MOSCOW (MRC) -- US President Joe Biden's administration on Friday set a goal for driving down the cost of removing CO2 from the atmosphere, as part of a US plan to decarbonize the economy by 2050, reported Reuters.
The Department of Energy's Carbon Negative Earthshot seeks to slash the cost of carbon removal to USD100 a ton by the end of the decade, either through Direct Air Capture (DAC) or helping forests and other natural systems capture and store the gas.
It is the department's third "Earthshot", meant to help achieve Biden's climate goals, by driving innovations in the toughest technologies to crack. The first two set goals on lowering costs of green hydrogen and long-term utility scale battery storage of energy from renewables.
"We have already poisoned the atmosphere, we have to repair and heal the Earth and the only way to do that is to remove carbon dioxide permanently," Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said while introducing the initiative at the COP26 U.N. climate talks in Glasgow, Scotland.
Fatih Birol, head of the Paris-based International Energy Agency, praised the initiative as an example of how governments can help push down technology costs that energy markets cannot do alone. "We need governments to push the magic button of innovation," he said.
Jennifer Wilcox, head of the DOE's office of fossil energy and carbon management, said using natural systems to remove carbon must surpass hurdles, such as making sure forest fires or future farming do not simply return carbon back to the atmosphere. "Part of this work will be defining what metrics (are) in order to monitor and verify storage on a long term scale" for nature-based approaches, Wilcox said.
The carbon negative initiative will be funded through the Energy Department's annual appropriations. In addition, the bipartisan infrastructure bill has about USD3.5 B in incentives for DAC demonstration projects. That bill has already passed the US Senate and that the House of Representatives could vote on it as soon as Friday.
As MRC informed previously, in October 2021, ExxonMobil initiated the process for engineering, procurement and construction contracts as part of its plans to expand carbon capture and storage (CCS) at its LaBarge, Wyoming facility, which has already captured more CO2 than any other facility in the world. The expansion project will capture up to 1 MM metric tons of CO2, in addition to the 6-7 MM metric tons already captured at LaBarge each year.
We remind that ExxonMobil plans to build its first, large-scale plastic waste advanced recycling facility in Baytown, Texas, and is expected to start operations by year-end 2022. The new facility follows validation of ExxonMobil’s initial trial of its proprietary process for converting plastic waste into raw materials. To date, the trial has successfully recycled more than 1,000 metric tons of plastic waste, the equivalent of 200 million grocery bags, and has demonstrated the capability of processing 50 metric tons per day.
According to MRC's ScanPlast report, Russia's estimated PE consumption totalled 1,868,160 tonnes in the first nine months of 2021, up by 18% year on year. Shipments of all grades of ethylene polymers increased. At the same time, PP shipments to the Russian market were 1,138,510 tonnes in January-September 2021, up by 30% year on year. Supply of propylene homopolymer (homopolymer PP) and block-copolymers of propylene (PP block copolymers) increased, whereas supply of injection moulding statistical copolymers of propylene (PP random copolymers) decreased significantly.
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