Heirloom, a company, claims to be the first and only commercial factory in the United States to lock away planet-warming gas CO2 from the sky.
A commercial plant in the United States is locking away the planet-warming gas, carbon dioxide, by directly catching it from the sky.
Heirloom, a startup, debuted its “direct air capture” facility on Thursday in Tracy, California. According to the firm, it has completed around 1,000 hours of operation to date. Heirloom’s method pulls CO2 out of the atmosphere using limestone. The captured carbon is then injected into concrete using a revolutionary technique, where it is supposedly retained indefinitely.
The CEO and co-founder of Heirloom, Shashank Samala, declared in a statement prior to Thursday’s launch event that the DAC facility “is the closest thing on Earth that we have to a time machine, because it can turn back the clock on climate change.” Numerous federal and state representatives were present at the ceremony, including California Governor Gavin Newsom (D) and U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm.
Indeed, Heirloom’s plant is not going to be able to undo the harm that has been done to the environment over decades of unrestrained usage of fossil fuels. Situated approximately 70 miles east of San Francisco, the outdoor storage facility has the capacity to hold 1,000 metric tons of CO2 annually, which is less than 0.1 percent of the emissions produced annually by a solitary gas-fired power station.
However, turning on the Central Valley facility is still a significant step forward for a developing subject that was largely restricted to research labs and people’s imaginations until very recently.
According to Giana Amador, executive director of the advocacy group Carbon Removal Alliance, “Heirloom’s project will mark the first operational deployment of DAC with storage in the U.S., which is representative of the field today: moving from research to demonstration and deployment across pathways.”
“We anticipate that this pattern will persist in all [carbon dioxide removal] technologies as the sector strives to grow at the pace required to fulfill global climate objectives,” the representative stated via email.
Heirloom, a three-year-old company that raised $53 million in Series A funding last year, is one of the few companies actively extracting and sequestering CO2 globally.
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