--- title: "United States Opens First Facility to Suck CO2 Out of the Air" description: "For the first time, a commercial facility that can suck carbon out of the air and store it underground has opened in the United States. " date: "2023-11-15" modified: "2023-11-15" authors: - name: "Noor Al-Sibai" job_title: "Senior Staff Writer" link: "https://futurism.com/authors/nooralsibai" url: "https://futurism.com/the-byte/us-direct-air-capture-facility" categories: - "Energy" - "Renewable Energy" - "Science & Energy" tags: - "carbon" - "Carbon Capture" - "direct air capture" - "the digest" --- # United States Opens First Facility to Suck CO2 Out of the Air ![For the first time, a commercial facility that can suck carbon out of the air and store it underground has opened in the United States. ]() *\Image: Getty / Futurism\* ## Self-Storage For the first time, a commercial facility that can suck carbon out of the air and store it underground has opened in the United States. In a [press release](), the team behind Heirloom Carbon Technologies said their newly opened direct air capture (DAC) facility near San Francisco will be able to siphon CO2 out of the atmosphere and store it securely underground in concrete for paying customers. Though dozens of carbon capture and storage (CCS) facilities have been [operational around the world]() for [more than a decade](), the majority of CCS plants are involved in capturing and storing new emissions made by other pollutive processes like coal mining, leading to the so-called "clean coal" technology that [experts]() and [activists argue]() is anything but. Direct air capture, meanwhile, sucks out ambient carbon from the air [without any other industrial process alongside it](). In the case of Heirloom, it's stored in what the company insists are secure concrete repositories underground. As the [*New York Times* acknowledges]() in its reporting on the new plant, Heirloom's first facility in Tracy, California is pretty small and only able to capture 1,000 tons of CO2 from the air per year — though as CEO and co-founder Shashank Samala points out in the press release, that number "has gone from \[one\] kilogram of CO2 to up to one million, or 1000 metric tons, in just over two years." "We want to get to millions of tons per year," Samala told the *NYT*. "That means copying and pasting this basic design over and over." ## Credit is Due California Governor Gavin Newsom and Jennifer M. Granholm, the head of the Biden Administration's Department of Energy, ventured to the Golden State's Central Valley during the Heirloom plant's unveiling last week to laud it as a "blueprint" for the current White House's plans to reduce American carbon emissions. Perhaps the biggest value proposition for companies like Heirloom — and its [well-heeled backers](), which includes the likes of Microsoft and Shopify — is that it will sell "carbon removal credits" to companies looking to offset their own emissions, a higher-tech iteration of [popular reforestation campaigns]() in which companies vow to plant a bunch of trees as an offset for their pollution without actually reducing it. While it's definitively good that companies like Heirloom are [being built all over the planet]() in efforts to reduce CO2 emissions, critics argue that those in the business of selling carbon credits are giving businesses a "[license to pollute]()" with a clean conscious because they are, after all, offsetting their emissions by paying someone else to suck it out of the air. At the end of the day, direct air capture still seems like a step ahead of the now-traditional carbon capture schemes — though if companies and governments want to get serious about reducing their emissions, they [need to just do it already](). **More on CO2:** [*Here's What It Would Look Like if Carbon Emissions Were Visible*]() ## Author At Futurism, I've often been drawn to unpacking the narratives that underlie technological, scientific and medical progress, with a special interest in areas of conflict and ambiguity that end up setting agendas and steering the fates of both elites and the hoi polloi. I'm a committed generalist, but I often find myself returning to work involving NASA and the private space sector, the effects of AI on media and society, and the mechanics of the pharmaceutical industry, with a specific focus on the spread of GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy. Prior to Futurism, I worked for publications ranging from Media Matters and Truthdig to Raw Story and Bustle. I'm also the author of "Myspace Scene Queens," a 2024 title in Instar Books' acclaimed "Remember the Internet" series. My work at Futurism has been cited by outlets including the New Yorker, Slate, Nieman Lab, the Verge, the MIT Technology Review, the Sunday Times, and the Daily Beast. I grew up in North Carolina, attended the University of North Carolina at Asheville, and now live in Brooklyn, New York. In my free time, I'm an avid reader and music fan; you can probably find me at a local poetry reading, concert, underground rave, or DJ set. I'm the proud parent of an ineffable orange cat named Mee-Mow. ### Author social links [Bluesky]()