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GLASGOW — The U.S. Department of Energy will announce its largest effort to date to drastically reduce the cost of technologies that absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, recognizing that current strategies to reduce greenhouse gases may not be sufficient to prevent the worst effects. from climate change.

Speaking at the United Nations climate summit, energy secretary Jennifer Granholm planned to announce that her agency will invest in research in the emerging field of decarbonisation, with the goal of reducing costs to less than $100 per tonne by 2030. Well below this figure. price tag for many current technologiesstill in the early stages of development and can currently cost up to $2,000 per ton.

The ultimate goal is to identify techniques that could remove billions of tons of carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere and permanently store it in places that won’t heat the planet.

“By reducing costs and accelerating the removal of carbon dioxide, a crucial clean energy technology, we can remove massive amounts of carbon pollution directly from the air and combat the climate crisis,” Ms Granholm said in a statement.

The idea of ​​pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, once considered science fiction, has received increased attention In recent years. Hundreds of countries and companies have pledged to achieve “net zero” emissions by the middle of the century; Essentially, it has pledged to stop adding greenhouse gases to the air to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. This is the threshold that many scientists say is beyond the planet. will experience catastrophic effects The Planet has already warmed by about 1.1 degrees Celsius due to heat waves, drought, wildfires and flooding.

But reaching net zero may require two strategies. First, countries will have to deeply cut their emissions from oil, gas and coal burning in power plants, factories and cars and switch to cleaner energy sources. But they may also need to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to offset emissions from hard-to-clean sources like agriculture.

UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change it may ultimately have to increase it from 100 billion to a trillion tons this century Staying below 1.5 degrees is partly because countries are too slow to reduce their emissions.

Still, current techniques are hardly matched. A popular option is to plant trees that naturally absorb carbon from the air. But trees take years to mature, there is only so much land, and forests can burn in wildfires, releasing carbon back into the atmosphere.

More recently, a number of companies have been tinkering with technological solutions such as: direct air captureThis includes using giant fans to remove carbon dioxide from the air and bury it underground. (This different from carbon capture and storage, another new technique that traps carbon dioxide in the chimneys of power plants and factories before it enters the atmosphere.)

Climeworks, a Swiss start-up, recently opened Largest ever direct air capture facility in Iceland. But this first plant is only capable of removing 4,000 tons of carbon dioxide per year – equivalent to the emissions of 870 cars – and Climeworks’ current costs are around $600 to $800 per tonne, but it hopes to bring that price down over time. establishes more facilities and improves technology.

Other ideas are even more expensive. Stripe, a payment services company, voluntarily paid $9 million Over the past two years to various decarbonisation start-ups, including a company that grows carbon-absorbing algae and bury it deep in the ocean. But most of these techniques cost between $200 and $2,000 per tonne of carbon dioxide, and it’s unclear how well they work.

As part of its new effort, the Department of Energy plans to engage scientists in its national laboratories to explore different approaches and fund demonstration projects so engineers can figure out how they can cut costs. The agency will also develop standards to assess whether decarbonization techniques are working as advertised.

The program is modeled after the Obama era. Sunshot InitiativeIt has been credited with helping bring solar energy into the mainstream in the 2010s. The agency directed its research efforts to cut costs and worked with private companies to ease the barriers to deployment.

The announcement is part of the Biden administration Energy Earthshots InitiativeIt aims to accelerate the deployment of emerging technologies to combat climate change. Earlier this year, the department announced similar efforts to cut costs for both. clean hydrogen fuels and advanced batteries can stop wind and solar energy.

Jennifer Wilcox, the agency’s deputy secretary general for the Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management, said in an interview that investments in decarbonisation should not be seen as an excuse for countries and businesses to mitigate their efforts to reduce fossil resources. fuel emissions, especially as there is no guarantee that decarbonisation will be feasible on a large scale.

Dr. “Decarbonisation will never replace the need to rapidly cut our emissions,” Wilcox said. “But scientists say that if we want to avoid the worst effects of climate change, we’ll probably need to remove billions of tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by 2050. And if we don’t start investing in solutions today, we won’t get there until mid-century.”

Dr. Wilcox added that the agency does not plan to opt for any proprietary technology early on. Instead, officials will examine a wide variety of approaches to see which seem the most promising. This may involve direct air capture, but may include, for example, testing how certain minerals can absorb carbon dioxide when crushed and sprinkled over large surfaces, a process known as enhanced weathering.

Dr. Wilcox also noted that some natural techniques for carbon removal, such as planting trees or farming methods that trap carbon dioxide in the soil, are often advertised today at much less than $100 per tonne. But researchers still need to find out how reliable these techniques are and whether carbon can be stored for long periods of time.

“Part of that effort is being able to show the true price tag of these approaches when you add in the costs of verification and long-term monitoring,” he said.

The Energy Department may soon have huge sums of money for this effort. President Biden he offered hundreds of millions of dollars in its budget for various decarbonisation and storage techniques. And the bipartisan infrastructure bill currently pending in Congress provides $3.5 billion to create four direct air capture “centres” across the country where new technologies can be demonstrated.

“It’s amazing how quickly this has become mainstream,” said Erin Burns, executive director of Carbon180, a nonprofit focused on carbon removal. “Just a few years ago, almost no one was talking about decarbonisation. Now it has broad bipartisan support.”

Ms. Burns said the Department of Energy’s goal of costing less than $100 per tonne by 2030 is an ambitious but reasonable target. At this price, decarbonization can be achieved with both government incentives and increasing number of companies companies trying to wipe out their emissions as part of their net zero commitment.

Decarbonization has its critics. Some climate activists worried that companies can rely on the vague promise of such technologies in the future to avoid the tough job of reducing emissions today. In addition, a number of oil companies defended the idea as a way to offset the emissions from pumping out more crude oil.

Still, other environmentalists say the world needs to explore as many options as possible to limit the growing damage from climate change.

“This shouldn’t stop us from working on reducing emissions, I agree,” said Jake Higdon, director of U.S. climate policy at the Environmental Defense Fund. But if there are safe, responsible and cost-effective ways to remove carbon, then we need to solve it as quickly as possible.”