Can carbon removal become a trillion-dollar business?

“TODAY WE SEE the birth of a new species,” declared Julio Friedmann, gazing across the bleak landscape. Along with several hundred grandees, the energy technologist had travelled to Notrees, a remote corner of the Texas oil patch, in late April. He was invited by 1PointFive, an arm of Occidental Petroleum, an American oil firm, and of Carbon Engineering, a Canadian startup backed by Bill Gates. The species in question is in some ways akin to a tree—but not the botanical sort, nowhere to be seen on the barren terrain. Rather, it is an arboreal artifice: the world’s first commercial-scale “direct air capture” (DAC) plant.

Like a tree, DAC sucks carbon dioxide from the air, concentrates it and makes it available for some use. In the natural case, that use is creating organic molecules through photosynthesis. For DAC, it can be things for which humans already use CO₂, like adding fizz to drinks, spurring plant growth in greenhouses or, in Occidental’s case, injecting it into oilfields to squeeze more drops of crude from the deposits.