The high cost of vacuuming carbon from the sky

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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**Megan McCarty-Corino** (1:04)
The climate project the Trump administration supports. From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Megan McCarty-Corino.
Mitigating climate change likely requires not only lowering emissions, but removing existing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. And while the Trump administration has cut many climate initiatives, it's continued to fund some carbon removal projects. Marketplace's Amy Scott reports.

**Amy Scott** (1:41)
In a warehouse in Brisbane, California, just south of San Francisco, Christian Toya demonstrates a carbon removal process called direct air capture. He's director of policy at Heirloom Carbon Technologies, which aims to remove a billion tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere within the next decade using limestone.

**Christian Toya** (2:03)
Behind you actually is a demo kiln. That's where the ringing of the limestone material happens.

**Amy Scott** (2:09)
They use the kiln to heat up crushed limestone, which separates it into carbon dioxide and calcium oxide powder.
The carbon dioxide is removed and permanently stored in concrete or underground. The powder is then used to capture more CO2, soaking it up from the air like a sponge and turning back into limestone.

**Christian Toya** (2:32)
Once that's done, we take that same limestone, put it right back into the kiln, wring it out like a washcloth for the CO2, and put it right back into the facility, and that loops continuously.

**Amy Scott** (2:41)
So far, Heirloom has been operating on a pretty small scale. Its first direct air capture facility in Tracy, California, has the capacity to remove 1,000 tons of carbon dioxide a year. But it's costly. Right now, it's in the high hundreds of dollars to capture one ton of CO2.
Toya says the industry needs to get that down to $100 a ton to make the economics work.

**Christian Toya** (3:07)
This needs to be cheap to matter. Otherwise, it'll just continue to be a science experiment.

**Amy Scott** (3:12)
The company plans to open a much larger project in Louisiana with the capacity to remove up to 200,000 tons initially. But when we visited, the timeline was up in the air.

**Megan McCarty-Corino** (3:25)
We'll be right back.

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**Megan McCarty-Corino** (5:02)
You're listening to Marketplace Tech. I'm Megan McCarty-Corino. We're back with Marketplace's Amy Scott.

**Amy Scott** (5:08)
Erin Burns is executive director of Carbon 180, a nonprofit that advocates for large-scale carbon removal.
She says the Trump administration rescinded Biden-era funding for several direct air capture projects. But Congress has protected the planned hub in Louisiana and another one in Texas, backed by Occidental Petroleum.