A commercial facility that pulls carbon dioxide straight from the atmosphere and stores it underground has opened for the first time in the United States. Heirloom Carbon Technologies launched its direct air capture plant in Tracy, California, marking a tangible step forward in the effort to remove legacy emissions from the air — not just reduce new ones.
At a glance
- Direct air capture: Unlike most carbon capture plants, which intercept emissions at the source, Heirloom’s facility pulls ambient CO2 from open air and stores it in concrete repositories underground.
- Carbon removal capacity: The Tracy plant can capture 1,000 metric tons of CO2 per year — a figure Heirloom says grew from one kilogram to one million kilograms in just over two years of development.
- Carbon removal credits: Heirloom sells credits to companies including Microsoft and Shopify, who use them to offset their own emissions while funding the facility’s operations.
Why this facility is different
Carbon capture is not a new idea. Dozens of carbon capture and storage facilities have been operating worldwide for more than a decade. But most of them work by intercepting emissions at industrial sites — power plants, mines, factories — and storing what would otherwise escape. That process has long been tied to the “clean coal” narrative, which many climate scientists and advocates reject as a cover for continued fossil fuel use.
Direct air capture works differently. It requires no companion industrial process. Instead, it draws down CO2 that is already dispersed in the atmosphere — the kind of legacy emissions that no smokestack filter can address. For a planet already living with the consequences of two centuries of industrial activity, that distinction matters.
Heirloom’s approach accelerates the natural process by which certain minerals absorb CO2. The company heats limestone to release stored carbon, then spreads the remaining material on trays exposed to open air. The mineral reabsorbs CO2 from the atmosphere in days rather than the years the natural cycle would take. That captured carbon is then mineralized into concrete and stored underground.
From one kilogram to one million
The numbers at Tracy are modest by the scale of the climate challenge. One thousand metric tons of CO2 per year is a fraction of what would need to be removed globally to meaningfully affect atmospheric concentrations. For context, the world currently emits around 37 billion metric tons annually.
But CEO and co-founder Shashank Samala frames the Tracy facility as a proof of concept, not an endpoint. “We want to get to millions of tons per year,” he told the New York Times. “That means copying and pasting this basic design over and over.”
That trajectory — from one kilogram to one million kilograms in two years — is the headline Heirloom wants the world to read. The facility opened with appearances by California Governor Gavin Newsom and then-U.S. Department of Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, who described it as a “blueprint” for national carbon reduction strategy.
The honest picture
The carbon credit model that funds Heirloom raises real questions. Critics argue that companies purchasing carbon removal credits gain a financial justification to keep polluting rather than cutting emissions at the source. Paying someone else to remove CO2 from the air is not the same as emitting less of it — and there is legitimate concern that the market for credits could slow the structural changes that climate scientists say are most urgent.
Direct air capture also remains expensive. Current costs per ton are far higher than most other climate interventions, and scaling to the billions of tons needed to affect global temperatures will require sustained investment, policy support, and technological improvement that are far from guaranteed. The Tracy facility is a beginning, not a solution.
Still, removing carbon that is already in the atmosphere is something reforestation, renewable energy, and efficiency gains cannot fully accomplish on their own. A credible path to stabilizing the climate likely needs tools that work on legacy emissions — and this is the first commercial-scale attempt in the U.S. to build one.
Read more
For more on this story, see: Futurism
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