Amazon is the latest tech giant to support filtering carbon dioxide from the air to combat climate change. The company is backing oil giant Occidental Petroleum to help it achieve this goal. Amazon announced today that it plans to purchase 250,000 tons of carbon scavengers from 1PointFive, a subsidiary of Occidental Petroleum Corporation.
It's the latest move by big tech companies to announce emerging carbon removal technologies to help them meet climate goals. Taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere is one way to try to undo the damage caused by the pollution companies have already caused. But much of the carbon removal industry has deep ties to oil and gas. When companies like Amazon spend money to deal with pollution in this way, that doesn't necessarily stop them from continuing to create more pollution by burning fossil fuels.
It's the latest example of big tech companies announcing emerging carbon removal technologies to help them meet climate goals.
Occidental subsidiary 1PointFive plans to build a massive industrial facility in Texas called a direct air capture (DAC) plant to extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Amazon said the carbon dioxide will be stored underground to prevent it from returning to the atmosphere. Occidental is also using carbon removal technology to sell so-called "net-zero oil," which involves injecting carbon dioxide into the ground to tap hard-to-reach oil reserves.
It can be said that the Biden administration is as enthusiastic about carbon removal technology as technology companies. The Department of Energy (DOE) has selected to fund a project developed by 1PointFive in King Ranch, Texas, as a "hub" for one of the first direct air capture plants in the United States. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law passed in 2021 provides $3.5 billion in dedicated federal funding for at least four direct air capture centers across the United States.
Last week, Microsoft announced it would purchase 315,000 tons of carbon dioxide removal capacity from another Department of Energy-funded center in Louisiana. The project is led by California startup Heirloom and Swiss company Climeworks. Climeworks was one of the first companies in the world to build CO2 adsorption industrial plants and has captured unknown amounts of CO2 at its facility in Iceland for Microsoft, Stripe and Shopify.
In addition to purchasing carbon emission reductions from Occidental Petroleum's 1PointFive, Amazon said today that it is "investing" in another California-based DAC company called CarbonCapture, which will provide Amazon with carbon emission reduction credits worth 100,000 tons. CarbonCapture is building another large-scale direct air capture plant in Wyoming. But there is one key difference. Both CarbonCapture and Climeworks have previously told The Verge that they do not plan to use their technology in conjunction with oil production, as Occidental Petroleum does.
Amazon's announcement today is a sizable acquisition for the nascent carbon removal industry, but it still accounts for only a small portion of the company's greenhouse gas emissions. By some estimates, Amazon's purchase from 1PointFive could cost as much as $150 million (direct air capture typically costs around $600 per ton of carbon dioxide, although policymakers are trying to lower that price with incentives). Occidental Petroleum also plans to use Amazon Web Services to "analyze real-time performance data and optimize its future DAC plant operations."
The Wall Street Journal estimated that Microsoft acquired Heirloom last week for about $200 million. While that may be a significant sum, the price Microsoft and Amazon pay to capture carbon dioxide still pales in comparison to the climate pollution they continue to produce.
Amazon said it committed to paying 1PointFive 250,000 tons of carbon removal over ten years, which is equivalent to the carbon sequestered by a forest about half the size of Rhode Island. By comparison, Amazon emitted more than 71 million tons of carbon dioxide last year alone. The company committed in 2019 to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2040. But since making this climate commitment in 2019, the company's carbon footprint has increased by about 39%, according to its latest sustainability report.