The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is allocating up to $1.2 billion to support development of two commercial-scale direct air capture (DAC) facilities in Texas and Louisiana, the first of this scale in the U.S. These projects are the initial selections from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law-funded Regional DAC Hubs program, designed to spur the formation of a nationwide network of large-scale carbon removal sites to address legacy carbon dioxide (CO₂) pollution and complement rapid emissions reductions.

These two projects are expected to remove more than 2 million metric tons of CO₂ emissions annually from the atmosphere, and will eventually remove more than 250 times more of the gas than the largest DAC facility currently operating:

• Project Cypress (Calcasieu Parish, Louisiana): Battelle, Climeworks Corporation and Heirloom Carbon Technologies, Inc., will collaborate in the capture more than 1 million metric tons of existing CO₂ from the atmosphere each year and store it permanently deep underground. This hub intends to rely on Gulf Coast Sequestration for offtake and geologic storage of captured atmospheric CO₂.
• South Texas DAC Hub (Kleberg County, Texas): Occidental subsidiary 1PointFive and partners Carbon Engineering Ltd. and Worley plan to develop and demonstrate a DAC facility designed to remove up to 1 million metric tons of CO₂ annually with an associated saline geologic CO₂ storage site.

The agency also announced 19 additional projects selected for award negotiations that will support earlier stages of DAC hub project development, including feasibility assessments and front-end engineering and design studies.