The Myth
“Direct air capture consumes insane amounts of energy. It’ll never work at scale — we’d need entire power grids just for DAC.”
This is probably the most common objection to DAC. And unlike last week’s misconception, there’s a kernel of truth here. DAC is energy-intensive. But the conclusion — that it can never scale — doesn’t follow. Here’s why.
The Energy Numbers (Real Ones)
Current DAC systems use roughly 2,000–3,000 kWh of combined thermal and electrical energy per ton of CO₂ captured. That’s a lot. For context, it’s about what two American households use in a year.
But here’s what the “too much energy” crowd gets wrong: most of that energy is low-grade heat (80–120°C), not electricity. Solid sorbent systems like Climeworks’ need only about 500 kWh of electricity per ton — the rest is thermal energy that can come from geothermal, industrial waste heat, or concentrated solar.
Climeworks’ Mammoth plant in Iceland runs on geothermal. Carbon Engineering’s (now Occidental) approach uses natural gas but is designed to run on renewable electricity. The energy is real; the constraint is solvable.
The “Entire Power Grid” Myth
Critics love to extrapolate: “If we need 10 Gt of DAC removal, that’s X% of global electricity!” This framing has two problems.
First, nobody is proposing 10 Gt of DAC. The IEA’s Net Zero by 2050 scenario calls for ~980 Mt CO₂ of DAC by 2050 — less than 1 Gt. The rest of the removal portfolio is enhanced weathering, biochar, ocean-based CDR, and conventional approaches. DAC doesn’t need to do everything.
Second, the renewable energy buildout is absurdly fast. The world added over 560 GW of renewable capacity in 2024 alone. Solar costs have dropped 90% since 2010. At current growth rates, global renewable capacity will more than triple by 2035.
Even at today’s energy intensity, 1 Gt of DAC would need roughly 2,000–3,000 TWh — about 7–10% of current global electricity. That’s significant but not impossible, especially given that:
- Energy intensity is falling with every generation of DAC technology
- Much of the energy need is heat, not electricity
- Dedicated renewable capacity for DAC doesn’t compete with the grid
The Learning Curve Is Just Starting
DAC is where solar was in 2005: expensive, small-scale, and easy to dismiss. Solar costs dropped 90% in 15 years. Batteries dropped 90% in a decade. Both followed Wright’s Law — costs fall predictably as cumulative production doubles.
DAC has barely started climbing that curve. Climeworks went from Orca (4,000 t/yr, 2021) to Mammoth (36,000 t/yr, 2024) — a 9× scale-up in three years. Their next generation targets further efficiency gains.
The DOE’s Carbon Negative Shot aims for sub-$100/ton DAC. Current costs are $400–1,000/ton. That’s a 4–10× reduction needed — ambitious, but well within what solar and wind achieved.
Who’s Betting Real Money?
Follow the capital:
- Occidental/1PointFive — building the world’s largest DAC plant in Texas (500,000 t/yr). Backed by $1.2B in DOE funding.
- Climeworks — raised $800M+, operating Mammoth in Iceland at 36,000 t/yr, planning further scale-up.
- Microsoft — signed the largest DAC purchase in history with Heirloom Carbon (315,000 tons over 10 years).
- Frontier (Stripe/Google/Meta/Shopify) — committed $1B+ for CDR, with major DAC allocations.
These aren’t charity donations. They’re bets on a cost curve that’s heading in one direction.
The Real Question
The question was never “does DAC use energy?” Of course it does. So does desalination. So does aluminum smelting. So does Bitcoin mining (170 TWh/yr and counting).
The real question is: can we generate enough clean energy to power DAC at the scale we need, at a cost that makes sense?
Given that renewable energy is now the cheapest source of new electricity in most of the world, and that DAC costs are falling with every deployment, the answer is increasingly: yes. Not tomorrow. Not easily. But feasibly.
The Bottom Line
DAC is energy-intensive. That’s a fact. But “energy-intensive” isn’t the same as “impossible to scale.” The energy transition is producing cheap, abundant clean electricity faster than almost anyone predicted. DAC’s job is to ride that wave — and every new plant makes the next one cheaper.
Saying DAC uses too much energy to work is like saying in 2005 that solar panels cost too much to matter. The cost curve has a way of making skeptics look shortsighted.
CDR Misconception of the Week is a Friday series by CaptainDrawdown. Got a myth you want debunked? Tell us on Bluesky or X.
Sources: IEA Direct Air Capture 2022; Climeworks press releases; DOE Carbon Negative Shot; IRENA Renewable Power Generation Costs 2024; State of CDR 2024; MRS Energy & Sustainability (2024); ScienceDirect DAC vs DOC review (2024).