Andy Jassy, CEO, Amazon
CNBC
After a recent infusion of presidency money into technology that sucks carbon out of the air, big business is getting in as well.
Amazon announced Tuesday that it’ll help fund the world’s largest deployment of direct air capture (DAC) technology by purchasing 1 / 4 of one million metric tons of carbon removal over the following decade from STRATOS, the primary DAC plant from 1PointFive, a carbon removal technology company. Amazon didn’t disclose the dollar value of the investment.
The carbon that’s removed through the air capture systems will then be stored underground in saline aquifers, that are large rock formations saturated in salt water.
1 / 4 of one million metric tons of carbon dioxide is akin to the emissions in one 12 months from 55,633 gasoline-powered cars, in response to the EPA.
Amazon, through its Climate Pledge Fund, can be investing in CarbonCapture Inc., a climate tech firm that helps to speed up industrial deployment of latest DAC materials to soak up carbon.
“With these two latest investments in direct air capture, we aim to focus on emissions we won’t otherwise eliminate at their source,” Kara Hurst, Amazon’s VP of worldwide sustainability, said in a release. “We’re also helping launch technologies we all know the world might want to avoid the worst effects of world climate change — supporting those technologies’ growth so that they’ll even be available to other firms and organizations.”
Amazon is attempting to decarbonize its global operations through wind and solar renewable energy projects, delivery fleet electrification and reduction in the burden packing per shipment.
Amazon’s announcement comes on the heels of Microsoft‘s news that it has agreed to purchase carbon credits from California-based startup Heirloom Carbon, which uses limestone to remove carbon from the atmosphere. The credits will remove as much as 315,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide over the following decade. That will amount to no less than $200 million based on market prices. The carbon offsets are equivalent of the annual emissions of roughly 70,000 gas-powered cars.
Heirloom’s DAC Hub was recently chosen by the U.S. Department of Energy for as much as $600 million in matching funding from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.
“As an investor in and customer of Heirloom, we consider that Heirloom’s technical approach and plan are designed for rapid iteration to assist drive down the price of large-scale Direct Air Capture on the urgent pace needed to fulfill the goals of the Paris Agreement,” Brian Marrs, Microsoft’s senior director of energy and carbon, said in a release.
While these are a number of the largest financial commitments to DAC, scientists say that worldwide, it’s obligatory to remove about 1 trillion tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere in this century in order to maintain global warming below the 1.5 degrees Celsius-limit set by the Paris Agreement, in response to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
“Solving big problems requires innovation and invention of latest technologies that do not exist yet, and it is important that we use all of the tools available to us to make the best impact,” Hurst said.