion in order to vacuum carbon dioxide out of the air.
The United States Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm announced Friday that her agency would be funding two projects to deploy technology known as “direct air capture.”
Granholm, on Thursday, told reporters that these “projects are going to help us prove out the potential of these next-generation technologies so that we can add them to our climate crisis fighting arsenal.”
She described the projects as “giant vacuums that can suck decades of old carbon pollution straight out of the sky.”
The projects were approved in Biden’s $1 trillion infrastructure plan for 2021. Total funds that were allocated to the four commercial-scale air capture plants amount to $3.5 billion.
The plants will vacuum the carbon out of the air in order to provide “environmental benefits for diverse applications across multiple sectors of the economy.”
In addition to removing the fossil fuels from the air, the plants are to be used as a way to develop “a robust clean hydrogen supply chain and workforce by prioritizing clean hydrogen demonstration projects in major shale gas regions” with “regional clean hydrogen hubs.”
It will essentially be a process where hydrogen pulled from carbon dioxide will be used to fuel hydrogen energy plants.
According to The Welding Institute Global (TWIG), the use of clean hydrogen energy, otherwise known as “Green hydrogen” is a “high cost option, which only accounts for around 5% of total [hydrogen energy] production” as of today.
TWIG also states that to “produce a secure, resilient and decarbonized energy system, production and bulk storage,” hydrogen will play a key role “in balancing intermittent supply of energy from renewable energy sources with end-user demands.”
The infrastructure plan says that the goal of “commercialize[ing] the use of clean hydrogen” will be introduced in the “transportation, utility, industrial, commercial, and residential sectors.”
The goal for the project is to be done and to “demonstrate a standard of clean hydrogen production” by 2040.
Similar projects to increase hydrogen energy have also been part of the World Economic Forum’s initiative to accelerate the use of clean hydrogen and “transition to a net-zero world by 2050.”