A flood of additional financing became available for carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS) when President Biden signed the $1.2 trillion bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act on 15 November. The Department of Energy, which had requested $531 million for CCUS in its budget for the current fiscal year, suddenly finds itself charged with administering more than $10 billion over five years for demonstration projects and R&D for those programs. Of that amount, $3.5 billion is allotted to support technologies for extracting and storing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, an activity for which the administration last year had requested all of $66 million.
The appropriations, much of which are available immediately, include $3.5 billion for direct air capture (DAC), a fledgling technology that many experts say will be needed on the gigaton scale. And even after fossil fuels have been nearly extinguished, CO2 removal from the atmosphere will still...
