Direct air capture has arrived at the community buy-in hurdle
The nascent industry is starting to build at scale. How it approaches community engagement could make or break deployment.
Image credit: Heirloom (rendering) / Lisa Martine Jenkins
Image credit: Heirloom (rendering) / Lisa Martine Jenkins
Carbon dioxide removal has ground to make up.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change laid out a goal of up to 10 gigatons of removal per year by 2050; today, the industry is averaging two, primarily from conventional methods like planting trees. For the vast majority of novel CDR services today, companies are far off the Biden administration’s goal of $100 per ton.
But slow progress is progress nonetheless. Direct air capture in particular has been buoyed by investments from big name corporations as well as federal funding, and those investments appear to be beginning to pay off. The number of operational DAC plants in the U.S. is expected to triple in the next six years, outstripping the total number of plants in other parts of the world.
As DAC companies finally emerge from the lab, they are coming into contact with local communities for the first time — and with the reality that the leading cause of climate project delays and cancellations is community opposition. The industry certainly has strong headwinds in getting these projects built, especially given that they are first-of-a-kind.
But in some respects the industry’s nascency could also be a bonus. New strategies and approaches aren’t starting entirely from scratch, but rather with the benefit of hindsight as to where wind and solar, for example, erred.
There are a few “basic best practices” that should be implemented for all infrastructure projects, said Hadia Sheerazi, a manager in RMI’s climate-aligned industries program: engagement should be early and often; benefits should be responsive to communities; and projects should, most foundationally, obtain consent. Sheerazi's team has been researching best practices and learnings from recent clean energy and infrastructure projects to help scale similar practices across the U.S.
Certain companies have had community engagement success even for a huge project. Despite concerns about the viability of offshore wind, one 924-megawatt project off the coast of Long Island agreed to invest nearly $170 million over 25 years in community benefits; public hearings numbered in the double digits, and community meetings in the hundreds. The project opened earlier this year.
These elements of engagement may seem a tall order for project developers, Sheerazi acknowledged, but the cost of not doing it is high: delays and even cancellations.
And for CDR, community engagement may be even more important than for other technologies. As Sifang Chen, managing science and innovation advisor at Carbon180 put it, “the benefits [of CDR] are socialized, but any potential harm could be localized.”
The big questions
Like all FOAK projects, many DAC facilities being built today face challenges related to building trust and proving safety.
According to Alayna Chuney, deputy director of environmental justice at Carbon180, public health is one key area of concern for many communities, particularly around where removed carbon dioxide will be stored and how it will be transported.
“Because CDR is so new, and it’s one of those things where research and development has been done in a way that it actually hasn’t been tested in the public, there are unknowns,” she told Latitude Media.
Many communities selected for DAC sites are still dealing with health and safety fallouts from the oil and gas industry, she added. Now they’re being asked to trust companies to bring a new technology into their backyards — largely without clarity about health impacts, and who communities can hold accountable if something goes wrong.
“Those are all questions that have not been answered, and I don’t know if it’s because there’s a lack of an adequate answer, or if companies are still trying to do their due diligence to make sure that when they do come with the answers, they're correct,” Chuney said.
Gary Dirks, who leads an Arizona State University initiative focused on climate technologies including carbon removal, said the communities surrounding the Southwest Regional DAC Hub, which received more than $11 million in funding from the Department of Energy for engineering and design, have been deeply impacted by the closing of coal plants that were major employers.
“Leadership in these communities have more or less accepted that, unless something really unexpected happens, by 2035 these coal plants will have closed,” said Dirks. “They are already thinking about what the future looks like and about what kind of new investment could come there.”
There isn’t a strong distinction at a local level between CDR and industries like wind and solar, he added. “They see it as all kind of a package of new technologies and new industries coming to their area and the questions that they have are all more or less the same,” he said. That includes questions like how many jobs a project will create, the surface footprints of those projects, and how much water a project will consume.
Mike Eisenfeld, who leads the energy and climate program at the San Juan Citizens Alliance, said local communities have a dearth of information about any of the carbon removal projects planned for the region, including both the Southwest DAC Hub and also the Four Corners Carbon Storage Hub, which received more than $41 million from DOE’s Carbon Storage, Assurance Facility Enterprise initiative.
“It’s too early to weigh in on things [like the DAC hub] because we don’t have the information,” Eisenfeld said.
That said, CDR projects aren’t necessarily what the communities want, regardless of how much information they ultimately get.
“We are of the opinion that renewables are a way better investment, because they can be permitted, they can come online, they’re investable, and they don’t require major grants,” Eisenfeld said.
“I understand it’s IRA funding and they’ve got to invest in this stuff, and DOE is telling me their carbon capture and sequestration program is moving in great directions,” he added. But he’s worried about the lack of any kind of contingency plan in case promised projects that hinge on unproven technologies fall through.
“The Four Corners area was identified as a national energy sacrifice zone in the seventies by President Nixon’s Project Independence,” he said. “Some of these things would just perpetuate that, and it’s grossly unfair from an environmental justice perspective to just keep dumping these projects on us.”
As for how to get community organizations like San Juan Citizens Alliance on board, in light of this context?
“Provide us the details,” Eisenfeld said. “And we’ll get back to you.”
Individual approaches
For the CDR industry, deploying first of a kind projects like the DAC hubs is a bit of a “chicken and egg situation,” explained Giana Amador, who leads the Carbon Removal Alliance.
“We have really good information that these projects are safe,” she said. ”But that science is very difficult for folks to wade into, and we don’t yet have a physical example that we can point to of what a safe carbon removal project looks like.”
That’s partly why responses like Eisenfeld’s are both common and reasonable, she added: “One of the sentiments that we’ve heard from communities is that they don’t want to be guinea pigs for new technologies.”
DOE has attempted to mitigate this inherent challenge by requiring projects that apply for federal funding coming from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act to submit community benefit plans.
San Francisco-based Heirloom, opened the country’s first DAC plant last year in Tracy, California, and is also involved in the Project Cypress DAC hub in Louisiana. The company’s head of climate policy Vikrum Aiyer said Heirloom is approaching those two projects very differently.
“We have found that doing community engagement needs to be bespoke,” Aiyer said. On top of that though, the company’s approach is evolving as the company itself grows.
Heirloom’s Tracy plant was developed before the startup had dedicated community engagement leads, Aiyer explained. Community engagement for that project started with city planners, city attorneys, and local labor unions, he said; then, they began engagement with conservation groups, local chambers of commerce, and environmental justice organizations.
The reverse was true in Louisiana. Even before Heirloom had secured the hub award from DOE, the company embedded in the adjacent communities trying to “assess the mood.” That included conducting focus groups, meeting with parish administrators and mayors, workforce development groups, and local community colleges, Aiyer said — all before being sure of funding.
The requirement that federally funded projects like Cypress submit community benefit plans with their funding applications has created “a really interesting fiber within the DNA of carbon removal startups,” he added. “That fiber has very much set a decree across the entire industry.”
And it’s not just startups that are learning how to engage with communities from square one.
Climeworks, one of the first DAC companies to hit the market in 2009 and is a partner to Heirloom on Project Cypress, has more development experience under its belt than most. But their first few facilities in Iceland haven’t really run into community engagement issues due to their rural locations, said Lesley Matthews, a senior stakeholder engagement manager at Climeworks.
“I consider us coming to the U.S. and taking advantage of DOE funding as the first foray into real stakeholder engagement,” Matthews said.
The company’s major lesson so far from engaging with communities for the Cypress project in Louisiana, she added, is that companies aren’t just pitching a specific DAC facility, but rather carbon management more broadly. That involves doing education on clean energy, carbon dioxide pipelines and storage, and importantly, the distinction between carbon capture and carbon removal.
Falling short
In some cases, even the community benefit plan requirement hasn’t been enough to guarantee a project a smooth start.
In Wyoming, where DAC company CarbonCapture had originally planned to build a 5-million -ton DAC hub called Project Bison, the company aimed to develop a robust community engagement program that could be replicated across the state by other developers.
That included creating a community council that met monthly to discuss the project; paid, listening-post functions filled by community members who gave input on everything from timelines to providers, said Patricia Loria, CarbonCapture’s VP of business development. (That’s an approach also taken by Project Cypress.) It also included designing a program in coordination with the local community college focused on DAC and the surrounding ecosystem.
Those efforts, Loria added, started before the company had chosen a specific location or a sequestration partner. Despite them, however, CarbonCapture announced in August that it had paused development on Project Bison, and would be relocating it out of state — not due to community pushback per se, but because of “growing competition for clean power” in the region.
Meanwhile, 1PointFive, a subsidiary of Occidental Petroleum, has run into community opposition in the development of the DOE-backed South Texas DAC Hub, in part because of the company’s association with the fossil fuel industry.
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Chuney, at Carbon180, said some of the problems projects are facing stem from the fact that there’s no real requirement as to what to put in a community benefit plan, and that sites are often selected before community work has started.
“The funding is already out there, the projects have been deployed,” she said. However, “it’s never too late to do environmental justice in a project.” In the case of several of the federally funded projects that are already underway, she added, it would have been nice for the startups to do a thorough review of key questions before finalizing a location choice: things like “how can we address some of the past harms?” and “what systems need to be in place to make sure the community is benefiting?”
“But that didn’t happen,” she said, “so now, how do we move forward? At this point you can still do those types of justice, and I think that is what community engagement is missing right now.”
For its part, Carbon180 is answering federal funding with funding of its own, via a regranting program, which funds environmental justice organizations that want to learn more about carbon removal. One organization, from the first cohort of that program, is based in Louisiana, near Project Cypress.
“They are trying to figure out as much information as they can, and they are still unsure,” Chuney explained. “They’re saying, ‘we still don’t support direct air capture because we don’t know enough about it.’”
Moving forward, Carbon180 is pushing for an extended timeline for project merit reviews, in order to give communities more of an opportunity to learn about a project before they have to weigh in. The goal is “two-way conversations,” Chuney said, rather than the “road show” showcasing emissions reduction work that DOE has peddled around the country, which she characterized as “a bunch of listening sessions for the communities, without giving them an opportunity to ask questions or show up in a way that was comfortable to them.”
As to what happens when, despite best efforts at community engagement, communities ultimately reject a project, RMI’s Sheerazi said it’s important for the CDR industry as a whole that developers “respectfully withdraw.”
“It’s part of building trust for the broader industry,” she added. “The thing is, communities have long memories.”
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